Ownership Rebellion

Why I bought a DVD Player

Welcome to what I' have coined my ‘Functionall Manifesto’ in this section I’ll be describing rules I’m choosing and trying to live by in order to live my life more intentionally. Today I would like to discuss ownership and why from now on I will be choosing to be an owner in the land of monthly fees.

The rental economy is booming and it has made many things more accessible, we can rent clothes we would not have been able to afford, homes, cars, equipment and much more. These are all good things and I have no intention of dismissing the value these things have brought into our lives, what I will contest is the notion this subscription landscape puts forward, which is that there is no value in owning anything.

We are being stripped of our rights to own anything every day, with the creation of a 40 year mortgage alongside insane interest rates and overvalued houses. It's not just big purchases but simple things like watching a film, before you could buy a physical copy of a film and watch it whenever you want. You paid for it, so it's yours. Now you pay for a whole bunch of films and shows you probably won't like and the ones you do like may disappear off the platform and the money you used to pay for that service every month could have bought you a DVD that is yours to keep.

To some this is a superficial problem but to me I feel it's more sinister than that, for example do you own your memories? I promise I'm not a conspiracy theorist just walk with me for a second, let’s say you have an IPhone and you take all your pictures on your phone, and you run out of space to store them. Apple has a solution for this you pay them a small monthly fee and they will hold on to your memories for you, what happens when you don't pay your monthly fee? In addition to overdue fines, you may lose access to all your memories even though you have been paying for months, there's no one time fee, you must keep paying and you effectively never owned them in the first place.

So what can you do about this? Fight back. Actually buy things that mean something to you, get physical copies of your memories, your favourite shows, your favourite books. Not only that but support artists you truly believe in, yes you won't have access to the collection on Netflix but you were never going to watch all of that in your lifetime anyway.

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To be honest with you this is an old draft I wrote but I have just had a lot of performance anxiety in relation to posting and I thought this was an easy way to put myself out there again.

I just feel that owning things should be normalised and we should not get to comfortable with the idea of paying for 'services'. I think I'm going to start with getting a DVD player so I can watch some of my faves whenever I want, I really like a lot of old movies but I'm so sick and tired of renting them so I'm going on try and get my hands on some DVDs. I do have a record player but I lost the cable during my move but I want to listen to some of my fave Brazilian artists on there.