We don’t own anything

There was a moment, not that long ago, when you could walk into a store and buy a CD. You would take it home, put it on a shelf, and it was yours. Same with DVDs, books, video games. You paid once and the thing belonged to you. You could lend it to a friend, sell it at a garage sale, or let it collect dust for twenty years. It didn't matter. It was yours. That world is mostly gone now.

The shift from owning to accessing

Somewhere along the way, we traded ownership for access. Netflix replaced the DVD shelf. Spotify replaced the CD collection. Adobe moved Photoshop from a boxed product to a monthly fee. Microsoft did the same with Office. Even video games are heading this direction, with cloud gaming services and subscription passes replacing the cartridges and discs we used to stack on shelves. The subscription economy is now valued at over $557 billion globally and is projected to nearly quadruple by 2035. Americans alone spend nearly $1,000 per year on subscriptions. The shift has been enormous, and most of it happened within the last decade. The pitch was simple: why buy when you can stream? Why own when you can rent? And honestly, the pitch worked because it was true. Streaming gave us access to more music, more movies, and more software than we could ever afford to buy outright. The convenience was real. The value proposition, at least initially, was hard to argue with.

The subscription creep

But convenience has a way of compounding into something less comfortable. One subscription becomes five. Five becomes twelve. Each one is "only" $10 or $15 a month, but together they form a steady drain that is easy to lose track of. And the prices keep climbing. Streaming services that launched with aggressive introductory pricing have steadily raised rates while cracking down on password sharing. What started as an affordable alternative to cable now costs about the same, sometimes more, once you stack enough services together. Reports show that streaming subscription growth has slowed to single digits for the first time, as consumers hit their limit on how many services they are willing to juggle. This is what people now call subscription fatigue. It is that creeping sense of being nickel-and-dimed by a dozen small charges every month, each one just small enough to avoid scrutiny but significant in aggregate. You don't own any of it. Cancel a subscription and everything vanishes. The music, the movies, the tools you relied on. Gone.

We rent more than we think

It is not just digital media. The rental model has spread into surprisingly physical territory. Rent the Runway lets you borrow designer clothing instead of buying it. The global apparel rental market has more than doubled since 2016, reaching $6.2 billion. There are services for renting furniture, renting artwork, even renting houseplants. And then there are the stranger corners of the rental economy. In Japan, you can rent a friend, a family member, or even a partner to accompany you to events. What sounds bizarre on the surface reflects the same underlying logic: why commit to owning something when you can pay for temporary access?

In Singapore, we never really owned anything

For anyone living in Singapore, the idea that we don't truly own things is not just philosophical. It is literally built into how the country works. The vast majority of Singaporeans live in HDB flats sold on 99-year leases. You pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, you call it "your home," but the land underneath it was never yours. When the lease expires, the flat reverts to the state. No compensation. The value of the property at that point is, theoretically, zero. No HDB development has actually reached the end of its lease yet since the programme only began in the 1960s, but the clock is ticking. It is not just housing. Even burial plots in Singapore come with an expiry date. Most graves are exhumed after 15 years to make way for new burials, a practical necessity in a country with severe land constraints. In Singapore, even death is on a lease. This creates an unusual relationship with the concept of ownership. You grow up understanding, on some level, that everything around you is temporary. The flat you live in, the physical spaces you inhabit, the infrastructure of your daily life, all of it has an expiration date.

The things we actually lose

The real cost of all this is not financial. It is something harder to name. When you owned a CD, you had a relationship with it. You read the liner notes. You knew the track order. You lent it to someone and it came back with a scratch, and that scratch became part of the story. When you owned a book, you dog-eared pages and scribbled in the margins. The object carried your history with it. Subscriptions don't work that way. A Spotify playlist is functional, but it is not an artifact. It holds no physical weight, no wear, no memory. If the service changes its catalogue or shuts down, your carefully curated collection evaporates. You were never a collector. You were a renter. There is also the question of control. When you own something, you decide what happens to it. When you subscribe, someone else does. Licences change. Libraries shrink. Features get paywalled. The thing you signed up for is not guaranteed to be the thing you have next month.

The upside of not owning

To be fair, there is genuine freedom in not being weighed down by stuff. Subscriptions let you try things without committing. You can explore a genre of music, sample a new hobby, or test a piece of software without the risk of a large upfront purchase. For people who move frequently or live in small spaces, renting makes practical sense. The accessibility argument is also real. Streaming brought vast libraries of content to people who could never have afforded to buy it all individually. A student in a small town now has access to more music, film, and educational content than a wealthy collector did a generation ago.

But we should be honest about what we gave up

The trade-off is worth naming clearly. We gave up permanence. We gave up the ability to pass things down. We gave up the quiet satisfaction of having something that is simply, unambiguously ours. And maybe this is fine. Maybe ownership was always more illusion than reality. After all, even the things we "owned" eventually broke, got lost, or ended up in a landfill. But there is something worth sitting with in the recognition that almost nothing in our lives truly belongs to us anymore.

Nothing lasts, and that might be the point

There is a commonly cited observation that most people are completely forgotten within three generations of their death. Your grandchildren might remember you. Their children almost certainly will not. The research bears this out: collective memory of events and people fades within 20 to 30 years at most, and for ordinary individuals, it is much shorter. This is not a new problem. It is the oldest problem. But it hits differently in an era where even the things we use to express ourselves, our playlists, our digital libraries, our curated online spaces, exist only as long as we keep paying for them. If we don't own the things we use and the world won't remember us for long, then the question becomes less about accumulating and more about what we do with the time we have. Not what we keep, but what we make. Not what we own, but what we leave behind that matters. Because the music on the shelf might be gone, but the song you wrote is still yours.

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