Re-asserting Ownership
It all started innocently enough. I wanted to listen the Attack on Titan soundtrack. I've had a Spotify Premium subscription for about a decade (though I suppose I've made much less use of it than I could have), and it's usually the first place I turn to when I want to listen to something. And that's when the trouble started. It turns out that Spotify on macOS doesn't have any kind of miniplayer, and doesn't even give you any kind of notification when the track changes. It's a small thing, but I like to know what I'm listening to. With Spotify, the only way to do that is by keeping the player open all the time. Eventually, I ended up getting Sleeve, a little app for showing and controlling what I'm listening to, that's compatible with Spotify, Apple Music, and Doppler. I value attention to detail, and Spotify doesn't, and that it irks me. They still don't have a rounded square icon on macOS.
All of that made me think about ownership, or rather the lack thereof. We rent so many things these days. We rent our homes, our cars, our software, our music, our books and movies, hell, even our relationships. At the same time, physical paper books, indie bookstores, small makers of various shapes and forms, are seeing a resurgence. I don't know if ownership is a fundamentally human desire (I suspect it's not), but going against the current trend, pushing back against prevailing forces, definitely is. A growing desire to re-assert ownership is indicative of that.
Personally, I have always had a soft spot for physical books, and have thought of Kindle books as being rented and temporary. Owning movies (or TV shows) has never appealed to me. When I was a child, we rarely bought tapes or DVDs, and I could only watch things when they aired on TV. Ephemerality in visual media seems natural. I bought CDs of music for a while, still have most of them, I would like to do that again, perhaps starting with the Attack on Titan soundtrack. No, I've never been into vinyl, and can't imagine that I ever will be. I think software subscriptions are fine, especially if you get regular updates. I am conflicted on home ownership.
Over the years, I have come to experience and internalize that all things are temporary (for better and for worse). And yet, I like to have nice things, be grounded in relatively unchanging routines. Maybe this is a chance to embrace what the Buddhists mean by "non-duality"? Making peace with being in a sea of rentals and temporaries is perhaps accepting the world as it is. But perhaps carving out islands of ownership and relative permanence is nudging the world towards the way we would like it to be.