An Inconvenient Truth: A Day of Reckoning, A Month of Savings ⭐

We spent last week with the kids in Nashville, Tennessee, which was good for all kinds of reasons. I'm eternally grateful that my children love and respect each other and are constantly in touch. But I'm almost awed that they still want to spend time with their parents and block out real time to do that. It's a wonderful gift, something I can't be proud of per se, as I didn't make any of it happen. So it's just nice.

We used to go on three week home swaps in Europe when the kids were, well, kids. And in the post-pandemic years, with both finishing up college and finding their respective ways in adulthood, they've joined us in Mexico for week-long trips in addition to our regular holiday visits and whenever else we see each other. Each lives in a different state, but both are close enough that any of us could travel and see the other the same day. They weren't able to come to Mexico this past winter, so we booked the Nashville trip after we all discussed whatever places and times made the most sense.

Nashville is terrific. It's also terrifically humid, which triggered an early exit from the "could I live here?" flowchart I run every time I visit any place. But that can be freeing in its own way, and because Nashville really is a special place in so many ways, there's no doubt we'll go back, and much more quickly than the 21-year gap between this visit and the last time we were there.

But this trip wasn't just about experiencing a place and being with the kids. A couple of months back, when my wife and I were still in Mexico, Netflix committed the cardinal sin of raising the prices of its various subscription tiers, an event that served to shake my brain into activity and revive an all-too-familiar topic we all return to again and again these days. We pay for any number of subscription services because of the convenience and value they provide. But they add up and multiply, often without us realizing it, and then these services enshittify in various ways, typically through a combination of price hikes and service downgrades that rebalance the value equation, and not in our favor.

That's central to the business model of any subscription service, really, an inevitable outcome. But so, too, is the idea that many customers of these services will pay and never even use the services. It's a proven formula, and we sleepwalk through life, never paying attention to the bills we pay unless we break out of this gooey Matrix-like existence, open our eyes, and pay attention. Which is why I described Netflix's price hike as a cardinal sin. This company reminded me that I pay a lot of money for this service and it made me think about what it was, exactly, that I was getting out of it. And the dozens of other things I just pay for. Because reasons.

I wrote about this in From the Editor’s Desk: Inconvenient ⭐️ and noted that we would be with the kids in Nashville and that I would use that opportunity to discuss all the services we collectively...