An Inconvenient Truth: Four Themes, Few Answers ⭐

I’ve spent the past few months reassessing my relationship with content and the subscription services that we all pay for endlessly for access to that content. I’ve framed this as being about convenience–which explains the name of the article series–and about adding friction back to my interactions with content when it makes sense. Not to arbitrarily make life more difficult, but to trade a bit of convenience for a better experience.

That doesn’t always work out, of course, and that’s fine: If you take the time to reassess anything you do in life and ultimately discover that the way you were doing that thing is, in fact, the best way to do it, at least for you, that’s still a win.

But in working through this, I had a realization that, in retrospect, should have been obvious to me. I’ve done this before. In fact, I do this all the time.

Because I’ve been reviewing laptops, phones, and other hardware for over 20+ years, I developed an understanding that these purchases, like any big decision, are not a single decision but are instead a matrix, a summation of a series of micro-decisions, each weighted differently. These micro-decisions include objective truths–this camera is better than that camera, this phone gets the best battery life, and so on–and more personal, subjective, and even emotional factors. You might just like the look of an iPhone or whatever. We all have to do our own math, figure out what matters most, and make the decisions we make.

The content-related reassessments I’m making this year can absolutely be viewed this same way. Which, again, is obvious in retrospect. And a little embarrassing given that I came up with that matrix of decisions thing. What can you do?

Well, I can frame this discussion a bit differently, in a more nuanced way than just making it about adding friction to save money. And while I don’t have a definitive list of the micro-factors that may go into each of the various content types–books/reading, music, movies/TV shows/videos, videogames, and so on–my experiences over the past few months have highlighted at least a few key themes.

Some of which, yes, are of course cost and convenience. I got that much right from the start, at least.

Ownership

Because of my push this year to minimize the number of subscription services I pay for each month, I’ve read and watched a lot of content tied to this topic recently. It’s all over the map, and while I definitely align with those who are likewise trying to do the same, a lot of the content out there–videos on YouTube, mostly–is heavily skewed in ways I don’t like.

Ownership is a big part of these discussions, just like privacy is when you watch videos promoting Linux while crapping on Windows 11. But in both cases, I feel this is overblown: Americans, especially, but I suspect most people too, are obsessed with ownership, one of the more abstract concepts that occupies too much of our time and takes away too much of our money. Whether it’s owning a house, a car, or an audio CD, ownership is, to my mind, overrated. More problematically, I think focusing too much on ownership makes it too easy to ignore other, more pressing problems.

Look, we’re all going to die. Everything we do is temporary, and everything we have will be gone along with us. Owning a thing, whatever it is, is transient. That’s true if it’s a physical object we can lock in a safe, and it’s true if it’s a Kindle e-book you paid for that Amazon suddenly remotely yanks out of your library because of some licensing change it experienced. These videos I watched are obsessed by this happening. I have several hundred books and videos across multiple services, and I can’t recall this ever happening to me. I know it can happen, and that it does happen. But so does getting hit by lightning. It’s not the epidemic some suggest. It also doesn’t matter that much.

Except, of course, that sometimes it does.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Star Wars changed my life. I was 10 years old when the first movie came to theaters. It was the first movie I saw more than once in the theaters and then multiple times, something I have never done with other movies. As a budding writer and artist, Star Wars kindled my imagination like nothing else; I created an endless stream of homespun comic books and drawings inspired by this movie and then its two direct sequels. I had the action figures when they were just a cardboard backdrop and a promise of more to come. I bought every book about this movie from the novelization to all the behind-the-scenes looks at how it was made. I explored its inspirations, from Greek myths to various hero journeys. I went on to read Clark, Asimov, Pournelle, Niven, and all the classics of science fiction. It was an all-encompassing obsession that’s never really abated. You get the idea.

One of the many Star Wars items I cherished the most that first year was a red View-Master-like device that came with a cardboard and paper disc with which you could watch the opening scene of the first movie, with the tiny Rebel blockade runner desperately trying to outrun a massive Imperial Star Destroyer. I was fascinated by this thing. This was the film, the real movie, a tiny, seconds-long piece of it, yes, but a thing I could hold in my hands. I watched it again and again, and you could still frame through it frame by frame, a miracle that let me see how the thing was made to some degree.

The idea that I could own even a small piece of this movie was also life-changing, perhaps not the healthiest of ways. I don’t remember the timing of this now, but this was an era when movies would slowly make their way to TV, but many years after the theatrical release. And though the emergence of HBO and cable TV added further time to that schedule, the related emergence of home video made my dream a reality. I really could own Star Wars. And its sequels.

And I did. Over and over again. From the original pan-and-scan VHS version of the original Star Wars in a TV-friendly but cropped 4:3 aspect ratio to the 4K digital versions of all the movies I “own” today, I have purchased every Star Wars movie in every format and reissue version imaginable over the years. I am not personally responsible for the wealth that George Lucas amassed, but it feels that way sometimes. Just ask my wife.

In different eras, I collected movies and some TV shows on VHS tapes, DVDs, Blu-rays, and various digital formats. I have hundreds of movies in my Apple-based digital collection, and many more in others. I ripped many of my DVDs to digital files 20+ years ago, back when Handbrake was a new thing and only worked on the Mac. And I still have those rips, though most are low-quality compared to the 4K, HDR, and Dolby Atmos capabilities we see in more modern formats. Some are literally 360p.

If I could do this over again, I wouldn’t buy so many movies. Some, like Star Wars, are special to me, and though my obsessive collecting of those films is probably indefensible, I kind of don’t care. I just love them and have watched all of them repeatedly, especially the original trilogy. But movies are the wrong thing to buy in general, unless there are crazy sales as has sometimes been the case; I would sometimes buy a movie from Apple when the cost of doing so was just a dollar or two more than the cost of renting it, for example. Like most of you, I think, I’ve watched the vast majority of the movies I’ve watched just once.

Money

If anyone ever tells you that money doesn’t matter, that person is either an idiot, so wealthy that they’ve lost all sense of perspective, or both. Of course money matters. Money matters for meeting the basic necessities of life, and money matters for what you want to do, or can do, with whatever is left over. It’s a sad reality, but it’s also pretty obvious.

For the purposes of this conversation, money is a factor for any decision one makes about content consumption. It’s the issue that kicked off this work in the first place, that dawning realization that I am paying far too much each month for far too many services.

This one is so obvious, it’s barely worth discussing. But you can either afford something or you can’t. For example, you may want to own a collection of books that will sit on bookshelves, organized and cataloged to whatever standard your compulsion demands and growing over time. But if you can’t afford that, the point is moot and you have to look elsewhere to scratch that itch. Hopefully, that itch is more about reading, in which case you have lots of good free and inexpensive options, and not about collecting, a habit that is both unhealthy and curiously human.

When it comes to costs, however, there are obvious, upfront costs and then there are less obvious costs. I was originally going to discuss this as part of An Inconvenient Truth: Music Deep Dive ⭐ for what will soon be obvious reasons. But I did mention in that article that I’ve used a set of tools to rip music from audio CDs (Exact Audio Copy), ensure that the meta-data of the resulting files is acceptably perfect (MusicBee), and then listen to that music on my PCs, phone, and other devices (where the software varies by device) and, ideally, through the music subscription service(s) I’m using (Apple Music, YouTube Music).

The ripping and management apps are free, which is nice, and both work well once you get past the quirky interfaces. And there are free ways to play that music, of course, on any device. But the cost of doing all this is off the charts, including in some ways that might not be immediately obvious.

The most obvious barrier here is the cost of buying audio CDs, these relics from the past that should be inexpensive but are anything but. Even here in Mexico City, where I assumed the music stores I see everywhere would sell cheap, used CDs in addition to the trendier (and even more expensive) vinyl, this is a problem. Audio CDs are expensive, and unless you can find a flea market, yard sale, or similar, or are still hoarding CDs from the before times, building out a collection–especially one you intend to use solely as source material for digital files–will cost you dearly.

This has forced me to rethink things and be very selective. Which isn’t a horrible problem, but I bought two CDs to rip just yesterday at a music store up the street, and each was nearly $20 USD. CDs didn’t cost that much when they were the preferred delivery vehicle for new music, and though the CDs I bought are live rarities from bands I like, neither of which is in any music subscription service, this is unsustainable.

The cost of CDs isn’t the tip of this iceberg, it’s the base, meaning the biggest cost. But there are other costs. You will probably need an optical drive for your PC, as these are uncommon now but fortunately inexpensive. You will need to store the ripped music somewhere, so you will be paying for storage of whatever kind. Ripping CDs takes time, about 20 minutes per disc with the equipment I’ve been using, as does fixing the metadata and copying it everywhere you need it, and your time is not free. And then you will ideally integrate that music into a subscription music service for the portability convenience, a bill you pay every month whether you’re also ripping music or not.

In this particular matrix of small factors that makes up a single bigger decision, doing all this doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’m baby-stepping it, a polite way of saying that I’m half-assing it. I’m not all-in and I never will be. Music subscription services are too convenient and the sizes of their collections are too big to give that up. I’ve been buying music since I was a child, and I have always spent time on curating that music, whether it was making mix cassettes on my old Sears stereo decades ago, making playlists in YouTube Music today, or anything and everything in between. So this is familiar in many ways. But it’s also futile for most, and it’s important to know this. I love music, so I don’t mind some aspects of what I’m doing. But the cost. The cost is just too high.

Convenience

I’m trying to reduce convenience and add friction here. After all, convenience is the gateway drug that triggered our reliance on far too many subscription services that became enshittified over time, trapping us like rats. However, convenience isn’t always bad.

Consider travel.

Thanks to the pandemic, my wife and I ended up in Mexico City. Also thanks to the pandemic, The Hilton hotel chain extended the timeframe of its loyalty program by one year, and because we were using a Hilton credit card at the time, we suddenly had plenty of points we could use towards hotel stays. Long story short, several of our first stays in the city were not only free but also nice upgrades. Likewise, since moving to Pennsylvania, we began flying exclusively on United, so we had racked up miles/points on that airline, and we continued doing so through new United credits over whatever time period.

These things, combined with geographical advantages that include not having to fly overnight to reach your destination as is the case with Europe, plus the lower costs in Mexico all around, are what made this place both accessible and more viable as a second home. Our entry into this world was eased by all these things, and the way we traveled and stayed was both cheaper and far more convenient. We could and still can get business class upgrades on flights for next to nothing, and we could stay in a fairly luxurious place for next to nothing too.

Convenience can be addictive. But when it comes to travel, it’s not just that: As I get older, I’ve done everything I can–within the confines of not being rich–to minimize the things that make travel so terrible. Much of that is tied up in the experience of flying, which usually involves indignities too numerous to bother even trying to list. Everyone understands this: Flying sucks, and anything you can do to make it a bit easier, anything you can do to eliminate stress, is worth at least researching.

Being able to fly business class is a luxury, yes, but it’s an affordable luxury for our flights to and from Mexico and it’s the difference between arriving having gotten work done in peace and with the space that requires and arriving with body aches and stress, and having accomplished nothing positive. TSA Pre and Global Entry are likewise expenses worth paying for if you fly at all within the United States or to and from that country. There is nothing more exhilarating than coming down into the cavernous customs area in Newark Liberty Airport, seeing it packed with a sea of humanity that seems to extend to the horizon, and just skipping all the lines, sailing through a tiny Global Entry non-line, having your picture taken, and then emerging out into the baggage claim area just minutes after you deboarded the plane. I think some of the people who were in line in customs when we last landed in Newark back in May might still be there. Which is only a small exaggeration.

But where does one draw the line? After all, paying for convenience, and doing so repeatedly, was how all this trouble started in the first place.

On this I’m not sure. But different experiences are, for lack of a different term, different. As are people. In reexamining how I read, listen to music, watch movies, TV shows, and other videos, play videogames, and whatever else, I’m reminded that one size doesn’t fit all. I may want to own some of this content, but in many cases, it makes sense to borrow or rent the content because it’s a one and done thing. Music is a good example of a subscription service that does makes sense for many people because of the nature of that type of content and how we consume it. That’s a worthwhile convenience. To me.

Flipping this on its head, so to speak, one might accept or even prefer a bit of friction here and there but will seek out convenience above all else elsewhere. The travel issues I described above fall into that second category, at least for me and as I get older, but there’s a related issue that can really tip the scales, and it’s painfully obvious for travel. The cost. The richer you are, the more you can spend, the more you can smooth out all the issues one faces when flying or visiting other places. I’m lucky that the things I do to reduce the pain of travel are reasonable from a cost perspective. But I’d still travel if I couldn’t do those things. I would just dread it more.

Applying this thinking to content–books, videos, videogames, and whatever else, and the same rules apply, just as each is its own thing and one might have differing preferences for each.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is another major theme of the videos I’ve watched on this topic recently, though I suspect many of the influencers making them don’t even realize it. It’s easy to get caught up in the belief that some point in time or some technological evolution from the past was somehow perfect and that nothing should have changed after that. And so you can try to claw back to the ways things used to be–I will enter into evidence my experiences ripping CDs, noted above–or, even worse, just be a young fool who pines for some past they never did experience.

Speaking of CDs, they’re making a comeback, we’re told, and according to this part of YouTube they’re even outselling vinyl, the poster child of this world. Curious about the truth of this matter, I looked it up. And this is what happened: In the past year, CD sales rose year-over-year for the first time in decades. But that doesn’t mean audio CDs are popular or selling well. It means that audio CD sales crested decades ago and then declined sharply. And that decline continued until the sales were finally so low, so immaterial, that they could grow again. A little bit. So we just experienced the second-lowest number of CD sales since the peak. That’s quite a comeback.

Today, CD and vinyl sales are a tiny fraction of the revenues generated by the music industry, and they always will be. But this also doesn’t matter to me, beyond the fact that these things, as noted above, are also prohibitively expensive. This makes me wonder how a new generation of underemployed and AI-addled hipsters can afford to buy CDs and vinyl album, new or used. But only briefly. Because, for the most part, physical media of any kind–music, movies, videogames, whatever–just doesn’t make sense, not as the delivery mechanism for the content. It’s just too inconvenient, and in keeping with the theme of this series, that means they’re a non-starter.

I do struggle with the nostalgia thing, though, and I think most people do too. From what I can tell, this is more about the crushing weight of responsibilities we have now, raising or having raised children, perhaps, and realizing that this is a lifetime commitment and background worry we have to deal with until we’re gone. Comparing that to the carefree days of our youth, when everything, in retrospect, just seemed better, it’s no wonder we focus on the good times and ignore all the issues that also defined the past. Like those vinyl albums that scratched far too easily and only held 20 minutes of music per side.

Put another way, you might argue that the key to nostalgia isn’t remembering the past, it’s forgetting the past. This is one thing you can trust me on: Forgetting the past gets a lot easier the older you get. And I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing.