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...