Hello, and welcome to the second-ever Digital Wisdom newsletter. If you’re a new subscriber, a special welcome to you.
(You can catch up with the first edition here.)
Right, let’s get cracking. I want to share some thoughts on the changing face of consumerism.
I’ll begin with a memory from my childhood...
When I was 11 years old, I really wanted a Nintendo Game Boy.
A few of my friends at school had one, and I would sit next to them on breaks, desperate for them to be nice enough to let me have a go.
I mean, this was THE games console of choice for an early 1990s school kid.
I didn’t have enough pocket money, but oh how I dreamed of one. I would spend my evenings at home drawing pictures (from memory) of this device. The pictures would get updated every time I remembered something new about how it looked.
I was literally obsessed.
Eventually the time came. I was able to buy one. And I did (+ Super Mario Land and Tetris that came with it).
As I put the shiny new box down on my bed, I looked up and saw my artistic impressions on the wall. Now I could rip them down, I no longer had to dream, I flipping owned a Game Boy!
Fast forward 30 years, and today I don’t own much at all. 😒
I don’t own much, I rent much. 😊
I’m part of the renting economy – you are too, probably.
Is your house on a mortgage agreement?
Do you play your music via a subscription to a streaming service such as Spotify?
Are your photos and videos held in a subscription-based cloud storage service such as Google Drive?
And so on. You can now even rent a dog to take for walks.
This is the antithesis of traditional consumerist culture.
Where we once placed great value on buying and owning stuff, now we own very little and more and more is rented.
We are owning less and renting more.
I don’t even own my old Game Boy anymore. I have no idea where it is, or in how many pieces it’s in, or what it’s been recycled into.
Joseph Coughlin, writing for Forbes in 2018, describes the consequences of what he calls ‘The Rentership Society’.
‘A marketplace that no longer views the accumulation of things alone as a symbol of success will challenge how business engages consumers, how the government taxes its citizens, and how we might keep score of our lives, if we are not surrounded by toys we can count.’
While this is all interesting, what can we learn from this trend, and how can we apply it to today’s Covid-world?
Here is my ten cents worth:
While we crave security in increasingly uncertain times (think Covid-19, conflict and the climate crisis), our value compass is realigning. The move to a renting economy was largely driven by technology and digital disruption (see Spotify, Uber, Airbnb etc).
As parts of the world are emerging from Covid-19 we want to hold tighter onto things again.
As we start to hug our loved ones again, we won’t want to let go. But what else will we want to hold onto – to own?
Perhaps we’ll see a culture shift from renting to owning again. It may be in a different form and on a smaller scale (to start with), such as hobbies involving collecting, or buying more physical books or music. I wonder…
What do you think? Drop a comment below.
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Take care for now,
Andrew.