On Ownership
I really think I miss ownership. We don’t bother with permanence any more if we can manage it. We subscribe to music or movie services. We lease cars and even phones. Computer software and apps are moving towards subscription rather than outright ownership. We don’t really bother much with physical objects when we can find an ethereal alternative on the internet. Pen and paper aren’t a thing any more.
And we certainly don’t bother firmly stamping down our thoughts and opinions. Temporary has become the norm. We prefer impermanence and deniability.
This move away from physical permanence has many benefits. We can disseminate information quickly and easily. We have access to millions of songs and movies in handsets we carry with us everywhere we go. And we can change, evolve, and grow at a pace far beyond what was possible just a decade ago.
My family recently just moved into a spacious new home. With the extra room we now have, I finally unpacked boxes I had stored for twenty years and sifted through the contents. There were college books and novels I once read as an “Angry Asian Man.” I found letters to lovers and homework from junior high school. I rediscovered a sketchbook filled with still life fruit and hyperkinetic anime, all poorly rendered with fervent passion. I found a scrapbook filled with photos and mementos from an exchange trip to Germany as a high school student. I saw my first foreign girlfriend again, still tall, still blonde and blue-eyed, still statuesque-and laughing so contagiously the rest of us erupted as well.
I’m sure that there will be moments like this for my children, too. But I don’t think any of my daughter’s online homework will be saved and then found serendipitously thirty years from now. Though photos might be far more plentiful and revealing. Videos will abound. I hope they will be saved on the cloud. I hope they will remain as private keepsakes.
I have several boxes of music CDs to unpack. They are still usable; my son has a small Sony boom box that plays CDs. But we have a music service he generally uses, and I think the CDs will just sit in a box, taking up a little of the extra space we now have.
I guess this all means I’m old enough to have the rules change in a way I don’t appreciate. I should adapt, and I have-mostly. I’m not really complaining about the change, or making the case that it is clearly inferior. Just different, with something lost, just as some things are gained.
One of my college roommates is now a college professor who got her first smartphone recently after giving birth to twins. She owns ten typewriters, as much ribbon ink as she can find, and thousands of vinyl records. Her kitchen is filled with hand made plates and bowls. She drinks out of cups she created. When I visit, every day with her is filled with memories I can touch and feel. She’s not living in the past, but she treasures and keeps it present all the same.
I think I will do more of that, too. I’m hard-wired to have emotional attachments to things I can hold and touch, even though I prefer to stream movies. I will continue to put pen to paper and oil to canvas. I will still collect, even if it’s in boxes to be found decades from now.
Nothing is forever. But some things sure feel that way when I hold them.