I Rent My Entire Life

After I wrote about the things I stopped caring about, someone replied on Micro.blog with something that stuck with me. The issue isn’t just consumerism, they said, it’s the expectation that we should have access to everything, from anywhere, all the time. Every song, every photo, every file, always available, always on. And that expectation has made a lot of us unwell. I think they’re right, and it got me thinking about something I hadn’t really confronted: what do I actually own?

Not in a minimalist sense. In a practical one. What would survive if I stopped paying for everything tomorrow?

My photos live in iCloud. My passwords are in Apple’s keychain. My music is rented from Apple Music, my films from streaming services that rotate their catalogues without asking. The apps I rely on for work charge monthly or yearly, and the moment I stop paying, the features vanish. My blog runs on a server I rent. My domain is renewed annually. My writing app, my podcast app, my meditation app, even the tools I use to store insurance documents for my family, all of them require ongoing payment to keep existing in my life. My subscription creep list from a few years ago has only grown since.

The word “own” has quietly changed meaning over the last decade and none of us really noticed. When I buy a book on Kindle, I haven’t bought a book. I’ve bought a licence to read that book on Amazon’s terms, on Amazon’s hardware, for as long as Amazon decides to honour that licence. The same is true for every film, every album, every game purchased through a digital storefront. I’ve written before about how holding a physical book feels like ownership in a way a Kindle never does, and that feeling turns out to be accurate. The physical book is mine. The digital one is a rental agreement dressed up as a purchase. We pay monthly for the privilege of never being without anything, and in doing so we’ve made ourselves unable to be without any of it.

What’s changed is that this model has spread from entertainment into infrastructure. It used to be that you’d buy software on a disc and it was yours forever, even if it never got updated again. Now Adobe charges monthly and if you stop paying you can’t open your own files in their native format. Microsoft moved Office to a subscription. Developers who used to sell apps for a one-off price now charge yearly, and the app stops working when the subscription lapses. I understand why they do it, ongoing development needs ongoing funding, and I defended the model at the time. The economics make sense for developers. What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was the cumulative effect on the person paying.

Each individual subscription feels small. A few pounds here, a tenner there. Taken together they represent a significant monthly outgoing for access to things that used to be purchases. Worse, they create a web of dependency that’s genuinely difficult to untangle. Try moving away from Apple’s ecosystem when your photos, passwords, email, music, and family sharing are all tied to one account. That wall gets higher every year, and the recent spate of account lockouts where people lost access to everything only drives home how fragile the arrangement really is. One algorithm flags something suspicious and you’re locked out of your own life.

The uncomfortable truth is that I’m not a customer in any traditional sense. I’m a tenant. I occupy digital spaces owned by corporations who can change the terms, raise the rent, or evict me whenever they see fit. The relationship only works as long as the payments keep flowing and the companies keep their end of the deal, neither of which is guaranteed. Google has killed dozens of products that people relied on. Apple can lock you out of an account with no explanation and no recourse. Adobe can raise prices and you either pay or lose access to years of work stored in their format.

If every subscription stopped today, here’s what I’d have left: some clothes, some furniture, a camera, a shelf of physical books I haven’t added to in years, and a laptop that would still turn on but couldn’t meaningfully connect to anything I use it for. My daughter’s photos from birth to now exist on a server I rent space on. My writing exists on a platform I pay monthly to host. The music I’ve listened to for the last decade would vanish completely, not a single track saved locally.

I’m not suggesting I’m going to go off-grid and start burning CDs. The convenience of subscriptions is real, and going back to buying software on discs isn’t a serious option. What I’m coming to terms with is the scale of what I’ve handed over without really thinking about it. Bit by bit, year by year, I’ve replaced ownership with access, and access with dependency, and dependency with something that feels a lot like vulnerability.

There’s no tidy solution to this. I could start downloading local copies of photos, backing up to drives I own, buying music outright from Bandcamp. I could export my writing and keep it in files on a hard drive. I probably should do all of those things, and I probably won’t do most of them, not consistently, not in a way that would actually protect me if everything went sideways at once. The convenience is too good and the risk feels abstract right up until it isn’t.

I think about it more than I used to, though. Every time a service raises its price or changes its terms or gets acquired by someone I trust less. Every time I hear about someone getting locked out of an account that held their entire digital life. The arrangement works until it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, you find out very quickly that you never owned any of it.