A few years ago, there was a metaverse hype, and VCs as well as aspirational startup founders painted pictures of us all living in the metaverse, in our digital NFT houses, where we'd live and breathe bits and bytes, removed from the constraints of the real world.
Yet, whenever some company had a "metaverse office", it was at best a less exciting version of The Sims, since you couldn't drown the avatars by removing the ladder from the pool. And anyway, none of those offices had a pool.
All the crypto metaverses now are bare wastelands, not even crickets chirping since such advanced sound effects do not feature in them, with only the occasional early investor logging in, reminiscing his bags at their highest point, longingly tending to his collectibles.
Maybe the premise of owning your avatar wasn't all that attractive, considering the appeal that Roblox continues to have despite the lack thereof.
Well, good thing that life doesn't have to be all digital. Just yet.
Although ownership is definitely moving into the digital realm,
Do you own any of the software you're using, or do you just subscribe to it?
What about the music you listen to?
The books you read?
The movies you watch?
For the minimalists, this must be an amazing development.
Spearheaded by Marie Kondo, people started throwing away all the things that did not spark joy and folding their clothes as if creating Origami masterworks to fit more of them onto the shelves - as such quite a paradox, since if you had less of them,you wouldn't struggle for shelf space, right?!
Unfortunately, Marie Kondo lost the plot when she started selling weirdly shaped objects that only sparked joy on her balance sheet. Hey, not to fault her, she did amazing for a Japanese business woman, so kudos. If people buy this pivot, more power to her.
Another group, probably all for less earthly belongings, must be the digital nomads. After all, things take space, and can't have that when your belongings must fit into whatever the Ryanair hand luggage requirements are.
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The aesthetics of the hipster coffee shops have similar minimalist vibes as the apartments one can look into on all seasons of selling sunset.
Everything suggests that having less stuff and consuming things as much as possible via a screen is the way...
Is it, though?
Is it such a good idea to squeeze all media into the same square box of your laptop's screen, e-reader or smartphone?
I don't think so.
Compare a collection of books you've assembled throughout the years with the welcome screen of your Kindle.
The second you delete your Amazon account (I must know I did this recently), all your reading history is gone.
Did it feel bad?
Not really.
I felt quite okay with Amazon not knowing how fast I read or which passages I highlighted.
Now contrast this with my experience of giving away over 40 books because I was moving and simply couldn't afford bringing them along.
That felt bad.
I did give them to a friend who later sent me a picture of them neatly standing in her office on a shelf, sorted by color.
Sometimes, I think of one of them, wishing I could pull it from the shelf and re-read some of its parts.
I think all writers eventually become that kind of reader that goes back to books just to go over the passage they obsess over because it's stunning prose or just a really well-captured landscape, or... pick your poison.
".. both men choose to exist mainly in the present moment. That they arrived at this point from different directions, but at a similar time in their eventful lives, is what binds them together.
Similarly having come to the understanding that life is just a brief phase on time's hyperbolic continuum, and that there have been other lives, and there will be other lives again, there are few things either of them truly care about, but making crop circles is one of them.
Sometimes it feels like it is the only thing."
Benjamin Myers in The Perfect Golden Circle - a passage that lives rentfree in my head.
When I was a kid, one of our greatest joys was pulling the tape out of our cassettes and then, with a pencil, rolling it all back in.
Listening to an audiobook was a ritual. You had to go up to the shelf, pick a cassette, and put it into the player.
At times, you had to rewind, and it was nowhere close to frictionless. Other times, your playing around with the cassette tape had ruined the whole thing so you could ponder the "actions have consequences." and ways to blame this on your younger siblings.
And when it ended, it just did. Nothing else started playing on auto-loop.
After that, you could fight with your brother you shared the room with over what to listen to next.
We didn't have earphones, and we only had one player.
Everyone in the room would also get the joys of listening to Benjamin Blumchen for the 500th time.
There are many more examples of things we own, we get deeply attached to.
Take the plush toys we have as kids. Chances are you or at least your parents remember very well the one that they could barely ever wash since you couldn't be without it a single night.
Laundry is a scary prospect for a beloved fragile plush toy.
Eventually, we grow up, and seemingly less attached to the earthly things.
Sure, there's people buying expensive things, for their sign value, not their utility, and those hoarding random stuff.
I'm not advocating either - hoarding, after all, is bad; it increases the likelihood of fires turning into big hazards, and buying things just to signal to others how cool you are is a strategy that probably works best on the Andrew Tate audience.
That's not one you want to impress.
Access to information is great. Access to education and media as well.
But I feel that removing friction and inconvenience hasn't made us appreciate things more or even contributed to making us happier.
It turned us from owners to users.
We're creating things we do not own every day on social media platforms.
We're consuming things we do not own, streaming movies, and reading on our kindles.
There's an app for everything.
All it takes is a few clicks and hooking it up with your payment of choice.
Et voila, access to a new slew of media.
Of course, you can also rent bikes like that, cars, boyfriends, girlfriends, random guys doing nothing..
The problem isn't the fact this is possible.
It's the fact it's becoming a default way to consume things.
The things we consume tend to consume us.
But what if you own things?
Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.
Walter Benjamin
When we own things, our relationship with them changes - if we pick them intentionally and decide to take care of them.
We can appropriate them by making them our own and using them to curate our environment.
When people visit my flat for the first time, they often say things like "it's very you."
The things we own become an extension of our selves, that's why it pays to be intentional.
Owning things also invites re-use.
It offers a more haptic experience than tapping on a screen.
It adds a ritual.
And what are rituals, if not ways, to halt the passing of time - even if just for a short, brief moment? Rituals stabilize us.
Things have stories.
Things can become a portal to our memories.
The books I read are all connected to places I read them in, conversations I had about them, and the way I felt back then. Some even have visible traces of going through a lot.
And then there are all the postcards I've received and collected over the years. It's fun going through them once in a while. Admiring their artistic covers and reflecting on the words that traveled all around the world to find me.
The plants, the art prints, the countless music scores I have, the assortment of pamphlets lying around...
A minimalist's nightmare. Probably.
For me, a source of joy and a welcome break from the world on the screen. Full of inspiration as I lose myself in them.
Owning thing irl gives us a sense of safety and a solid foundation.
It facilitates curating one's own taste, shaping the place you're in, which in return shapes you.
It's my belief that everything in this world has its own language. We have the ability to open up our ears and minds to anything and everything.
Tokue, in the movie Sweet Bean paste (γγ)
Thanks for reading π
This isn't a call to hoard for the sake of it. With all the things one accumulates, the experience they enable is essential to me.
As long as we still live in the real world, we might as well keep some real things around.
The inconvenience isn't always a bug.
It might be what paves the way for deeper enjoyment.
