My Thoughts on 'You'll own nothing and be happy' - The Poison of Convenience

@tarazkp was touching on the old 'You'll own nothing and be happy' concept recently.

Conspiracy theories on this matter aside - I'm not buying the malicious intent from an evil overlord from the WEF or whatever - the fact that this concept is considered a positive worries me in and of itself. It points to a greater problem our 'developed' culture has regarding the march of progress, a march through a bog of filth and rotten sludge, consequences such as blood-sucking leeches be damned.

We as a society don't think about consequences beyond the immediate. Instant Gratification has become society's middle name, consequences be damned.

You see, these consequences are mostly silly and small. Trivial enough that the people around you mock you for whining, 'old man yells at cloud' memes to essentially shut you up, and it passes through society unhindered.

One example of this is QR codes at restaurants. I was with my friends once and complained about being forced to sit staring at my phone at a restaurant so I could find what I wanted. The whole point of a restaurant is to socialise away from phones. But I was mocked, the joke being dragged up numerous times to the point of pure annoyance.

And yet, time and time again we have gone to these places, and have nothing but a trainwreck of an experience; Apps that don't work, bad connection, glitches, no customisation, etc. There is no standard app. Every restaurant is different with their own crappily designed app with crappy glitches and problems.

But the inconvenience is minor, so it passes through and restaurants continue until being served by a human becomes the exception.

McDonald's has these self-ordering kiosks now that are so dramatically more inconvenient than a simple sheet you point your finger at in 3 seconds - instead having to scroll through categories and lists and payment methods - that 'fast food' is becoming a misnomer. My local KFC took it a step further and forced me to connect my social media to an app I had to download, taking me several minutes setting up before I could even order.

By not considering the potential issues with shiny new modern concepts that supposedly help streamline our lives, life has become significantly more irritating and, well, inefficient. Each industry has a minor effect. Together, it puts a significant toll on your daily human experience.

These thoughts are surely not from an old man yelling at a cloud. I know my way around touch screens and modern tech, and I'm a damn sight more capable than the kids now who are brought up entirely on the Apple one-size-fits-all ecosystem. But I'm also old enough to know what works, what doesn't, and how much is too much of a good thing.

Take Supermarket self-service stations. 1 or 2 at the end for those who know how to use it, have a small number of items, and maybe have some social anxiety - fine. Sounds grand. But with a growing number of supermarkets using them exclusively, the elderly can't cope at all, and you're suddenly doing the supermarket's job of scanning and bagging.

More examples:

• My metro station years ago started phone QR access. Now everybody spends a precious few seconds finishing off their conversation on an app before switching and stumbling around to find the QR to access, backing up the entire queue one by one.

• My door is a touchpad now instead of a key. The battery ran out. We had to wait days for the landlord to come just so we could lock the door again. And the buttons don't work consistently. I've been stuck outside for minutes before, trying to get in.

• Our building elevator has facial recognition. Now there's consistently a panicked group of people trying desperately to get in before the door closes as one person after another blocks the entrance while they struggle to get their face scanned multiple times.

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Every human experience has become that little bit more inconvenient. Not enough by themselves to do anything other than a slight groan. And also not enough to make any notable improvements. Either way, by the end of a day, I have groaned a lot. My user experience of life, my happiness, is down.

So shifting back to the whole 'You'll own nothing and be happy' as a slogan for a positive future, have the proponents of this idea actually given it full consideration?

In a society where we CAN rent everything if we want, rather than buy, it makes much more financial sense to any business to charge monthly for eternity for a product, than it does to make it a one-time purchase which you now own.

A $300 lawnmower at $30 per time, is going to rake in a LOT more profit after only 10 uses, And unless you only plan to use it 10 times ever, you're at a financial loss.

Cars already force users to pay subscription fees for extra services readily built into the cars, why not subscription-based driving? How much will it cost for a weekend? What about the 1-hour commute package?

This isn't that ridiculous let's be honest. It does make financial sense for a company to profit in this way - it's already the status quo in certain areas to make you pay monthly for a single product rather than own it, such as with Adobe.

When we allow it, bit by bit, year by year, the younger generations won't even realise what they've lost. They may have nothing they hold dear to them. Nothing they worked for to own for themselves, and nothing to pass on to their young ones, because the culture has changed to a subscription-based culture.

Now, I'm hoping humans are too entrenched in an instinctive need for ownership so such an outcome won't happen; the car subscription models are already showing signs of failure, for example.

But anything like this that can pass through unnoticed, will pass through. And over time, slowly enough, we will be able to quantify just how much worse off our human experiences have truly become.

It reminds me of another old man yelling at a cloud in Japan. He sued Japan's national broadcaster for using too much English. He was Japanese, he didn't speak English. He was losing his comprehension of the news, and generally feeling distressed about it.

Chinese people are becoming more illiterate the more they use pinyin (romanised system for writing Chinese characters) on their phones, erasing their entire written language bit by bit.

This kind of incremental decline is clearly quite a tangible thing, but it's hidden between the trees of overall progress, while only those with the time, experience and boredom - old cloud yellers - actually notice.

We get richer, but waste it all. We live longer, but wish we didn't. We have more careers, but we all end up in the same concrete office. We are more connected than ever, but we don't trust anyone.

We own nothing, We are sad.