Are you ready to own nothing?

You will own nothing and you will be happy. This may sound like a crazy idea, but it’s something that more and more people are starting to believe in.

In an article published in Forbes by the World Economic Forum, the authors talk about how we will eventually live in a system where your whole life is subscription-based and only the very rich will own any personal property.

“Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city — or should I say, “our city.” I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city.”

If you read the article, this is how things will play out:

Privacy is a luxury
Owning a home is a luxury
> — YOU ARE HERE — <
Owning clothes is a luxury
Raising kids is a luxury

Ownership is dead, and you can see it all around you.

Home ownership is declining, nobody owns a video game or a movie anymore (it’s all streaming), and total household debt is at an all-time high.
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

So, here’s exactly what will happen next.

The future of cars is a subscription nightmare

Earlier this week BMW announced that they would be charging an additional $18 a month to use heated seats in their cars. People were pissed.

“South Korea’s BMW ConnectedDrive Store, which sells the heated seat and steering wheel subscriptions ($18/mo and $10/mo, respectively) also lets you pay to unlock other hardware features such as a “high-beam assistant, additional safety systems, and the camera-based Driver Recorder.”

It’s not just BMW milking their customer’s tits, Tesla has been doing this for years with their “premium connectivities package” which allows you to use features like internet browsing, music streaming, and live traffic visualization.

This is all leading to a future where microtransactions are ubiquitous across cars by 2030 — meaning you won’t truly own your car unless you cough up an additional pound of flesh.

That’s not even mentioning that rental car companies are now offering subscription services for you to rent out a car for up to several months. It’s only a matter of time until we’re all driving around in subscription-based cars that we don’t own, and paying through the nose for it.

The future of digital ownership is a joke

Did you really think you owned that copy of Microsoft Office that you bought?

Nope, you’re just paying for a subscription to use it.

And what about those games you bought on Steam, Xbox, or on the Playstation Store? You don’t own them either, you’re only paying for the privilege to play them as long as the servers are up and running. Don’t believe me? Here’s the proof:

Funny how all these stories always go under the radar. And even if they’re in the public eye they’re forgotten in a month. We have the memory of a goldfish.

Nobody ever reads the fine print. I can’t blame them. But if you take a look at the Steam Subscriber Agreement for instance this is what it says:

“Valve hereby grants you a nonexclusive, nontransferable, revocable right and license to use the Software for your personal, non-commercial use in accordance with this Agreement, or, if you are a Game Developer, your internal business use… the Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services.”

Ironically, NFTs (i.e. digital ownership that is verifiable on the blockchain) might be a viable solution to the problem of digital ownership — but they’re years away from being taken seriously.

You will never own a home in this economy

Owning a home was never easy.

Houses are expensive and deliver an immediate sense of buyer’s remorse due to maintenance costs, property taxes, and interest on the mortgage.

But if you get past the initial headaches, owning a home is like winning a ticket to the chocolate factory. It opens the door for generational wealth and you will no longer have to deal with the common problems of renting:

Being at the mercy of rent increases (which are crazy right now, especially in NYC)

Guaranteed no return on your money

No interest tax deduction

Real estate appreciates long-term

If you do want to move, you can rent the place out and actually earn passive income from it

Kiss all of that goodbye.

As we enter the era of the “Great Reset,” it’s becoming increasingly clear that owning a home is a luxury that few will be able to afford — and it’s primarily due to banks buying everything up.

Blackstone — not to be confused with BlackRock, which is also the devil incarnate — is a global investment management company and is among several powerful firms pushing working families out of the housing market and into rentals.

To date, Blackstone is the largest single-family-rental company in America, with more than 80,000 homes under its control.

In 2022, Blackstone is planning to spend $6 billion to expand its backing of single-family rental offerings, and will pay above asking prices for many of these homes. Not only will prices not go down on homes but you will be paying hundreds of dollars more per month in interest.

You will just keep getting poorer.

And to see where we’re heading in America you can look at a similar trend of homeownership in Japan:

And to use another example, Canada is particularly fucked and emblematic of where America might be heading.

In terms of home affordability, they are worse than London, England. The average detached house in Toronto is CAD1.8M.

Economic titans like Blackstone, BlackRock and Zillow can take a hit from buying homes at record prices, but eventually, their investment will pay off royally for them.

They’ll continue to buy up houses and not be punished for any risky financial gaffe they make, as was the case in 2008 when the banks were bailed out to the tune of $700 billion.

The banks are too big to fail and are also “too big to jail.”

In 2050 the idea of ownership will be completely dead

We, the everyday average American dude person is responsible for all of this. We’re allowing it to happen by willingly paying for it.

Let me explain.

There’s a common misconception about how to price things in today’s economy.

Price is firstly based on the number of work hours that go into everything, from digging up the metal, to shipping, to assembly, to shipping again, to whatever, because this is how profit is generated, you divide the work hours into as much production as you can at the same workday.

For the most part, in our modern economy, all of that is wrong.

Today, pricing has very little to do with how much it costs to produce a thing, and everything to do with how much people are willing to pay for it. This is how something like a house can cost $700,000 to build and be worth $100,000,000. It’s how shoes are made for $30 and sold for $300. It’s how selling bathwater made an OnlyFans girl thousands of $$$.

It does matter how much it costs to create something, but what matters more is how much people are willing to pay for it. That’s one of the reasons why gas prices are so high. The oil industry is hitting record profits during these gas prices because they can manipulate the supply and demand.

This is all to say that these subscription models aren’t some new-fangled way to milk more money out of you. We are willingly paying for our demise.
It’s our fault.

We’re the ones to blame.
And you will be happy
Don’t forget that part.

It’s unfortunate, because due to market circumstances — such as record-high inflation, coronavirus, and another recession — big corporations will be able to pursue long-term prudent investments, while the common man makes expedient decisions.

It’ll be a lot of fun in the short term: cheap credit, booze, pills, digital media on demand, and the idea of ownership for things we don’t really own.

But in the long term, we’ll willingly give up rights and privileges that would make the average American living in 1958 puke.

Thanks for reading friends.

https://medium.com/yardcouch-com/you-will-own-nothing-and-be-happy-now-great-reset-2cb6ec88c732