Because apparently Netflix and they lil friends think I owe them rent.
I'm slowly filling my space with things technology spent the last 15 years convincing us we didn't need anymore. CDs. DVDs. Books. Magazines. Photo albums. Old electronics.
And no, it's not just because I'm nostalgic as hell — although I absolutely am. The more mature I get, the more I realize that I don't want access to everything.
I want to OWN my shit. There is a difference.
We Traded Ownership for Convenience
Streaming sounded like a good deal at first. Why have shelves full of DVDs when thousands of movies could live inside an app? Why buy an album when every song you could possibly want is sitting right there on streaming? Cool.
Except somewhere along the way, we stopped buying our entertainment and started renting access to it.
And the media overlords keep raising the damn rent!
I can save an entire series to my watchlist and wake up one day discover: Oh. It's gone. Oh. It's been cancelled after season 1. Where did it go?
Who knows! Maybe another streaming service has it now. Maybe nobody does. Maybe I need another $19.99 subscription to finish the last three seasons.
And meanwhile the service I already pay for has raised its price again! Sir.
If I Bought the DVD, It's Still Sitting There
That's what I've started appreciating again. If I buy a DVD, I have the DVD and all the fun extras and special features it comes with.
Nobody's licensing agreement expires and makes it disappear from my shelf.
Nobody moves Season 4 to another bookcase and tells me I need a premium membership to access it.
Nobody sends my CD an email saying: Beginning next month, your Michael Jackson album will increase by $3.99.
I bought it. It's mine. And I'm realizing how much I've truly missed that feeling.
I Miss Homes That Told You Who Lived There
Remember walking into somebody's house and immediately learning things about them?
There were CD/vinyl record towers. DVD and VHS shelves.
Books stacked everywhere. Magazines on the coffee table. Family photo albums on the coffee table.
Mixtapes with somebody's handwriting on the label.
You could stand in front of someone's collection and go: “WAIT — you like this too?!”
Our stuff told stories about us. Now so much of what we love is invisible.
Music collections live behind a password. Movies live across six apps, each with a subscription attached to it. Thousands of photographs live inside a phone "cloud".
Our interests increasingly exist in accounts instead of around us.
And I don't think I want that for my home. Not completely anyway.
I Want My Kids to Find My Stuff
I want my children to flip through my physical media one day after I'm hella old and gone - and laugh at what I listened to.
I want them to pull out a DVD years from now and say, “Mama used to LOVE this movie.”
I want photo albums they can physically sit together and look through.
Books with folded corners. Things with fingerprints on them. Things that get scratched, written on, rediscovered and passed around.
I want them to experience choosing a movie from the shelf instead of spending 45 minutes scrolling through 7,000 options before everybody gives up and watches the same damn thing again.
And maybe they'll think some of my collection is ancient. That's fine.
I fully intend to become somebody's weird old mama with an impressive media collection.
I'm Not Giving Up Streaming... Yet.
Let's not get carried away. 😂
I'm not dragging the television into the yard and declaring war on Wi-Fi and streaming.
Streaming is convenient. I use it. I'll continue using it for shows I may want to catch once and not collect.
But I'm starting to treat streaming as what it actually is: Access only. Not ownership.
I want something I can hold.
Maybe I Just Want My Home to Remember Us
Maybe that's what all this nostalgia is really about. Remembering what saving a project on a floppy disk felt like. Having a cellphone that I can flip closed. Watching a movie that reminds me of something I enjoyed with my late mother.
I'm not trying to recreate my childhood exactly. I'm building a space where the things we love leave evidence behind.
A shelf full of movies we watched together. Albums that became soundtracks to different years of our lives. Books somebody loved enough to destroy the spine. Stacks of photographs.
Stuff with stories attached to it.
Because I'm starting to believe not everything needs to be compressed into a cloud, hidden behind a paywall, or available only for as long as I keep paying somebody every month.
Sometimes I just want the thing.
Sometimes I want to know that twenty years from now, somebody can stumble across it.
Maybe I want my kids to discover a piece of me they didn't know about.
And if that requires another bookshelf?
Well...
That's a problem for Future Me. 😂
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