Episode 74: Subscribe to Life

Transcript

when subscriptions, subscription services, were really kind of coming into fruition,
there was a lot to like there, I thought. There, for instance, you know, and there were,
obviously, I'm not necessarily talking about just like the, you know, online service,
SaaS kind of stuff. I'll talk about Amazon for a second. When Amazon opened up like their kind
of subscribe and save sort of stuff, I really liked that. It was a way to kind of put certain
things on autopilot. And I always assumed and suspected, expected that ultimately they were
going to get you eventually, right? Because like if you sort of put something on subscribe and at the
time it kind of looks like it's a decent price or whatever, and it just starts showing up and you
get used to it just showing up, they can kind of quietly raise that price in the background or
the price can quietly go. I don't know if it's in their control or the vendor's control or whatever.
Doesn't really matter. The point is over time, I'm sure you end up paying more. Like they get
theirs eventually kind of thing. But with that said, the convenience of it just sort of showing
up to the house, you know, for the silly stuff that's either easy to forget or inconvenient to
buy, right? Like, you know, box of paper towels or laundry detergent or like stuff that you need every
so often, but you don't think to pick it up like every week, like eggs or something, you know?
So anyway, I kind of got into this mindset and I would tell people, you know, my goal at that,
again, this is years ago. I was like, you know, it would be great. Just subscribe to life,
right? It was sort of this joint, this kind of joint place of these subscription services combined
with all the recommendations that were showing up as, you know, big data analytics were kind of
really taking over the world. So the idea being, you know, I want to hit like a button in Amazon
that's just like subscribe to life and they just send me whatever I need without me having to even
tell them, right? And my joke would always be like, and then I'll just take their word for it.
Like if one day, you know, like a stuffed alligator showed up in my front door, I would be like, well,
I don't know what I need this for, but I guess it's fine. It's subscribe to life, right?
It was, it was both a joke and something of a serious idea, right? I mean, there's, there was kind
of levels of this to me. Obviously on the face of it, it's a joke. Like I'm not, I don't seriously
want to just hit a button and have a giant company just send me crap and then bill me for it.
But the general idea, you know, the more serious note to it being more like, well, you know, if you,
if you could move some of the tedium out of the way in life, you might have more opportunity or
bandwidth or wherewithal or energy or whatever to do other more important things.
Or more fun things or more interesting things or whatever. I have sort of several follow-up
thoughts on this after whatever, however long it's been since I was kind of joking about this.
I guess the first thing is that on the face of it, within the description of what I just said,
there are a whole series of problems aside from the fact that, which I already kind of mentioned that,
you know, placing that much trust into a giant company would be an extremely foolish thing to do.
Some of the other pieces too, like I just mentioned there at the end, if you can move tedium out of
the way, you have more of an opportunity to other things. But, but psychologically speaking,
that's not really how it works. It's good to have some tasks in life that are a little more tedious.
This is the thing where if you're really working hard at something and it's consuming a lot of brain
cycles and you have to think about it a lot and you kind of get to a point of being a little stuck,
going and doing something kind of tedious, monotonous, mindless will a lot of times let
your brain kind of digest what it's been doing and refresh itself a bit. This is also the same thing
where it's like, you know, you go to take a shower and you have a bunch of good ideas all of a sudden,
like shower thoughts kind of thing. Doing tasks that don't require a bunch of brain power
to break up things that do require a bunch of brain power and active thought
are a useful tool to have in your, at your disposal. So I almost think, I think it's a,
probably a false statement and I'll, I'll reference, you know, the Pixar movie WALL-E.
If you got rid of all of your tedious tasks, the things that just use, go to a food store to,
to buy a thing that you needed to get because you didn't grab it the last time you went or
whatever, you know, I don't think there's too many steps between that and the humans,
like the roly poly floaty chair people that we see in WALL-E. Because in theory, what they took
away, I know WALL-E is a, is a cartoon. Like I'm not sitting here pointing it at as, as like a source
of truth, but like clearly what was taken away in that world was not higher level, higher order
thought and interest. What was taken away was tedious activities. And instead of the, the species
gravitating toward higher level thought and higher level activities, you know, they just became chair
people. So on the face of it, like the idea of subscribe to life is probably a bad one, at least
for that reason. To say nothing of, you know, topics like corporate greed and manipulation. I'm not
even going to talk about that stuff. I'm just talking about it at like kind of an individual
level. But the other thing that this brings up for me is, and I'll just kind of flip the coin here
for a second. Let's say that you did want a service that really took care of a lot of your basics,
right? Where it's not the, I'm not talking about a service where you order food. I'm talking about a
service where you click a button that says, I need food in general. And then every so often food just
shows up and you don't make any choices. Like it somehow knows what you want and need, and it just
shows up on the right cadence, right? That's the service that I'm talking about here. The one that
I think is a terrible idea, but for the sake of this conversation, it's, it was what I was kind of
joking about back, back when, let's say you did want a service like that. Or let's say I did want
a service like that. There are some merits there, right? Like that could be useful in the right
context, but what's happened instead, companies didn't go in that direction. They didn't go in
the direction of subscribing to life, quote unquote, in the way that they'll send you necessities.
Instead, what we've gotten, I think is sort of subscribed to content. And I think this is far
worse in some, in a lot of ways. First of all, it's less useful. And what I'm talking about here is this
pervasiveness of how much entertainment content is being constantly shoveled down our throats
in the form of YouTube videos and YouTube shorts and Netflix shows and Apple TV shows and all the
streaming service shows. And, and most of it, this point has become so disposable. I mean,
really disposable and you can blame data and analysis for this stuff, because if you think
about it, you know, you take some of Netflix and I'm going to really simplify this, right?
Let's say that a bunch of people watch horror movie content and then those same bunch of people
also watch mystery shows. Well, so Netflix can see that and be like, oh, you know what we should make?
A horror mystery show, right? You just put these things together and it writes itself. But the problem
is it's like the tail wagging the dog in some ways, you no longer are looking at it from a creative
expression or like a director or a writer who's trying to say something or show something or do
something innovative. What you're doing is the opposite. It's like a, it's just a content machine.
And what we've all done to ourselves with all these subscription services is subscribe
to content. So instead of seeking out interesting content, we sit around looking for what has been
shoveled in our direction. I think what I'm trying to express here, and I'm not sure I'm doing a great
job of it. There was a time, there was a time that I thought companies were moving in a direction where
they were going to help us, help people move certain monotony away, certain necessities out,
right? Now, maybe that's the piece is necessities, right? We need food, we need water, we need,
you know, shelter. Like there are certain things we need. And it seemed like there was a direction
in which some of those needs were going to be met by some of these services. And instead,
what nobody needs the next, next, the next Netflix show, that's hard to say. And instead of getting
the needs met, we're being shoveled garbage, mostly, and we're lapping it up. Now it has almost become
a necessity. I mean, how many times you sit down at the end of the day and like aimlessly scroll
through either Netflix or YouTube or whatever, trying to find something worth watching, there's a
whole other option. Just turn the damn thing off. Like just do something else. But it's almost like
that the monotonous activity that has been taken from us is being able to watch actual worthwhile
entertainment as opposed to the true necessities that we actually need. And I think that's,
I think that has me frustrated these days because there was other paths to take.
I suspect, and I don't have data on this, but I suspect that the, particularly the Americans,
consume more entertainment than they ever have in history. I also suspect that more of it is cookie
cutter, boilerplate, disposable crap than it ever has been before. So I'm not sure. Maybe I've come
around and around again that, that a subscribe to life button might be nice if it was, you know,
truly subscribing to the things that would actually make life a little bit simpler and easier as opposed
to having, I guess, things forced on us as a part of this and so become so inundated and so saturated
with these sorts of things. It'd be better if it was better for us, not for the giant companies
feeding these things to us.