Shared Ownership

It's my experience that owning Things, in many cases, gives me less options, and restricted freedoms.

This is why I choose to share as much as possible on Things that would otherwise be large expenses.

I've never owned a car. Instead, I use Zipcar when I need additional mobility. This saves me from having a car payment, an insurance payment, and buying $4 gasoline (gas is included! which blows my mind.) The cost of ownership becomes disbursed across Zipcar's network, leading to savings for me. I don't have to interact with a human to get my car, which leads to less friction -- but I know if something goes wrong, there's humans a phone call away.

Using Zipcar gives me more options (which is a form of freedom.) I also save a lot of money, in comparison to an alternate reality where I owned a car.

On a sunny day, I'll rent a convertible Mini Cooper.

If I'm taking a long trip, and I need to sleep somewhere, I'll zip myself a Kia Soul, and throw my futon in the back end.

If I need a cheap get-around car, I'll zip myself a Honda Insight.

I learned by zipping around in a Prius that I really don't like driving a Prius.

Last year, when I moved from Oakland to San Francisco, I zipped a flatbed pickup and threw everything I owned in the back of it -- including a queen size bed. Having a queen sized bed gave me less options, so I untethered from that.

My experience is that we're moving towards more tools that give us shared ownership of Things. Zipcar is one example of this.

Spotify is another example. I wrote about how I untethered from my music collection. Instead of investing thousands of dollars in records, not to mention the time in 'keeping up' with what music is cool, so I don't buy crap records, I use Spotify to lease my music.

Airbnb is a similar concept to Zipcar, but with living situations. This model of shared housing is just getting started, but I suspect in the next few years, Airbnb will revolutionize the way we live.

I've used Airbnb twice. When I landed in Oakland, and when I landed in Seattle. I'm anticipating the day when I'll be able to drop into any city and grab a spot using Airbnb for a month or two, with everything I need to get settled in within a day, at near-cost to renting an apartment. For now, it's not quite ideal, but it will be as more adopt the service (or a similar one.)

A great talk on this is Sam Lessin's "The End of Ownership" at TEDx.