It started with a simple question: how much money slips through my bank account unnoticed? I started listing subscriptions:
HBO $14.99 (monthly)
Day One $34.99 (annual) — $2.91 (monthly)
Apple Music $9.99 (monthly)
Marquee Television $8.99 (monthly)
Disney+ $7.99 (monthly)
Uke Magazine $ 3.99 (quarterly) — $1.33 (monthly)
Apple TV $4.99 (monthly)
Netflix $8.99 (monthly)
Waking Up $99.99 (annual) — $8.33 (monthly)
VPN $12.99 (monthly)
Audible $14.99 (monthly)
Amazon Prime $12.99 (monthly)
TOTAL: $109.48 per month x 12 months = $1,313.76 (annually)
Out of principal, I felt cuts needed, so I diligently slashed the easy ones: HBO, Disney, Apple TV, and my VPN. I love music, but recently felt my listening dictated by algorithms. I admit it, how often have I listened to Simple Minds since my early teens and after thousands of listenings, new horizons need explored. Sayonara Apple Music. I also cut Day One, as any word processing program.
Amazon Prime. Auf wiedersehen!
Marquee, Waking Up, and Audible made the cut as they feed my artistic and creative spirit.
In Viktor Frankl’s, Man’s Search for Meaning, he describes the horror of being striped of all possession, everything but his life, but then, in a revelation, he found freedom in knowing what he did posses—that freedom within.
Boethius, that wise philosopher also writing from prison The Consolation of Philosophy, states,
“Why, then, ye children of mortality, seek ye from without that happiness whose seat is only within us?”
The exercise of viewing my subscriptions turned from from one of economic nature to that of life values: where I spent my dollars, I also spent my time.
In the summer of 1977, a line trailed around the colossal Cooper movie theatre and extended several blocks. The three local television networks — for we had only three — featured the the release of Star Wars. That exclusivity built an excitement of an experience of a lifetime. Then we waited another four years for the next installment. Binging was slower in the 70s. Scrolling over Disney+, there glows every Star Wars program imaginable, including the famed Mandalorian.
But I digress, which is easier to do stuck at home under state of emergency, subscriptions piling up, every movie watched, programs all binged. Netflix looks like late night reruns. I find myself craving to swing the pendulum the other direction and simplify. I watched a Netflix show on the minimalist lifestyle where people fit all their worldly belongings into a small backpack. Though interesting in concept, too extreme for my taste and I’ll stop with the question of my subscriptions.
Don’t get me wrong, I subscribe to a life of choices. I love the research I can do on the internet, viewing obscure Ernie Kovak’s films on YouTube, downloading Shakespeare texts, realizing that Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshee albums are finally easy obtain. I enjoy having 1,000 songs in my pocket, watching Wim Wender’s movies, and Wagner opera’s and LSO concerts galore.
I hate buffets. I start piling on curry next to a mound of to chow mein, then place on top a slice of pizza and a bunch of french fries. Discord, disharmony, tumult strikes. The mixture confuses the pallet, disrupts digestions, the aesthetics of the plate destroyed, incompatible for any Instagram food porn.
Now, looking over my list of subscriptions, I find that parts of my life fill the plate of life like a buffet. I’ve been left to my own means to load up, make choices, select at will.
John Dewey, the guy famous for the long forgotten Dewey Decimal System, wrote a delightful book called Art as Experience.” Here’s the short of it:
There is the art.
There is the viewer.
The two meet in the middle and create experience.
That’s life in a nutshell, I think—experience. The world happens and we are placed in the middle of it. But with a subscription mentality, life happens without experience, scrolling by in tweets and thumbs up or down. We strive for freedom of choice, we subscribe, but forget the experience. It seems easier to scale back and share just a bit more time with family, friends, co-workers and enjoy our time together. Maybe someday that might include curling up with a granddaughter to watch The Mandalorian, but at this point, I hope not, since I canceled my Disney subscription.