PTPL 201 · What Meema’s 1940s Cottage Taught Me About Software Subscriptions

On cautious, informed renting, and the lie of personal ownership

Mum on the gas box at the house she and Meema lived in before moving to the cottage

Lately I’ve been looking at the subscription software I use, trying to decide what should stay and what needs to go. The evaluation process is not as straightforward as I thought it was going to be.

So I’m looking into the concept of ownership. What does it really means when the things you rely on don’t exist in any tactile sense?

With excellent timing, my sister showed me a video this week that reminded her of the things I write about. In it, the creator, Hannah, highlights some of the plain and positive ways people lived in the 1940s, before the abundance of the 1950s took over and the succeeding decades snowballed us to where we are today.

People in the 1940s were necessarily frugal. It was normal to have only one of a thing that did a particular job, like a milk jug, a mascara, or an umbrella. Upcycling clothing was expected, and the only alternatives to cooking from scratch involved going to the baker or to a sit-down restaurant.

View of the front of Meema’s cottage, with its bull-nosed verandah

My personal connection to the 1940s comes from time spent in my maternal grandmother’s bullnosed verandah home in Adelaide, South Australia. The 1900s-era house was small, as was the yard.

Looking back, I can see that it was an unintentional time capsule of a bygone era. For perspective, I was born in the latter half of the 1960s. Meema moved into the house in the early 50s when Mum was about 13, 1940s habits in tow.

This was where my mother lived until marrying my Dad, who happened to be growing up a street away. It’s also where my older sister and I spent many happy hours.

The old fixed table and benches are gone, but that SAGASCO gas stove looks to be the original!

Bread and butter pudding was cooked in the old gas stove, drinking water carried in buckets from the tank in the spacious back yard, and the only toilet was a narrow structure just outside the back door.

Sleepovers as a kid were fun, until we need to go to the loo after dark…

Picking apricots from the tree and drying them on wooden trestles was a seasonal chore. Finding things to do that didn’t involve screens was a universal skill.

Meema didn’t have much, but she did own her house and everything in it. Every chore was a purposeful act that contributed to keeping the household running smoothly. Routines were a given.

Can you imagine present-me visiting Meema and trying to explain the concept of subscriptions? That the things she relied on every day would never truly be hers?

I’m sure she’d agree that paying for services makes sense for things like council rubbish collection, delivery of wood for the fireplace, and electricity. But no way would she, with a 1940s mindset, have thought it wise to “pay rent” for things she wasn’t using, didn’t need, couldn’t afford, and would never be able to own.

Wanting what you have is a shortcut to having what you want

And so I must ask myself whether my subscriptions fall into that category.

Do I use it? Do I need it? Can I afford it?

Those are important, but it’s the ownership side of things that puts my independent soul on alert. It’s one thing to use something for the fun of it and quite another to—unconsciously or not—rely upon it.

That’s why I’m training myself to always ask, What’s the exit strategy? The escape plan?

In the aforementioned video, Hannah talks about things she doesn’t buy any more because of her vintage leanings. The section on “endless subscriptions” begins at 07:20. At 07:56 Hannah quotes Cinzia, whose video on cloud services reveals her as a kindred spirit.

“If it’s not on your hard drive, it’s not on your computer, it doesn’t exist according to your rules,” Cinzia states, “you do not rule it. And thus it could be erased randomly, without recovery, any second.”

I hear you, Cinzia! And I very much agree that keeping things in the Cloud is how you give up autonomy over your work. That digital and cloud services give access, not ownership.

Hannah’s friend, Miriam, told her what everyone today needs to stamp firmly on their digital workflows: Everything is now at the mercy of the manufacturer.

Keep in mind, though, that is only true for the things you have built in the places they own, in formats only they control. Fortunately there are simple ways to avoid this trap, which I have covered in-depth in the past.

make decisions based on facts, not out of either blind fear or blind trust

When it comes to subscriptions, I want to be a wise digital citizen. This means that I will—

• seriously consider all aspects of ownership
• meticulously track all my subscriptions, and not take on more without an informed awareness of their effect on my total financial load
• calculate the cost of each subscription in terms of years (not months), value, and distraction potential
• remember that in the majority of cases, subscriptions are optional
• make decisions based on facts, not out of either blind fear or blind trust
• keep both myself and my purse strings hard to reach (thanks, Hannah)
• carefully weigh up the risk to benefit ratio of the subscription software
• be honest about whether I genuinely want or need the service, or if the excitement of the shiny new thing is the main driver
• cultivate an abundance rather than a scarcity mindset

I treasure the memories of life as it was in Meema’s home, and I am chuffed that because of Hannah’s video, my sister now understands the terms local storage and data ownership ; because they were presented in the context of things she is already familiar with.

As I contemplate the subscriptions in my life I’ll be sitting with these wise words from The Minimalists:

Wanting what you have is a shortcut to having what you want

Thank you to those who have already suggested alternatives to the Setapp apps (see last week’s post) I currently have installed, or who have emailed me your views on this topic. I value all input! Keep it coming.

Postscript 1 Unless otherwise attributed, photos in this piece are of my Meema’s former house, taken by me in 2019 with permission from and in the company of the new owner, a lady from a similar era. She was delighted when I knocked on the door and told her of my connection to the place, and offered to show me around. I noted many changes, but most were minor. It was so good to discover that in essence it felt so much the same.

Postscript 2 Did you know there’s a way to quickly see what a video is about without watching it?

So when well-meaning people say, “Hey, did you get a chance to watch that 52-minute video I sent you last week? What do you think of [point X]??!”, you can paste the video link into defuddle.md to see the transcript in Markdown, complete with front matter. Then have AI summarise the main points, focusing on point X.

50 minutes saved!

In the case of that 1940s-themed video, I went back and watched the full thing, and looked up the Cinzia’s Footnotes video she quoted from. The text from the latter video wasn’t organised as well as the former. In fact, the transcript was a punctuation-free wall of text! But, with some robot help, I was able to extract the juicy bits.

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