Ownership Sucks

There was a great article on Worldchanging a little while ago discussing the wastefulness and increased cost of owning things like cars and power tools rather than borrowing or renting them. As the owner (actually lessor) of a car I don’t need, this resonated especially well with me.

So for instance: someone figured out that the average power tool gets used for ten or twenty minutes in its entire lifetime. So let’s say that instead of having 400$ of tools around the house you pay a few bucks a day to borrow tools from a power tool library. Plus you don’t have to worry about upkeep of the equipment and you can be reasonably sure that the equipment you’re borrowing is of decent quality, assuming capitalism does its job and motivates the providers to offer a good service.

Someone was telling me that his folks eventually realized it was cheaper to rent a car whenever they needed one — a few times a year — than to own their car and pay for insurance and upkeep. There are a few organizations around that provide short-term loans of vehicles. Streetcar, in the UK, comes to mind, as well as Communauto, here in Montreal and Flexcar, in eight cities around the US. All are very generous about charging for gas — Streetcar gives you 30 free miles per day and Communauto and Flexcar just pay for all the gas themselves!

The net effect of increasing the availability of borrowed resources would ideally be a change in the way we see “stuff”. Currently we are taught that owning stuff reflects our self-worth. People have started movements to divest oneself of stuff, but without a system set up to borrow stuff as needed this is unattractive. So coupling the desire to divest oneself of stuff with the ability to obtain, on a temporary basis, whatever stuff we need moves our focus from “what we have” to “what we use.” The stuff itself loses importance and what we want to do with it gains. It really doesn’t matter that I don’t own a table saw because any time I need to use one I can either bring my project down to the local community woodshop or borrow a table saw for a weekend.

Obviously there are people for whom it is better to own certain stuff. If I use my table saw every weekend it may be more cost-effective for me to just buy one, and it avoids the hassle of transporting stuff all the time. But I should think that the vast majority of people would do well to subscribe to a stuff-lending service.