You Will Own Things, and Actually Care

or The Revolt Against the Rented Life

This essay will cover more ground than it settles. I know that. Over the next several months, I want to pull these threads out in full, but a series has to start somewhere, and this is where I’m starting: a life worth owning involves owning things.

Owned Space

I, like so many others, was greatly helped by Aaron Renn’s original newsletter on The Importance of Owned Space. It strengthened my argument for biblical localism, especially as it relates to building sanctuary churches and communities for Christians. Renn writes:

“One of the biggest problems faced by Christians in America (and also by political conservatives) is that they exist almost entirely inside space that is owned by others—legally owned in many cases, but more importantly socially and culturally owned.”

And for the last 6 years, I’ve been dedicated to addressing this, both ecclesiastically and economically, at scale in Batavia and a few other communities. Our church has bought a large building and property. We encourage our members to buy homes and do what we can to help them. We encourage the start-up of businesses and support them. The company I work for has bought several buildings on Main Street in Batavia. We want our Christians to own things. It helps us be salt and light, and it makes it clear that we are committed to the good of the community for the long haul.

Another benefit is that it creates a deeper tie to, and care for, the place you reside. To a great degree, my family’s, friends’, and congregants’ well-being is tied up with the well-being of this county. We want to see quality housing, restaurants, and employers. And we are seeing rapid growth in Clermont County, OH. We are one of the fastest-growing counties in the state. Not all growth is quality growth, especially when it is rapid.

For example, I have not been thrilled with many of the housing developments going up in our county. While we need more housing, the cost-to-quality ratio doesn’t appear to be there, to my very untrained eyes. These homes all look the same, are on small lots, and resemble the poorly built homes I’ve been reading about. The claim is that many new builds are being completed too quickly, using cheap materials and low-skill craftsmen. And yet the prices remain very high, even higher than those of the older but higher-quality existing homes. Buying a house at top prices on a 30-year mortgage, only for it to start falling apart just a few years in? That’s not the future I want for my community.

For many people I know, even if they earn enough and have saved enough to buy a house, they have decided to delay until they can find something of higher quality. So they remain renters or, in many cases, pay high prices for a crappy house or settle for what is essentially a “tiny house.” This isn’t just a housing problem. In many areas, we are coerced into being perpetual renters, paying more for less, and often getting both.

This all does feel designed, or maybe more like the organic and necessary end of a certain way of thinking. After all, many of you are familiar with the World Economic Forum’s 2016 line, “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.” Regardless of how orchestrated it all is, I think it is essential for Christians to revolt against it.

A life organized around access rather than ownership does not just leave you financially exposed. It slowly trains you toward non-attachment, toward the assumption that everything is temporary, nothing is worth maintaining, and belonging somewhere is optional. That is precisely the kind of person who cannot build a household, cannot commit to a church, and cannot plant himself in a county and mean it.

Renting Everything

The subscription economy and the rented life are not just inconveniences. They are a curriculum. And what they teach runs counter to everything required to build a lasting community that values the good, true, and beautiful. We must return to the school of ownership, and it doesn’t have to start with buying a house. The beginning can be much smaller and yet still formative. First, though, consider how far this has gone.

Legal ownership is only part of what’s been taken. The subtler loss is cultural. Renn was talking about churches and neighborhoods, but the same dynamic has colonized the most ordinary parts of daily life. Many of the things that we once owned have been replaced by digital subscriptions. We get our music through Spotify, our movies through Netflix or Prime, and even our video games through Xbox Game Pass or PlayStation. In most of these cases, we essentially are paying for access to a library of content. It’s not stored locally. It’s not just entertainment. It’s software like Adobe, Microsoft Office, and, to a degree, QuickBooks. You no longer own a copy but rent access to the program in the cloud. But what once was limited to TV and computers has spread to just about any internet-connected device.

The BMW 3 Series required a subscription for heated seats. Mercedes-Benz has offered an “Acceleration Increase” subscription that uses software to unlock more of the engine’s existing potential. Mazda’s remote start was locked behind a subscription service. Toyota did the same thing, but it was part of a free trial that ran out, and one day it just stopped working. There are similar examples with printers, smart alarm clocks, and washing machines. But my favorite example is Samsung’s Family Hub smart refrigerators. It rolled out a software update on the fridges that added promotions and advertisements to the refrigerator’s display when it is idle. Keep in mind, these fridges cost from $1,899 to $3,499. Imagine paying that much only to walk into a darkened kitchen for a glass of milk and find a Moana 2 ad on your fridge.

We don’t own our media, full access to our vehicles, or even the surface area of our appliances. Worse yet, we buy things that initially include features that are removed unless we pay a monthly or annual fee. This “worsening” has a crass name made popular by Cory Doctorow: enshittification.

The Deal has Been Altered

Doctorow uses the term to describe what happens when a platform, product, or service begins by treating users well, offering real value at low cost or low friction. Once people are locked in, it starts shifting value away from users and toward advertisers, business customers, or other partners. Then, once all sides are dependent, it begins squeezing everyone in order to extract as much value for itself as possible. What began as useful becomes bloated, manipulative, and worse. You pay more, get less, and find that leaving is harder than it should be.

Google Search in the early 2000s was a clean, useful tool. Today the first page is frequently a wall of advertisements, AI summaries of uncertain accuracy, and SEO-optimized content designed to rank rather than inform. Facebook built itself on genuine social connections: lost friends found, family kept in contact across distance. Then came the algorithmic feed, targeted advertising, and the deliberate engineering of outrage, because outrage drives engagement and engagement drives revenue. The pattern is the same in both cases. The product got worse on purpose, and leaving costs more than most people are willing to pay.

This is what it looks like to live in space owned by others. You moved in when the terms were good. Now the terms have changed, and leaving costs more than staying. You are a tenant who thought he was a resident.

Small Revolts

The other night I stumbled upon a YouTube channel called CheapAudioMan, which recently documented the CD revival in similar terms. CD manufacturers are reporting fifteen percent annual growth. Discogs data shows sales up year over year. A single Taylor Swift album released in 2025 sold two million compact discs in the United States alone. Five of the top ten selling CDs in that same period were K-pop releases, bought largely as collectible objects.

The easy interpretation is ironic nostalgia. For some buyers, it probably is. But I think something deeper is going on. A growing number of people are tired of passive consumption. Streaming made listening effortless, but it also made it weightless. The algorithm chose what you heard. There was no friction, no commitment, and, in the end, nothing to show for it. A CD or record requires a choice. You spend money, bring something home, and put it on a shelf. It becomes part of your life in a visible way. CheapAudioMan makes this point directly: Gen Z buyers are not mainly purchasing CDs as nostalgia. They are purchasing them as identity. What is on their shelf says something about who they are.

And it is not just CDs. Retro video games, consoles, and cartridges from the nineties and early 2000s have become mainstream, expensive, and more popular than ever, despite modern games being technically superior by almost every measure.

Gaming has been one of the most aggressive adopters of the subscription and live-service model. Battle passes, daily challenges, early access tiers, and games that launch broken and patch themselves into adequacy over the course of months. The implicit contract is that you never finish, never own, and never stop paying. Retro games violate every part of that arrangement. They start instantly, and they end. They have clear goals and no ongoing obligation. You own the cartridge. Nobody can patch out the experience you remember or add a storefront to it.

And many of the people going back to older hardware never even played these games as children. They are choosing them because the current alternative feels extractive. They are choosing ownership over access. They are choosing something fixed over something endlessly updated, monetized, and controlled from far away. In their own way, they are pushing back against the rented life.

Own Things Worth Owning

That instinct should make sense to Christians. We should want to own things that can be handed down, maintained, and defended. We should want our children to value what is durable, tangible, and good. Property matters. Homes matter. Land matters. But so do books, music, stories, and even games. They help train people in the habits of stewardship and care. They teach that some things are worth keeping, not just consuming. And in an age that wants to turn everyone into a perpetual renter, even small acts of ownership can become a kind of revolt.

The lesson I am trying to teach my children, and relearn myself, is simple: when you own something worth owning, you become invested in it. You maintain it. You protect it. You notice when something is wrong, and you do something about it. That is not just how you care for objects. It is how you learn to care for a household, a church, a neighborhood, and a county. People formed by ownership are not easily pacified by endless access to things that are not theirs. They know the difference because they have felt it. They are harder to extract from, harder to uproot, and harder to turn into perpetual tenants of someone else’s vision for their life.

Renn was right. The space you own is the space you can defend, shape, and pass on. That is true of a building on Main Street in Batavia. It is true of a house with a yard. It is also true of a shelf of books your children have actually read, a record they saved up to buy, or a game with a beginning and an end that belongs to them and stays what it was. Start there, if you have to. Start small, but start. The rented life is not neutral. It is shaping you, whether you consent to it or not. The question is whether you will let your children be formed by it, or whether you will form them to resist it.