You’ll Own Nothing and Be Happy: Is That Our Future?
What if the biggest economic shift of our lifetime isn’t about inflation or AI, but about ownership itself?
In this episode of the Missing Middle Podcast, Mike and Cara explore how ownership is quietly disappearing from everyday life, and what that means for consumers, younger generations, and the economy as a whole.
From streaming services and digital books to video games, cars, exercise bikes, and even housing, more and more products are shifting from one-time purchases to subscription-based access. While these models offer convenience and regular updates, they also raise serious concerns about control, pricing, and long-term access.
Mike and Cara examine the “illusion of ownership” and more about “constrained optimization,” where economic circumstances make traditional ownership nearly impossible for younger generations. Questioning if we are being pushed into a future where the top 0.001% owns all assets while the middle class is permanently transformed into a generation of renters. Mike and Cara break down the policy choices required to reclaim property rights and protect the Canadian dream of actually owning the things you pay for.
Is society moving toward a future where access replaces ownership? And what do we give up when that happens?
Mike and Cara discuss:
Why younger generations own less and whether that is preference or necessity
How subscription models create the illusion of ownership
What happens when companies can revoke access to things you have paid for
The connection between digital rentals, housing affordability, and corporate power
Whether “you will own nothing and be happy” is a prediction rather than a conspiracy
Why the right to repair movement may be one of the most hopeful policy responses available
This is not a nostalgic argument for going back to CDs or Atari cartridges. It is a clear look at the trade-offs people have accepted, including convenience, flexibility, and constant updates, and what may be lost in return, such as autonomy, security, and true ownership.
If you have ever wondered why everything now comes with a monthly fee, or what that means for the future of housing, work, and economic freedom, this conversation is for you.
If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:
Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, which has been lightly edited.
Mike Moffatt: So, Cara, Professor Moffatt is going to ask you a question for which there is only one correct answer. That question is as follows. What was the best year for music ever?
Cara Stern: I mean, there’s only one right answer, and that’s got to be 1989, the birth year of our greatest songwriter of all time, Taylor Swift.
Mike Moffatt: So sorry, as any good Gen Xer will tell you, you’re off by two years. The answer is 1991, and specifically a 44-day period in 1991 where seven massive albums were released. You had Metallica by Metallica, you had Ten by Pearl Jam. You had used your illusion one and two by Guns N’ Roses, Blood Sugar Sex Magic by Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bad Motor Finger by Soundgarden, and Nevermind by Nirvana.
That was not only the best year for music, but the best 44-day period for music ever. I do appreciate that you picked a year where Gen X was listening to a lot of music, but I got to tell you, the correct year was 1991.
Cara Stern: I gotta say, I don’t really remember that year because like Taylor Swift, I was two that year. So I guess that explains why I don’t remember it, although it does sound like that’d be a pretty good time to be listening to music.
Mike Moffatt: Well, I think about this question a lot, because my daughter is the same age that I was in 1991, and she’s just as music-obsessed as I was at that age. But the way that she engages with music is totally different than how I did back then. She’s got Amazon Music and YouTube, and she can access practically any song in the world at any time.
Back in 1991, I would have considered that the greatest thing ever. I used to have to save up for weeks to buy an individual CD. And I think by the end of 1991, I had maybe 12 or 13 albums, and that was really it. Unless I listen to the radio.
Cara Stern: I heard you guys used to sit by the radio just to record it so that you would have a copy. That was the only way to make your playlist of songs that you wanted, right?
Mike Moffatt: Yeah. No, absolutely and I got really good at that. We used to do that on cassette and we’d have to time it perfectly. So growing up in London, Ontario, once they stopped saying CKSL London, boom! You hit record. You don’t need them, giving the radio call signs during the song.
So absolutely, we used to do that because that was the only way we could get music sometimes. But we had a physical object we could hold, whether it be a CD or a song we taped off the radio, and I feel like something’s been lost in the fact that the music is no longer a tangible, physical object that you can hold on to.
There’s no record sleeve, there’s no cassette tape, there’s nothing that you can actually put in your hands. And I feel like this feeling is common among Gen Xers that there’s been something lost. Do you think it’s common with other generations?
Cara Stern: I don’t think so. At least not among millennials. I haven’t heard too many people pining for the days where we used to actually have the physical CD, and I think part of that has to do with the fact that a lot of us are living in much smaller spaces than our parents did. And so I remember my dad having a wall of CDs. I can remember even when I was a kid, and I was a teenager, I’d walk around first with CDs and then MiniDiscs because I thought that was the future, not MP3. I was wrong. Don’t take technology tips from me.
But I’d walk around with a whole bunch of them so I could rotate through them on the go. And it’s a giant thing you’re carrying with you. I don’t miss those days at all.
I couldn’t have imagined streaming. But it is amazing to be able to not have to own any of those products. Not have to put them in a physical space. It gives me so much more space in my home that otherwise I would need for storage. People still like vinyl. I think some people like vinyl because it looks beautiful. Some people like vinyl because it sounds better — I understand that, but it’s more of a collector’s thing. I don’t think the average person is like, “I wish I could go out and buy that CD.”
The one place though, where it does seem to make a difference is in that idea of permanent ownership. I don’t know whether people go through music more than they used to because we have so much more access to variety, versus my dad who used to always listen to the same CDs over and over and over and over because those were the CDs that were in his car, for example. We are now getting much more variety.
But at the same time, I can’t think back to a lot of albums that I’ve listened to over the last 15 years that I actually own a copy of. If they took them off of Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever we’re listening, it’s gone. I don’t know how I would actually go about listening to it, except for the fact that the internet is forever. You can find it probably somewhere online, but it’s not the same thing as owning it.
Mike Moffatt: There is that sort of problem where, if you are very reliant on an album, being on a service and they no longer offer that album, you can lose your access to it. And I know we’ve seen that in a number of domains.
Cara Stern: We can go back to Taylor Swift. I remember when she got in a fight with Spotify and she took everything off of there. If you were on Spotify, you could not access her music for a very long time. But there’s also weirder examples. I remember back when Amazon remotely deleted a bunch of copies of 1984 due to copyright issues that they had sold on Kindle, which was beautiful. It was the most perfect example that they ever could have used, and I don’t know why they they didn’t think that one through — although I guess if it was a copyright issue, they probably had to do it.
It just showed people that you could pay for it, you could give them the money. They’re like, here’s your e-book, it’s on your device. And then one day it’s not on your device. And I think that was the first time I heard it. And it sparked a lot of alarm bells about what happens when you don’t own anything. As much as I don’t care about owning it, I still want to access it. That is something that is a big concern.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, absolutely. That we had this illusion of ownership in many areas. You see it a lot in video games where you might have an older video game console. You do a digital download of a game that relies on a server to access, and that server is no longer online. You can’t play that game.
That was not an issue for me when I was playing Atari and Nintendo and all those computers you see behind me. I didn’t have to worry about Atari pulling the plug on me. But you see it in other areas as well. So, there was a famous example of a car that had seat warmers built in, but it was added as a subscription service.
And if you didn’t pay your bill or the car company just decided that they didn’t want to offer that anymore, you lost access to those seat warmers, even though you paid for it. It was physically in your car. You couldn’t use it.
I worry about those exercise bikes. We’ve got one upstairs. I won’t name the company name, but it’s one of those things where it’s a subscription service and if that company goes out of business or I’m just not able to pay that subscription, that bike becomes a paperweight.
We saw the Cloudflare outage a month or two ago. And all of these things that we thought of as physical, tangible objects. It turned out it actually required access to the cloud and no longer worked. So they had these adjustable beds that people couldn’t change the positions of because they didn’t realize that there was reliance on the internet to get the bed to change those positions. So again, that server goes down or what have you, and you’ve got this bed with a bunch of features that you paid for that you own, but you can’t actually access because it requires this technology. It requires permission from the company who sold it to you.
Cara Stern: Yeah, thinking back to your video game systems behind you. I remember having those video game systems. Some of them — not the Atari, I’ve never played it — but an older Nintendo system that was kicking around for a long time. I could take the cartridge and just put it in, and it would be there, and I could play it at any time.
And now you connect to the server. So sometimes I have games that you just can’t play anymore because you can’t connect to the server anymore. And then I get concerned about corporate monopolies, because when I think about companies like PlayStation, they sell a version of their system that doesn’t even have a way to play a physical game anymore. You have to buy it through them on their digital store. And that brings up a lot of concerns, because what if they decide to take it away?
First of all, what if you can no longer access it? And then what happens to the prices when right now, they make it cheaper to get it from the online store. Sales are much better there than I could ever get at GameStop, but at the same time, eventually that’s the only place to get it. What happens to the price then? It’s very concerning and that’s just one area, but it’s a place where I see it on a regular basis.
Mike Moffatt: This model is becoming a lot more frequent, and it’s largely just due to technology. Because these models typically require the internet. It wasn’t that Atari had big morals and would never do that sort of thing. It was that they had no ability to, they couldn’t tell you to stop playing Space Invaders. Once you had that cartridge, it was yours. But now companies with the internet and the ability to sell digital access, it’s created a lot of power for corporations. And there’s this whole concept called rentier capitalism.
And the idea behind rentier capitalism is that it’s an economic regime where the dominant actors in an economic system become what we call rentiers. They make their money not through the production of new commodities, not through making Space Invader cartridges for your Atari, but actually through extracting value through the ownership and control of scarce assets.
Some of those being physical, like land, but a lot of those being platforms or intellectual property. So it creates this area where you don’t really own anything. And, the companies are instead making money by gatekeeping. Basically, that they own this intellectual property, they own this access to the seat warmers in your car or what have you, and then can extract all of these rents from you. Or again, something that historically you would have bought once paid for once and owned and used in any way that you’d like.
Cara Stern: I wonder if that’s just about companies trying to find ways to make more money, and that’s the way they could do it, where they’re like, let’s look for some endless growth. We’ve already sold this much. We can’t really keep going because there’s not many more people to sell it to. Do we try to then make more money from the product?
Maybe if we just get people to pay for it on a regular basis, we can keep making money forever. Is this just a greed thing?
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, well, I’d say it’s greed and technology right? That I don’t think necessarily corporations are becoming more greedy. It’s just that they have more tools to use that greed. So we look at all the software we use at MMI and we use a lot of it. I think it’s all subscription. I can’t think of the last time we paid once for a piece of software and that was it.
Everything is on this monthly subscription model. And again, technology has made it possible. And I do feel like there’s always one or two companies who will push the boundaries first. They might get a little bit of blowback. And then once people have accepted that economic model, the rest of the Fortune 500 comes in and says, “Thank you for your service. Thank you for making this an acceptable business practice. And we’re going to do it ourselves.”
Cara Stern: I guess I can see some people saying there’s a benefit where you could get content updates. I think about Adobe, we use Adobe’s Creative Suite, and that’s something that you used to be able to just buy, but it was very expensive. So it is prohibitively expensive for a lot of people. And now people can just access it maybe for a month if they need it.
And then also you get updates all the time. So if there’s a new version, you don’t have to go spend another $1,000 on another version of it. You just keep paying your subscription. You keep getting the new features. I wonder if they’re seeing it as a benefit to the consumer at all, and it’s balancing out with that downside of not actually owning it, if that’s a trade people are comfortable with.
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, I certainly think there are some benefits to this. That I do think of times in the past, video games that were released that were buggy as heck, and you were stuck with it. Now, through these models, they can provide updates and so on.
Now I think that’s a bit of a double-edged sword, because you also see companies ship buggy products knowing that, like we say around here, “We’ll fix it in post.” It’s like, we just want to get this thing on the virtual shelves, knowing that it’s still got bugs in it, but we can fix those over time on our subscription model.
There are some benefits of the subscription model, but it does also create conditions that cause these companies to act a little bit lazily. I think all of it deteriorates the concept of ownership. And I feel like Millennials and Gen Z, more than my generation, Gen X, are more likely to engage in the forms of economic activity that aren’t clearly ownership, like renting a home or activities that give the illusion of ownership, like buying an electronic copy of a book or a movie or video game.
And because your generation is more likely to do it than my generation, we start to wonder why that is. There’s two schools of thought on this. The first, and I hear this a lot more from Boomers, but my generation says it as well, that you guys just don’t care as much about ownership. If it’s cheaper and easier to rent, that you’re happy to do that, even if it means that one day you won’t be able to access that video game because it’s been taken off the server. It’s just a path of least resistance, and you guys are busy eating your avocado toast and can’t be bothered with the whole thing of ownership and mowing your own lawn or all these things.
The other school of thought is that these generations, the younger generations, are moving towards forms of renting or forms of illusion of ownership, not because you have a preference for that, but due to what economists like me call “constrained optimization”.
That refers to economic circumstances that make traditional ownership either difficult or impossible. So I don’t pitch for the Toronto Blue Jays not because I don’t want to, but I don’t have that ability to. And that’s constrained optimization. So knowing that there’s this ongoing debate, which side of that do you land on?
Cara Stern: When it comes to housing, no doubt, I think most people still want to own a home. I know that there’s some people trying to change that and saying there’s nothing wrong with renting. Lots of places do have a lot of renters. But I think our culture in Canada still relies a lot on owning a home. And I think a lot of people renting are doing that because they can’t buy a home.
I’ve heard some real estate agents say maybe some people want a condo, or they want to live in a condo townhouse, not a single-detached, because they can then have the maintenance done through their maintenance fees. They don’t have to deal with it.
I can see how that would be appealing for some people, and I’m sure there are people making that choice. But I think in general, most people still want the homes that their parents had, and that includes owning those homes. There are places where I think there is some truth to not wanting to own.
For me, that’s a car — and I don’t think this is a popular opinion among my generation. I think a lot of people still want a car, even though we are seeing lower rates of people getting their driver’s license as generations go on. But the idea of owning a car in a city, to me, is super unappealing. I do have one, but the cost of maintaining it is frustrating.
I have this dream that one day I can get rid of it and just have a really robust car-share system in the city, and that would be much, much more preferable. I don’t have to have it taking up space and all the money that’s spent on it. So if it was affordable, which I think a lot of these things were much more affordable for your generation, yes, of course I want to own it. But when the costs are so high, something’s got to give. I’m happy to give that ownership away to make that work.
Mike Moffatt: I think there are some areas where even this Gen Xer would say that renting or other forms makes more economic sense. I’m certainly a believer in car shares. I love them as well. Not having a large depreciating asset in my driveway does appeal to me. Absolutely. I do see some benefits of it. Where I fall in this debate is maybe 80% constrained optimization, but I do see that other 20% of it, where there are some real benefits to this model.
Cara Stern: You’ve made the connection between that decline in home ownership and the decline in ownership rights when it comes to digital media and even exercise bikes. Does that extend to future generations and renting homes rather than buying them? Is that the direction society is pushing people?
Mike Moffatt: I definitely think there’s a movement there. Again, it goes to this idea of rentier capitalism where you’ve got these kinds of big corporations who own not just intellectual property, but things like land and other things. And they can use the sort of capital that they’ve accumulated, this capital cash. Use that to buy assets, land, intellectual property or so on. And then rent those out and get this stream of income going forward that pays more than government bonds.
So I really do think we are moving in that direction. I think that policymakers aren’t thinking about this as much. A lot of policymakers have moved away from thinking that home ownership is good. To be clear, we want there to be lots of rental options. But I fear that we’re moving into a scenario where renting has become the only option, and that gives a lot of power to landowners and corporations to engage in this rentier capitalism, Where they own all of these underlying assets and they can charge us basically whatever they want for the use of them.
Cara Stern: So when people see the goal of the World Economic Forum, which was outlined in a famous, or rather infamous, piece, “Welcome to 2030” with the line, “you will own nothing and you’ll be happy” — is that where we’re actually headed? Do you believe that?
Mike Moffatt: Yeah, to be clear, I don’t think that there’s some big World Economic Forum conspiracy theory putting us all there. I think what the WEF was looking at was these kinds of overarching trends. But I think they have nailed onto something that is real and I think it’s concerning.
So while I see the benefits of having these models where I don’t have to have a wall of CDs, I can access music online. And that if I buy a piece of software that’s buggy, I’ll get regular updates. All of that has value. Being able to call a car whenever I want and not have a large depreciating asset in my driveway, that has value as well. But I worry what we’re giving up to get that.
We’re creating the conditions where the top 0.001% owns all the assets, and it can charge us whatever they want for the use of them. And then if they decide one day that they don’t want to provide that use, then we’re out in the cold.
Cara Stern: That’s the very concerning part of it. And I just wonder if there’s any way out of this?
Mike Moffatt: I think it comes from government. We do see this in some areas, but one that gives me a lot of hope is the right-to-repair movement, because that is another form of ownership that, even if you bought something that doesn’t require a monthly subscription, a car or tractor or something like that, if you can’t repair it yourself or you can’t choose who repairs it, do you really own it at that point?
You’re still locked into this ecosystem where the producer of that asset can still extract value from it. So we are seeing governments enact, right to repair laws. And I think for the most part, that is a good thing.
You do worry about government overreach and how it could stifle innovation, but I think for the most part, when you see governments start to think, “Hey, we need to be able to give people the ability to use the products that they have purchased with their own money, however they want, and be able to modify and repair them,” I see that as a positive thing. I certainly hope we can build on that. And you can take some of the rough edges off of rentier capitalism and find ways to scale back some of these more egregious business practices.
Cara Stern: Oh man, I hope so. The right-to-repair movements really give me hope, because there’s a lot of people who say, if you own a thing, tinkering with it should not void the warranty and you should be able to fix things if they break down. And it’s really frustrating watching companies do it. I have a lot of personal boycotts of companies that have made their products impossible to repair, so I’m just not going to buy it anymore. But I guess some people need to do that on a larger scale if the companies are going to actually listen, because as long as the people are buying it, then they’re going to keep doing it.
Unfortunately, we often don’t have a lot of alternatives. You’ll have a company that dominates the market or they do it first and other people follow it. It’d be really nice to see some more flexibility in the products we own. This is a place where we do need a lot of policy changes, and maybe this is something that we come back to, to talk about how we can do that.
Thanks so much for watching and listening. And thanks, as always, to our producer, Meredith Martin, and our editor, Sean Foreman.
Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about the top 40 songs of 1991, please let us know in the comments or send us an email to [email protected].
Cara Stern: And we’ll see you next time.
I like this substack and the topics discussed but I take really strong exception to the suggestion that "Taylor Swift is the greatest singer/songwriter ever". I can't hum any of her tunes, let alone sing along. I suspect "Taylor Swift is the greatest singer/songwriter ever" may be the title of one of her songs. Maybe in the future. All her friends will be listed in the credits.
Of course I'm a senior, born at the peak of the boomer years. I lived in Calgary, sold my second home for 25% less then I paid in 1985 because shit happens. Rented for a few years and bought again. The mortgages then ranged from 8.5% to 10.25%. My third home roughly doubled in price over 14 years (wow). Yes, I was mortgage poor. Vacations were in a tent never far from home.
Sold my share in the 3rd home to my ex at almost market and rented again. She sold it 2 years later because the market had more than doubled in value as interest rates plummeted. Market timing is everything.
We live in the Netherlands now. We own our humble flat but some 70% of the rentals here are gov't owned. Rents are controlled for these units and there is a long waiting list but you are secure in the tenancy. Renters here upgrade their own kitchens and floors on there own dime and are entitled to take what they paid for if they move. Compare that to the rights of North America tenants.
Owning a home is nice but it can also make your life miserable. I tossed all my Albums, CD, tape decks, DVD players etc. The new stereo is a phone, Tidal, and a sound bar. My life is uncluttered and so is my garage. There is no car, just a selection of bikes. I have to pay for health insurance that I seldom use. I own less but I'm unbelievably happy. Your mileage may vary.
Seriously this is the pitch?