about a year out of college, i decided to buy my first car. i was commuting two hours by train and bus to work and i had saved up enough money to pay for something used in cash. it seemed the most logical thing to do. i diligently searched for the right car until i found one that met all my needs. i test-drove it and got the a-ok from a mechanic. it was a buy.
the day of the purchase, i remember being extraordinarily stressed-out. the prospect of spending so much money all at once frightened me, and i felt at a disadvantage as a first-time buyer matched up against a seasoned professional salesperson. i knew nothing about the insides of the car, how it worked. and what about this one, in particular? it already had such a long history, very little of which was documented. it required a lot of trust on my part—to the dealership and the previous owners of the car—to assume that the scant pieces of information collected over the years about its whereabouts and activities were actually illustrative of its current condition.
it was only after a lot of desperate, fumbling negotiations to knock down the price that i became worn down by the thought of all the time i would have wasted assessing this machine, only to walk away from it and never see it again. i bit my lip, closed my eyes, and signed the paperwork, deciding to put my trust in the goodwill of other people rather than the comfort of money in a bank account. i had to leave the car in the lot, having borrowed another one to make the trip to the dealership, but i vowed to return the next day to pick up my new possession.
it turned out that owning this giant machine came with a bunch of responsibilities. i had to take it everywhere i went. i had to lock it up when i wasn’t using it. i had to fuel it up regularly, and keep air in the tires. i had to wash it to keep it looking fresh and clean. i had to drive it to the mechanic for maintenance. i even had to register it with the state every year, and buy it insurance.
but all of these burdens psychological, temporal, and financial were, in my view, outweighed by the perks. with this one simple tool, i could travel distances that would have been unheard-of on foot. i could keep my job that was dozens of miles away, meet friends in far-flung places, travel to national parks, go across state lines, and see so much of the world—just as long as i carried out a short list of basic obligations.
in the ten years since i bought my car, my outlook on this ledger of pros and cons hasn’t changed. and more importantly, it has been (mostly) sublimated into a genuine, broad feeling of care. in other words, against all odds, i have formed a bond with a machine. i need it live the life i’ve developed for myself, and it needs me to stay functional. i don’t pretend to understand how it really works, and i don’t pretend that, when the day comes that its repair costs outweigh its overall value, i won’t trade it in for a new one. but i made a commitment when i bought my car, and that commitment has imprinted upon me a real emotional attachment to it.
still, as my car gets older, i have to start thinking about how i’ll live without it. i wonder about how it would feel to lease a car. to pay for time-limited access to all the perks and responsibilities, rather than assuming them in perpetuity. more and more people are doing it nowadays, and i can see why. i pay for time-limited access to all sorts of things: movies, TV shows, music, cloud storage, electricity, shelter. it doesn’t faze me, so why not lease my next car?
i find, though, that even in my own practices of buying access, there’s always some way in which i’m undermining a lack of broad ownership with concentrated ownership: whether it’s my dvd collection, my records, my computer, or my (fingers-crossed) little future house and its little backup generator. there is something about buying access that just feels like a deferred commitment, a lack of conviction, a weakness—or even worse, a repression by external forces.
when i buy access to something, i have to ask myself: “who are you buying this from?” unfortunately, it’s often an opaque process, teeming with middlemen. each intermediary, of course, wants their cut of the amount you are paying, driving the price up without necessarily rewarding the craftspeople responsible for the thing that you wanted in the first place. it becomes less about the object, the tool, the thing, and more about the social process of matching you, the buyer, with the right seller.
sure, the same indirection plagued my own experience of buying a used car. but what’s different is that i only had to have the experience once. rather than the diffuse unease of periodically paying rent to some shadowy set of stakeholders as one does often with, well, rent, i had an intense one-time trial of cutting a check to some guy in the back office of a toyota dealership—an experience that was never to happen again, as long as i took care of my car.