[004] Own your life, don't just rent access.

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A broadcast for a greater world. Log off. Spread love. begreater.FM

Garrett: 00:10

Welcome back, friends. You're listening to Be Greater. FM. The late night radio show for a greater world. This is your host Garrett broadcasting from the great coastal state of North Carolina. Wherever you are right now, whether you're at the gym, driving down the highway, running away from the police, or maybe just watching the sunset, welcome.

Garrett: 00:37

Thanks for being here. You can visit the begreater.fm or begreater.co websites to learn more about the movement, buy a cool shirt to spread a positive message in the world, or discover charities and donate to their websites directly. In this broadcast transmission we're going to talk a little bit about what it means to actually own your world as opposed to just renting access to everything around you. But before we get into all that, we're gonna start things off like usual with a little bit of

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Good news from Earth. Good news from Earth.

Garrett: 01:18

This is Be Greater. FM checking in on the surface of planet Earth looking for signs of good news. And for this one, we're headed out into the ocean. Because there's something pretty historic that happened this year. Most of the surface of this planet is water. And once you get out far enough beyond the country's coastline, you enter what we call the high seas, or international waters.

Garrett: 01:45

Huge stretches of ocean that don't belong to any one nation. These waters make up roughly two thirds of the ocean's surface. And for a long time, protecting biodiversity out there has been complicated because no single country is responsible for the whole thing. But after nearly two decades of negotiations, the world finally created a new framework for taking care of it. The High Seas Treaty was adopted in 2023.

Garrett: 02:15

In 2025, it reached the required number of ratifications and officially entered into force January of this year. As of right now, more than 90 parties have joined the agreement. And here's why that matters. The treaty gives countries a legal framework for creating protected areas and international waters. Assessing activities that could seriously damage marine ecosystems, sharing marine research and technology, and generally cooperating on the conservation of life in parts of the ocean that belong to everybody and nobody at the same time.

Garrett: 02:52

And I think that last part is what makes this story so interesting. The ocean doesn't care where one country's imaginary border ends. Sharks and whales don't carry passports. Fish don't stop swimming because they crossed into international waters. Ocean currents connect the entire planet, so protecting something this large requires people from all over the world, people who disagree about many other things, to decide.

Garrett: 03:18

This is something worth protecting together. It belongs to no single nation, and this is how a whole planet takes care of something it shares. And obviously, signing a treaty doesn't magically clean up the ocean. The hard part is what comes next, actually putting it into practice. But I think there's something encouraging about the decision itself.

Garrett: 03:40

You protect something that might not directly benefit you tomorrow. You protect it because if everybody assumes that someone else will do it, then eventually nobody does. And after nearly twenty years of negotiations, humanity now has a new global framework for protecting one of the largest shared spaces on Earth. Not too bad, humans. Keep taking care of our oceans.

Garrett: 04:03

It's all the water we've got down here. This has been your Good News From Earth.

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Good News From Earth. Good news from Earth.

Garrett: 04:11

Alright, that was some pretty good news. Now, I want you to think about something that you own.

Garrett: 04:24

And I mean actually own, like something that's yours. I'm talking about something that you could theoretically put into a box, forget about for a decade, and then come back and open that box again and it would still be there and it would still belong to you. Because I think ownership is slowly becoming a foreign idea in the modern world. We used to buy a lot of things, but nowadays increasingly we buy access to things. And that might sound similar, but it's not quite the same promise.

Garrett: 05:00

And before it sounds like I'm just gonna complain about subscription models, let me say this: Access is incredible. I mean, think about music. There was a time when you had to go to the store and choose which album you were actually gonna buy. Now, for the price of about one CD or one album, you can just open an application and listen to any song from any decade that you can think of. And movies are the same way.

Garrett: 05:26

Instead of owning a shelf or a drawer full of DVDs, you just open a streaming service on your TV and suddenly there's thousands of movies sitting right there for you to choose from. Software moved this direction, video games moved this direction, and books even did. Our photographs and files increasingly live in cloud services. And from a convenience standpoint, this is amazing. We have access to more media, information, and entertainment than probably any people who have ever lived.

Garrett: 05:58

I'm not going to sit here and say that that's not awesome. It is. But I think convenience can sometimes hide a trade that's going on. Because while we gained access to almost everything, in some cases we're giving up our control over whether we actually get to keep any of it.

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You're listening to begreater.fm / Enjoy :)

Garrett: 06:29

Ownership and access are different promises: an object that you actually own makes a pretty simple promise.

Garrett: 06:35

This is yours. If you buy a book, you can read it today. You can put it on a shelf, you can lend it to somebody, you can write all over it. You can give it to your kid forty years from now. Nobody has to keep a server running for that book to continue existing in your life. A subscription makes a different promise.

Garrett: 06:57

It's more like, you can continue to use this while this arrangement continues. And again, that can be a great arrangement. Sometimes I want access, I don't need to own every movie I watch or every single song that I hear. But the arrangement or the agreement can change. The price can change.

Garrett: 07:18

A movie can disappear from a catalog or a quote library of content. A service can shut down or go out of business entirely. Software can stop being supported. An account can disappear or a licensing agreement can change. And none of that necessarily makes subscriptions bad, it just means access and ownership are very different things.

Garrett: 07:43

And I think we've become so used to access now, that sometimes we forget that there was ever another way or that there's another option at all.

Garrett: 08:06

And I think the part that I'm actually interested in here isn't the economics of subscriptions. It's what permanence does to our relationship with things. Think about a bookshelf. Those books aren't just information.

Garrett: 08:15

Over enough time, they become a record of a person. You remember where you were when you read one? Maybe somebody wrote a note inside the front cover. Maybe one of the pages is folded. Maybe your grandfather owned it before you did and passed it down.

Garrett: 08:31

The same thing with records, photographs, letters, or tools, objects that get scratched or worn or repaired. They accumulate history and eventually sometimes they get passed down. There's something very human about that. People have always left objects behind. Not just expensive things, ordinary things.

Garrett: 08:57

An old camera, a box of photographs, a cookbook with somebody's handwriting in it, a record or CD you played a thousand times. And those things can carry a little piece of somebody forward. There's something different about an object that can just stay in your life without requiring somebody else's server to keep agreeing or hosting it.

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You're listening to begreater.fm / Enjoy :)

Garrett: 09:31

And I should probably clarify something before you hear this as: "just go buy more stuff" because that's not what I'm saying. If anything, maybe it's the opposite.

Garrett: 09:42

We already live in a world overflowing with disposable stuff. Cheap things, fast things, things designed to be replaced. Things we buy because an algorithm showed them to us and forget about six months later. Ownership doesn't just mean filling your house with more things. Maybe it means owning fewer things that actually matter.

Garrett: 10:06

A few books that you really love, music that you want to keep, or photographs that you never want to lose, good tools or a toolbox that was maybe passed down from grandparents, something built to last, something you would actually want to repair instead of just immediately replacing. Something you might want another human being to have after you're gone. That's very different than just buying a bunch of things to have them for no good reason.

Garrett: 10:38

And there's another weird little thing about physical ownership as well. Sometimes the inconvenience is actually part of what creates the relationship. Think about an album.

Garrett: 10:49

Streaming lets you jump from one song to another instantly. But putting on a record is different. You choose the record. You put it on the player. You listen to that side of it and the songs in the order they're intended.

Garrett: 11:03

Eventually, you have to physically walk over and flip it over. It's less efficient, but somehow that can make the experience feel much more intentional. A physical book works the exact same way. You're holding one object. You can see visibly how far you've read.

Garrett: 11:23

The pages change a little bit because you handle them or maybe write a note. Eventually it becomes your copy. And I think that matters because friction creates a relationship with the thing. The easiest version isn't automatically the richest version. And that's another pattern that I think shows up all over modern life.

Garrett: 11:53

So I don't think the answer is to cancel every single subscription ever. I mean, I'm not doing that. I don't think everybody needs a wall of DVDs or a giant bunker full of physical media. The real question is a lot simpler. What matters enough to you that you'd actually like to keep it?

Garrett: 12:11

What music do you love enough that you'd want to know it can't suddenly disappear? Which books changed you enough that you'd actually like them sitting on your shelf twenty years from now? What photographs are important enough that maybe they should exist somewhere besides a cloud account? What things are good enough that you'd rather repair them than just replace them? What could you imagine passing down?

Garrett: 12:39

Maybe those are the things worth owning. Not everything, just the things that matter. Own the things that you really want and subscribe to the rest if you want to. Maybe that's the standard for the modern world. And that's pretty much the core of the idea.

Garrett: 12:56

Own the things that matter to you so somebody else can't decide to take them away. But before we conclude things, we have to always end things off with a little bit of:

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Gratitude. Because it makes you happier.

Garrett: 13:15

Alright friends, for this broadcast I want you all to think about something you've had for a long time. Maybe it's sitting somewhere near you right now. Something worn, scratched, faded, written on, or repaired. Something that's been with you long enough to have a little history attached to it.

Garrett: 13:34

There's something pretty cool about that. Objects can become tiny containers for memories. And sometimes you don't even realize how much something means to you until you pick it up years later and suddenly remember exactly where you were or who you were in that moment. So today I'm grateful for the old things, the things that have lasted, stood the test of time. And I'm grateful for the people and the memories attached to those things as well.

Garrett: 14:05

And I'm grateful for you all for listening to this episode. The modern world has given us access to more than any generation before us could have imagined. And I think that's incredible. Use it. Enjoy it.

Garrett: 14:19

Stream the music. Watch the movie. Use the cloud to store things. Take advantage of good technology. But maybe every once in a while stop and ask, What do I actually want to keep?

Garrett: 14:34

Because convenience is useful, access is useful, but permanence has a lot of value too. Some things are worth holding onto.

Garrett: 14:45

Thanks for tuning in to Be Greater. FM. This has been your host Garrett, signing off. Don't forget to log off, spread love, and be greater.

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A broadcast for a greater world. Log off. Spread love. begreater.FM