…is a phrase playing off the great William F. Buckley retort to writers angry about something in the National Review. Do people know it any more?
It was time for a review of the credit card statements. What do I get charged for, and do I need it? Peter Drucker writes every meeting should be on trial for it’s life in your calendar. Subscription services might not -or should not- even be on the calendar. It was time to cancel some of my own goddamn subscriptions.
I had Showtime briefly for the occasionally brilliant but short lived Sasha Baron Cohen series Who is America. The never-watched Hulu at some point grabbed a credit card and $12/month thereafter: sorry, gig’s up. Netflix provides an immense amount of value for $10/month, and possibly Spotify does more at the same price. A total savings of around $40/month. That’s one filet mignon with tax and tip, and doesn’t move the financial needle.
Spotify was the hardest. The premium service enables downloads (thus reduced mobile data costs), and free services now can’t control which tracks to play.
The real cost of all of these services is time, and perhaps even openness to new things. Spotify enables pretty much any music you’d want, but what do I do but listen to the same tracks repetitively?
The sheer immensity of these services’ offerings is a possible gaping wound on one’s discretionary time. If I want to watch Better Call Saul, that’s fine. I should make a decision to do it on its own, not because an algorithm teases me into it since I liked Breaking Bad and BCS’ first season.
None of these services wants you to cancel of course, and the path to cancellation has deeper exit interviews than most jobs.
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