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Gen Z subscribes to everything from music and films to software and storage, paying endlessly for things we never actually own. As ownership is increasingly replaced by access, are subscriptions making life more convenient – or creating a generation that pays forever and owns nothing?
There was once a revolutionary economic model called buying something.
You handed over money, gold, or whatever the currency was. Someone gave you the purchased item. And then – this is the crazy bit – they stopped charging you.
This model lasted generations, centuries in fact, long before the Egyptian empire.
Our parents bought CDs. They bought DVDs. They bought Microsoft Office on a suspiciously chunky disc. If they wanted to watch Shrek 2 every Sunday for the next 15 years, nobody at Netflix headquarters could suddenly decide it was leaving the platform on a random Tuesday.
Today, I pay Spotify to listen to music I don’t own, Netflix to watch films I don’t own and Apple to store photos on a cloud, that I don’t quite understand, and I definitely don’t own. Should I ever buy a PlayStation 6 (I won’t), it’ll be the same thing again.
All it takes is a month of mis-budgeting and I’m a bounced direct debit away from my digital empire collapsing. Welcome to the subscription economy.
And for Gen Z, the generation already struggling to own perhaps the most important thing of all – a home – it’s worth asking a slightly uncomfortable question.
Are we becoming a generation that owns nothing?
‘You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.’
If you’ve spent enough time in certain corners of the internet, you’ve probably seen this sentence a bunch of times already.
The phrase originated from a 2016 World Economic Forum vision of life in 2030, inspired by an essay written by Danish politician Ida Auken.
Her imagined citizen explains: ‘I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house.’
Everything that had once been a product had effectively become a service.
It is important to say that Auken wasn’t unveiling some secret Davos supervillain masterplan. She later clarified that the scenario was not her personal utopia, but something designed to provoke discussion about where technological development could take us.
The sentence mutated into one of the defining memes of modern capitalism. But strip away the conspiracy theories and there is an interesting question underneath it. Because 2030 is now four years away.
And we may not be renting our knickers from Jeff Bezos just yet, but an extraordinary amount of our lives has quietly moved from ownership to access.
Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look premieres on @netflix Thursday, August 27 at 3 p.m. ET.https://t.co/px5rI0eKh7 pic.twitter.com/IDZO55jY6K
— Rockstar Games (@RockstarGames) August 6, 2026
We used to collect things
Think about the bedroom of a teenager twenty years ago.
Probably smelt a bit of B.O mixed with Lynx Africa, but there also would have been CDs stacked against the wall. DVDs. Books. Games. Posters. Maybe an iPod containing 700 illegally downloaded songs with names like rihanna_umbrella_FINAL_REAL.mp3.
Those possessions weren’t simply products. They were little archives of who you were.
Today, my music collection is an app. My film collection is several apps. My photographs are increasingly dependent on a cloud subscription.
Software itself has become a subscription.
Gaming has subscription passes. News has subscriptions. Fitness has subscriptions. Food has subscriptions.
Dating apps will literally charge you money to discover who likes you. Capitalism has somehow put flirting behind a paywall. And individually, none of these payments looks particularly threatening.
It’s financial death by a thousand Direct Debits.
The genius of £9.99
For businesses selling you something once is nice. Selling you the same thing every month until you die is nicer.
That’s what makes the subscription economy such an interesting evolution of consumer capitalism. The transaction doesn’t really end anymore.
Previous generations were encouraged to consume more things. We’re increasingly encouraged to maintain more payments.
And those aren’t quite the same thing.
Tech analyst Tom Goodwin famously observed the absurdity of the emerging digital economy back in 2015: Uber, the world’s biggest taxi company owned virtually no cars; Facebook created no content; Alibaba carried no inventory; Airbnb owned virtually no property.
His conclusion? ‘Something interesting is happening.’
Some of the world’s most valuable businesses have been built around becoming the middleman between us and the thing we want, and that raises a bigger question about wealth.
Because, while ordinary consumers increasingly pay for temporary access, somebody still owns the underlying asset.
Spotify may rent me access to music. My landlord rents me access to a house. A cloud provider rents me digital storage. A software company rents me its programme.
The ownership hasn’t disappeared. It has moved upwards.
Perhaps ‘you’ll own nothing’ was only ever half the sentence. Someone will own everything. It just might not be you.
Is renting automatically dystopian?
This is where things get complicated… because I also don’t particularly want to return to the year I was born – 2006.
Spotify is objectively more convenient than carrying 14 CDs around in a little zip-up case. Streaming has given millions of people affordable access to enormous libraries of culture.
And sometimes ownership is just unnecessary. Access can be cheaper, greener and dramatically more convenient. The problem isn’t renting something. It’s when renting becomes the only option.
Ownership gives you something subscriptions don’t: permanence. With this comes a degree of consumer control. Subscriptions replace some of that control with convenience.
And perhaps we haven’t really stopped to ask what that trade is worth.
The generational state-of-play
This feels particularly relevant to Gen Z because we’re not experiencing the subscription boom in isolation.
We’re experiencing it alongside a housing crisis, expensive rents, precarious employment, and a cost-of-living crisis.
The traditional economic conveyor belt – work, save, buy house, accumulate assets -already feels considerably less reliable than it did for previous generations.
Then, at the smaller end of the economy, we’re being trained into another behaviour entirely: Don’t buy it. Access it.
There is something almost philosophically strange about that.
Ownership once represented security. You accumulated things because, eventually, they became yours. The subscription economy is more like permanent consumption without accumulation.
