Rent Everything!

I own a circle cutter. It's a handy little tool for cutting circles out of paper, up to a diameter of 8 inches. For a while, back when my son constantly wanted the planets of our solar system cut to scale so he could color them in, I used the circle cutter at least twice a week and it saved me a lot of time. (I still had to cut Jupiter and Saturn-plus-the-rings by hand, though.)

My son's into dinosaurs now, and the circle cutter is sitting in a box on a shelf somewhere, I'm not even sure where exactly. Sure, I could easily get rid of it -- sell it on ebay, donate it to the local charity flea market, or just throw it out -- but who knows? Maybe in a few years I'll need to cut lots of circles out of paper for some purpose and be awfully glad that I held on to it. (If I can find it, that is.)

This is stupid.

Some people are hoarders. It's easy to make fun of them, because they keep stuff that they obviously will not ever need again, like the little paper wrappers around tea bags (but they're so pretty!) or ugly old clothes with tears in awkward places and uncleanable stains (but what if I have to paint a room someday?). These are not the people I'm talking about, though I suppose they too could benefit from what I'll be proposing here. No, I am talking about all of us -- maybe excluding a few exceptionally strong-willed minimalists, who get by with exactly as much as they need and nothing else.

We all do this, in some way or another. Our basements are full of snowboards, barbecue equipment, or sports gear that we haven't touched in years. There are muffin baking trays, exotic cookbooks, special sushi knives, and/or funny pudding cups hidden in the back corners of our kitchens. There's this book we bought but never found the time to read. The sweater we've worn for one winter, then put away for summer and forgot to take out of the box again, three years ago.

And yet, we tend not to think of such things as a problem. After all, we might use them again at some point; and it's better to have stuff than not have it, right?

Well, no.

First, let's take a look at this from an economic perspective. If that bores you, just skip the next five paragraphs, to where I start talking about things from the perspective of optimality. That is usually more fun.

Still, economics matter. Buying things -- exchanging money for physical objects -- tends to seem like a good idea: after all, it turns this abstract thing called money into something we can actually use (provided we understand the manual). And it's not like the money is gone, then; after all, the thing that we spent it on is still there, and we could theoretically turn it back into money at any point. Whereas, if you rent something, you get some use out of the thing, but then it's gone again and so's the money.

Which sounds obvious right up until the first time you've tried to sell your barely-used $200 bread machine on ebay and ended up giving it away for a ten-dollar bill that later turned out to be forged.

Exchanging money for things you own always decreases the value of that money. It ties the money down, so it can neither flow nor grow (i.e. it cannot be invested and it is not available if you need it). As soon as you stop using the product, even for a while, it becomes a net negative: it takes up storage space, it may require maintenance, and even if you invest time and energy in trying to sell it, you will never be able to reclaim more than a fraction of the money that went into it.

By contrast, owning little increases your mobility (it's easier to move), frees up space (so you don't need as big a flat) and has clear psychological benefits (e.g. freeing your mind from having to keep track of your belongings).

If this sounds like an argument for minimalism rather than rent-ism, that's because it is. Minimalism is the goal; renting things instead of owning them is just a simple and effective way to get there. While it is easy to see the benefits of a minimalist, uncluttered lifestyle, most of us do not have the strength of will to keep it up. That's where renting can help: if we pay rent for everything we use, we are incentivized to limit the things we use to what is actually necessary, and to return them as soon as we do not need them any more -- knowing that we can get them again any time we need to, for a small fee proportional to the time we hold on to them.

Of course, that would require an entirely new infrastructure; but as I'll argue later, we are already rapidly moving into the direction of this being possible. So, what would a rent-only existence look like?

First, let's look at a few examples where this is already possible. You can rent a flat instad of buying it, which is a good idea if you know you'll be moving out again, or if you don't want to be responsible for keeping up all of the infrastructure. You can rent a car -- say, a small one for going to work, then a bigger one on the weekend for taking a trip with your family. On a smaller scale, instead of buying books you can borrow them from the library -- sometimes for a small fee, sometimes for free up until you hit a certain time limit.

Now imagine the same principle working for everything else.

Say, cutlery. You have a set for every member of your family on a cheap long-time lease. If you have guests, you get some from the home supplies store for the evening, then wash them and bring them back. (Or bring them back unwashed for a small premium.) You want to bake a cake? The home supplier has all the tools you need in a special combination offer, minimum renting time two hours, which incidentally is just as long as it takes you to finish your favorite cake. If you still get your recipes from books rather than the Internet, they've got those too.

Or maybe that's too much hassle and all of those guests wouldn't fit into your small flat anyway? So you rent a room, which will also have enough chairs. If you want to cook, rent a room with a kitchen. If this sounds like an absurd luxury to you, compare it to the cost of permanently renting and maintaining a flat that has room for all of those people, and a kitchen that's big enough to cook for twelve even though on most days you never need to cook for more than three.

The only things you have at your place permanently are the things you literally use every day. That special pancake pan? Drop by the shop on Friday, or have it delivered together with the pancake mix and syrup, then have the kids take it back and let them keep the deposit. (Kids love that.) The printer? As soon as the kids are out of that phase when they ask you to print coloring pages for them all of the time, get rid of it and go down to the copyshop whenever you need something.

That assumes there is a copyshop, of course. And party rooms for rent. And a home supplier that offers all these services.

But we can make that happen. Look at how Uber and Lyft are changing the attitude to owning a car in urban centers. Look at laundry services, grocery delivery (which could provide part of the infrastructure for an easy-to-use quick renting service) and the density of copyshops in urban centers. Being able to rent everything is not that far off.

In closing, here's again what renting does for you:

• It makes you pay attention to what you actually need.

• It helps you keep your place uncluttered.

• It makes you more flexible, not just in where you live or how many people you invite to your party, but also in how many tools you have at your disposal: not just what you have lying around or are ready to buy (and then have lying around forever), but everything that's in your home supplier's catalogue.

• It lets you adapt more easily to your financial situation: If you're short on money this month, return that king-size bed and get a cheaper one instead until you're liquid again.

• It allows you to live in a place that is exactly suited to your everyday needs, rather than your everyday needs plus every conceivable eventuality.

So, are you ready to rent?