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📓 December 31, 2025 — 4:57 p.m. (Driving Home After the Last Delivery)
It’s 4:57 PM. I’m wrapping up my last delivery and heading home, and I keep thinking about something that feels small until it doesn’t:
At some point, being a normal fan became a label.
If you buy movies physically now, you’re not just a movie fan. Now you’re a “cinephile.” A “boutique collector.” Like I’m supposed to wear a beret and smoke a cigar while I put in a 4K disc.
Same with games. If you like physical copies, suddenly you’re a “video game collector” or a “retro gamer,” like that’s some niche lifestyle choice. And I’m like… bro, back in the day, we all bought the game. Nobody called it collecting. It was just buying what you wanted.
I remember when Avatar hit 4K and I went to Best Buy—back when Best Buy still sold movies. I was happy. The slipcovers were clean, the price wasn’t insane, and it felt good walking out with something I actually owned. Then the cashier hits me with:
“Why are you buying it? Can’t you just stream it on Disney Plus?”
That question is the whole era in one sentence.
Then around Thanksgiving I went hunting for Eyes Wide Shut on 4K during the Criterion sale. I’m in Barnes & Noble asking for it, and the employee keeps calling it a DVD like the whole format upgrade doesn’t even exist. Then comes the follow-up:
“I’m surprised people still buy movies like this. You could just stream it.”
And I’m not even mad at them personally — it’s bigger than them.
We trained a whole culture to believe renting forever is normal and owning is weird.
But what are you really saving?
You save a trip to the store, sure. You save space, sure. But you start paying every month, and then every few months they raise the price. “Inflation.” “Licensing.” “New tier.” Same story. And the worst part is: you don’t even own the thing you’re paying for. Titles disappear. Cuts change. Quality shifts. One day it’s there, next day it’s gone, and you’re just supposed to shrug and keep paying.
Gaming has its own version of the same sickness.
I watch YouTube sometimes and I skip like 90% of gaming videos because the vibe makes my skin crawl. Not all reviewers — but a lot of them talk like gaming is only numbers now: frame rate, textures, brightness, kills, metas. And if you’re not in that lane, you’re in the “cozy gaming” lane, like everything has to be categorized into a personality type.
I play chill games too, but the label feels like another box. Another way to turn something human into a product category.
Even the way games get revealed feels different. I remember when announcements felt like events—big stages, giant screens, live demos, a crowd reacting in real time. Even from home, you could feel the electricity. It was like: they’re giving us their best shot.
Now it’s a quick video drop. A thumbnail. A “world premiere” that lasts thirty seconds before the algorithm moves on. Then the journalists and influencers post their verdicts—because they had early access—so by the time you see the game, it already has a label attached to it.
Everything arrives pre-chewed.
And that’s what keeps bothering me: it’s not just that media went digital.
It’s that the whole experience got flattened.
So yeah… maybe I am “a collector” now in their eyes.
But in my eyes, I’m just someone who wants to own what I love, and actually feel things the way we used to feel them — not rent them, speed-run them, and replace them.
Because the older I get, the more I realize: convenience is cool…
…but it’s not the same thing as a life.
Plástico man moveth.
Question: What’s one thing you refuse to “rent forever”—music, movies, games, books, or something else?
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