The things we don't need

For the past couple of days, I had been getting an SMS from my bank informing me that a 699 rupee charge was not going through because of a bad expiry date on my credit card.

It was the Netflix charge. I pay for the highest tier available in India. It is the same plan that I had from when we were sharing it in the household.

We can't do that anymore. We are in Finland, and our family is back in India.

Anyway.

I logged into Netflix today to add the new card to Netflix, so that that subscription could go through. I looked at the tiers that were available: mobile, basic, standard and premium. I thought about going to standard, but that comes with 1080p max resolution. I want that 4K.

And then, just in that brief moment, I thought how much do you use Netflix now? What was the last thing you watched on Netflix? Do you need this subscription?

I have been thinking about consumption and this want for more since, ironically, I saw that documentary on Netflix. I also came up on this post by Steph - Buy wisely.

Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use. Sometimes I consider other priorities such as cost per smile, cost per thrill, cost per externality, and cost per lesson.

I try to do that too. Imagine how often I would use something. What would be the cost per use.

That is one of the reasons why I feel one should spend more on quality underwear or socks. Things that you wear day in and out, many times over. The cost per use of a product like that will be good. I do similar calculations around the phone I buy and for how long I keep it. And so on.

The insidiousness of subscriptions is that we don’t subsequently question whether we need this thing anymore or not. There are no doubt benefits too for the consumer. But businesses bet on the fact that most people will find the cancellation cumbersome. Or they employ dark-patterns to make it difficult for people to cancel.

Netflix , helpfully, gave an option to pause things for a month, instead of cancelling.

The answer was that I don't need this subscription. We don't watch TV anymore. I mostly watch PL matches, twice a week. If we both want to or get to watch something we do that on YouTube.

So, I cancelled my subscription to Netflix.

If we want to watch something, which is on Netflix, we will subscribe for a month, then cancel it. That feels like a good decision.