Finn Williams: The act of collecting in a world run by rent

For Finn Williams, many a day has been spent digging through stacks of books and other media around Whanganui.

OPINION

A few years ago, after I moved back to Whanganui but before I came to the Chronicle, I worked at a recruitment agency.

The first thing the agency sent to me was a house-moving job in the central city. An older man was moving from his third-storey apartment to a house in the suburbs.

I got to the job late, called in last minute by the regular movers, and once I got there I quickly figured out why they’d needed the extra help.

Piled around the already sweaty movers were old fruit boxes filled with books, CDs and vinyl records.

After making my way up to the apartment I found even more boxes filled to bursting point, and spent much of the day straining my noodle arms to get them to the moving truck.

I never did another house-moving job at the agency but I think about the day at the apartment a lot, how wonderful it seemed and how ridiculous the man’s horde of belongings looked in his new, significantly smaller home.

I would like to say this chance occurrence altered my brain chemistry and developed my own collecting habits, but to be honest, I had been a collector long before then.

A few years ago things weren’t as bad because there was nowhere in Whanganui to buy much of anything and I was a broke student, so adding to the collection was saved for family trips out of town to somewhere with at least a JB Hi-Fi.

Nowadays, though, with boutique shops popping up left and right and with more disposable income to spend, the shelves and drawers of my room are stacked high and heavy with DVDs, CDs and books.

I’m sure some would see this as a waste of time, money and space, especially when you can access any form of media you want online, requiring no more space than what’s needed for your laptop.

To the contrary, though, I think physical media mean more now because of how instantly available yet entirely temporary a lot of life is.

As I see it, an increasing amount of modern life runs around rent, that’s especially true for the 1.6 million Kiwis who live in rental properties, but it stretches further than that.

People can rent access to movies, TV and music from streaming services, books from Audible, classes from Skillshare, games from Xbox Game Pass and even food from Hello Fresh.

We may call these subscription services, but I think of them as rent, and as both a former renter and someone who will almost certainly be a renter again in the future, I feel safe in saying no one likes renting, except for landlords.

Renting sucks because of the element of fear and uncertainty baked into the system on purpose — the fear keeps you paying, whether that fear centres on losing your home or your favourite shows.

So for me, being able to pick one of my favourite movies off a shelf and have it whenever I like does my soul a lot of good.

I also consider it a form of media preservation considering how often media is scrubbed off streaming platforms never to be seen again, often without a physical release, leaving people no legal way to access it.

In a world that feels increasingly intangible, I think there’s a growing desire from people like me for something they can hold.

The future of our homes may be uncertain rentals, but at least we can fill them with beautiful things that our definitely ours.

Finn Williams is a multimedia journalist for the Whanganui Chronicle. He joined the Chronicle in early 2022 and regularly covers stories about business, events and emergencies. He also enjoys writing opinion columns on whatever interests him.