My Relationships with things…

… with cars, music, room & board, you name it

I was going to write about my experience on how last year I made a change in perception. I had a perception for decades that helped interact with certain things that made them important to me, a perception that made me understand why I needed those things and why, me, as a consumer decided to buy them.

It was that same perception that made me rationalize that I needed to own them to make use of them and make my life easier bringing comfort and flexibility to my busier and busier daily routine; at the end, that perception constructed a series of relationships with things that would make me feel more at ease, right? Well, that was about to change.

Just as many years ago, Steve Jobs said, times are changing at a brutal speed, and we need to adapt. We have seen industries like Music, Photography or Travel, disrupted by technology, and logistics and mobility are like no other, and then Uber and flying drones came on the picture.

In my case, it was back in 2016, in a city like Sao Paulo, where traffic levels only increase by the day, mobility had become a pain in my butt (literarily because it made me sit longer while driving) to commute on a daily basis to work only a few kilometers away (as few as 6) taking me around 40 minutes back and forth (so around 1 hour and 20 minutes per day sitting and driving).

So I said enough is enough, I became a renegade, an outlaw of that routine and decided to make a change. I didn’t want to remain a driving robot that would move my body from home to work and work to home every day giving away my precious time to my wheel. So then in a month or so it was done, I had sold my car and became a free spirit of the city; being able to hop in Ubers and Taxis at my will, feeling cooler by the minute, “yeah, im gonna Uber home! \O/”.

Anyway, I quickly realized that Uber in a city like Sao Paulo is not the way to go contrary to Taxis (99Taxi) which have superpower outsmarting traffic riding on bus lanes, that was THE plus I was wanting for my life? Humm, not sure I am. Was it the money I was “saving”? Putting the money of my car in the bank rendering nice % of interests like Brazil does to your money? Not having to pay the IPVA tax, or the gas or the insurance or the money loss of your depreciation month after month? It all sounded so cool…. But think again, it was nice yes, but it wasn’t the pony trick I was about to discover.

Having the Bus lane-trick apart and the money saving, the real deal for me was a collateral upside that became the main gain.

I became the owner of my own time and suddenly I started to develop a new type of relationship, but instead of with things, it was a relationship with me; I suddenly found time for myself, “me-time”. So it was like meeting and finding a very old friend, a connection I once had with me and that suddenly re-appeared.

#featured