I USED to smile at Robert de Niro's injunction in the Michael Mann film, Heat: Don't let yourself get attached to anything you're not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.
It's generally unlikely that I will ever feel the heat* around the corner; but if I did, it would be such an unbearable wrench leaving my possessions behind that I'd probably just stay put.
Like many people of my generation (and there's a gloomy sentence I genuinely hoped I would never have cause to write), I've come to regard the accumulation of possessions as something that validates my very existence.
I think of John Dyson, the somewhat haunted hero of Michael Frayn's Fleet Street novel, Towards the End of the Morning. There's a passage in which he surveys the piles of family clothes, 'all quarried by his own labour'. The bed, the food his family consumed and the electricity they used, even the house itself. It all consoles him. "He, John Dyson," Frayn writes, "thought by some as a boy to be rather a fool, had got it all." What was good enough for John Dyson has by and large been good enough for me, even if it has led to a mass of clutter that has never served any practical purpose beyond taking up valuable space.
Well, so much for that. And so much for the perception that today's teenagers and twentysomethings are just as materialistic as their parents, if not more so.
A report by the consultancy PWC suggests that rather than acquiring possessions they're more likely to want to borrow them. They favour 'experiences' rather than 'things', and crave a lifestyle that can be described as 'pared down'. Having access to material things is what counts. As for actually buying a car - forget it.
Hence the rise of the sharing economy - a booming, global, online market in which everything and anything can be hired or shared. Why take up space in your home, or splash out in the shops, when you can hire instead? Want to hire a dog for an hour or a weekend? A website, BorrowMyDoggy, allows you to do just that. Want to rent out a spare room, or your rarely-used garden tools, kitchen appliances, sports equipment? There are websites for that. Want to borrow a frock? Ditto.
The sharing economy is huge: it could grow to £225 billion over the next decade. De Niro's words would resonate more with today's millennials than with their parents.
* The forces of law and order
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