Forever Young: Growing Up in the Streaming Era

“You have a generation that is renting more than they’re owning. When you do not own something, why would you defend it?”  – Charlie Kirk

It was a rare moment of empathy in political discourse and a glimpse into the deeper malaise affecting millions, but especially young people. While Kirk was speaking about homes, wages, and debt, his words echo across a broader spectrum of life in 2025; from housing to media, jobs to identities, assets to attention. 

Mine is a generation not only priced out of the housing market, but also locked out of cultural ownership. And if we own nothing, not even our playlists, our shows, our libraries, or our identities online, why would we invest in a system that clearly wasn’t built for us? 

The Credit-Centric Subscription-Tied Forever Rent Economy

Millennials and Gen Z are drowning in debt and renting apartments, cars, software, entertainment, and even clothes. 

Ownership has been replaced with access. On paper that sounds good, but access is conditional and can be revoked. Companies have been specifically rewriting words like “own” and “buy” in the terms and conditions. Content you thought you purchased can be permanently deleted for unspecified terms violations, and your ability to take up recourse is as much under threat.

Subscriptions act like taxes, silently auto-renewing while we try to budget our lives against the bigger forces of inflation and recession cycles since 2008. 

After a long day dealing with all of that, you want to come home to your rented apartment and enjoy something that feels like yours. Oh but wait…Netflix removed that show you were looking forward to watching. You’ll have to rent it on Amazon Prime now, and there will be ads.

Media and Culture: Renting Our Reality

We don’t own our movies or music anymore. Everything is “on demand” but also off-limits, a licensing agreement away from being pulled.

Your saved playlists on Spotify? Gone if you cancel.

Your TV shows on Netflix? Disappear in an instant.

By holding consumers hostage with subscriptions, media companies and service providers aren’t incentivized to produce quality content or provide quality service. Their audience is already captured.

The under-30 crowd came of age in the post-subscription era. Millennials may still have a few throwback CDs, but by the time Gen-Z had ears to hear iTunes already reigned supreme. They entered high school with a Spotify account, meaning if they want to go back and listen to the music that defined their youth, that they spent time collecting and curating, they have to keep that Spotify account for the rest of their lives. This generation can’t build libraries, only watchlists. Without cultural permanence, how do we form identity, community, or nostalgia? 

What does it mean to grow up never having the right to keep anything? Not your home, not your tools, not your art, not your voice?

Political & Psychological Consequences

When you own nothing, you have no stake in the system.

People stop voting, stop talking, stop caring, stop building, stop fighting to fix it. They become renters in all areas of life–including beliefs and identities. They don’t participate in or defend the system because they intuitively sense: it doesn’t belong to them. Culturally, it’s the same: if Netflix cancels your favorite show, or Disney launches another half-assed remake, your reaction isn’t protest–it’s numbness. Shrug. Move on.

At best, this attitude presents as drift and distraction. At worst, and at nihilism’s most severe,  people start wanting to watch the world burn. This is what Charlie Kirk understood about young people. No ownership = no allegiance.

ENTER STREEVO: Restoring the Right to Keep What’s Yours

We believe in ownership–of media, of culture, of memory. Our product isn’t just a way to record shows–it’s a symbolic and practical stand against the “renter-by-default” economy. We want to empower people to build libraries, not keep signing up for shelves they don’t control. 

This isn’t nostalgia–it’s about future-proofing the ability to own a slice of the culture you live in.