I Outsourced My Life to Subscriptions

One day, two people I knew separately started raving to me about their Stitch Fix clothing subscriptions. “Everything matches,” one said. “I don’t have to coordinate my outfits,” said the other. Then, during a jog one morning, I noticed that three of my neighbors’ recycling bins were overflowing onto the street with cardboard from meal kits. There seemed to be one for each day of the week. There’d been a disturbance in the zeitgeist. A quick search on the internet confirmed the revolution: Beauty influencers were all suddenly rating makeup baskets. A website called Cratejoy promised a monthly box for all hobbies and passions. And Amazon Prime was advertising the Carnivore Club Gift Box, featuring its Jerky & Meat Sticks Sampler—for $55 a month. A new era of subscriptions had dawned.

There was a previous era of subscriptions, more humdrum, more quotidian, that I hadn’t quite awakened from. These involved my own recurring deliveries: the lowliest personal hygiene consumable—toilet paper—and the highest form of home entertainment—cinema—from the same place: Amazon Prime. How much better could life be if I let the robots shop for me?