Rent.

I used to rent, in fact I come from a long line of European heritage who rented all their lives. My grandmother still lives and rents the same apartment she has lived in for 80 years. I bring this up not from a real estate angle of houses getting so expensive no one born after 1990 will ever own one but from the view we are heading into a rental cycle for all things useful and some not so.

Consider renting as the new ideology for our future to lighten our economic load and save the planet by shrinking our carbon footprint. Aside from real estate rental, we could expand our thinking to our everyday lives and start unbundling our acquisition and collection mentality. We certainly wouldn't need the storage space we need now and the majority of what we needed to rent can be found on the net so our free time, the most precious commodity, could be increased. Live with less is the new cry for freedom from the next generation.

One of the latest battle for minds and wallets concerns e-tablets and often rages around the publishing world and who has the best E reader. A recent visit to a Borders bookstore informed me that their "Nook" reader will have the latest of everything available to buy and read. So along with the Kindle, iPad, Sony reader and countless other devices we will be marketed at, until we choose our new direction in literary indulgence. I like books and I like to occasionally recommend and lend them to friends, something difficult to do with new technology because I don't want to hand over my iPad to someone for a week while they read the latest thriller I've downloaded. So my first suggestion to the Amazons of this e-commerce rental world is why not set up a library instead and I'll rent the books online, hopefully for significantly less than the buying rate. Why have a tablet with 100s of books stored on it, especially if you aren't going to lend them or your tablet out?

We already have other areas of entertainment like DVDs where we are comfortable renting but can't we free ourselves from the trip to the store? I can't remember the last time I visited a video store (why do we still call them that, when we have been watching DVDs for years) because I rent all my movies through the mail and eventually we'll rent the latest releases via broadband (hope someone from the government is listening).

Living and working in the city we find less and less reasons to own a car except for the visits to Grandma's house. GoGet car share gives you the flexibility to have a car when you want it, even if it's for only a couple of hours to visit Grandma. Why own when you can walk around the block to a specified parking spot and swipe your way into a new car and return it to the same spot when you are finished.

There are sites in the US like Zilok and Snapgoods where people rent out everything from lawnmowers, where do you store them in your apartment, to home appliances, cameras for your holiday along with works of art to healthcare. It is a system built on trust, much like social media and asks why you should own everything when someone else can do it for you and you only need rent it for the amount of time you require it? All of sudden you have a culture of abundance because there is nothing you cannot have, at least for a period of time.

Sure there will always be items I want to own, who's going to rent out underwear but why not have the best of everything else when you need it on a rental basis? Sure cars and entertainment seem the obvious choices but the more we learn to live without, the more we have access to everything. Along with the global outsourcing trend, renting everything could be the next e-commerce wave to wash over us.

I have one more suggestion and that is to look at renting jobs. There are jobs that look interesting to me, like Donald Trump's real estate job but I don't want to spend decades getting to that position, so why not rent some Donald time and see if you like it. Wonder what his rental rates would be?

For the final word, Kevin Kelly from Wired magazine, "access is better than ownership".