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Archives from 2002-2006

The new iPhone became available for preorder and my coworkers were chatting back and forth about wait times and problems with the online ordering process and everyone was very intent on having a brand new phone in their hands the day it ships, June 24. Our company pays for a new iPhone every calendar year so I could have been ordering mine too but I managed to stop and ask myself: is anything wrong with my current phone?

No. My phone is fine. It makes calls and it talks to the internet and it takes photos and jesus, it’s fine.

I am trying, lately, to step out of the cycle of want. Shoes makeup clothes hair products skincare bags gadgets stuff crap things. I’m trying to look at our current situation and see past the discomfort and stress to a deeper message about values and how happiness isn’t tied to objects.

I’m thinking about the things that are meaningful to me and how they are experiences or interactions, moments and conversations and feelings, and they don’t come in a box and I don’t need a new one every year to supplant the old one.

My boy Riley is obsessed with getting new toys, it’s all about tearing something out of a package and playing with it for the first time. A day later, its charm is diminished, it’s tossed in the toy box with everything else. I don’t know how to help him see that it’s a broken system, always wanting new things. That you’re custom-designing your own dissatisfaction when you live this way. I get it, after all. I like new things too. I like to open the package and touch something for the first time too.

I’m thinking how my job has always been to drive the cycle, to convince people they need new things, and how what I really want, instead, is to have someone tell me I made a difference. That I helped.

It’s all tied together somehow, lately. All of it in a complicated tangle and I know there’s something underneath that I need to get to. I don’t know what to do to make progress other than listen and think.

And for now, not buy a new phone.

Money worries, future uncertainty, career angst, frustrating inability to separate personal values from creature comforts, hour-long commutes, fear of failure, spousal disagreements, parenting challenges, feelings of isolation, constant sugar addiction cycle, school stresses . . . meet Monday evening, 5-7 PM.

Monday wins.

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