Device

I just quit my job, which means it's time to spend money. Here are some of my proudest recent purchases.

• 31 lbs of Arm & Hammer brand cat litter
• a copy of The Hunger Games, brand new, which I have now finished and deem very good
• 2 lbs of well-aged white cheddar, also very good
• subscriptions to not one but two magazines
• a fucking iPod Touch

The shoulder strap was $30
extra but worth every penny

I have never before owned a portable media player. Wikipedia says that is the correct terminology, by the way. I still say "MP3 player", which probably puts me in the same category as older people (such as my mother) who call the refrigerator the "icebox". Personally, I am all for "iPod" becoming a fully genericized word, a la "Kleenex" or "Thermos" or, apparently, "Heroin". I'm not rooting for the continued supremacy of Apple -- I just like it when that kind of thing happens. On a related note, I also like how far the word "phone" has evolved in the past ten years, and I hope that in 100 years, when first-world humans are all equipped from birth onward with a personal, sentient computer that is simultaneously an inseparable part of your individual Self and also your closest lifelong friend, a device that effortlessly augments all mental functions and mediates every interaction with the world around you until the day you die, that it's still called a "phone" and people will have no idea why unless they happen across a Wikipedia page on its etymology.

Five years ago, it was already a little surprising that someone of my demographic didn't own a MP3 player. Three years ago, it had become genuinely strange. It's now June 2012, and the only people in America who don't own some kind of portable electronic device capable of playing music are institutionalized, incarcerated, or infants, and there are probably significant numbers of individuals in all three of those categories who do. I'm like a 16th century German monk who's been stupidly plugging away at page after page of a hand-copied Gospel while every day donkeys pull carts past my abbey window piled high with newly printed Gutenberg bibles. I still haul around big bulky binders of CDs in my car, like illuminated manuscripts with broken zippers.

Why did I wait so long to buy an iPod? I've had to think hard about the answer.

It's not that music doesn't matter to me. It does -- I like music and want it around. Clearly it's not an audio quality issue, because very little of my music is on vinyl (although now that I think about it, it would have been funny if I'd told people that that was my rationale: "have it your way, man, but that iPod crap just don't match the warmth of scuffed aluminum coated polycarbonate plastic -- and it never will"). I'd like to say that I've long been a critic of Apple's labor practices overseas, but that's not true. I'm sure Apple's labor practices overseas are nauseating and atrocious, but that is something that I am choosing not to think about right now because I have the luxury of choosing not to think about it.

The best answer I can give is that I don't like spending money and buying an iPod always seemed like an indulgence, not a necessity. That's what I've told myself. But the truth is that answer doesn't hold water either, because I regularly indulge in things that aren't necessities. I drink, often at bars. I go to live shows. I eat succulent foods. I can hear the cash register noises and see the numbers tick upwards as I contemplate all the money I've spent on non-necessary items since the year began. Hell, I could have probably bought an iPod with the amount I spend on eating out in an average month, at least since I started working a decent-paying job.

I've got to admit that the key difference is in how these purchases feel. If I go to a restaurant with some friends and pay $40 on a meal for K and myself, it feels like a treat. We're having a good time, we're living life or whatever. It's an indulgence that's transient by nature. If I skip those rare meals a few times and instead save my cash to buy an iPod, it feels like I'm buying an expensive thing. It's a thing for me to enjoy, to horde and fondle in a dark cave beneath the Misty Mountains. And crucially, it sticks around to remind me of my purchase. Hmm, this seems like it's becoming an argument against restaurants more than it is an argument in favor of iPods.

The bottom line is that I didn't want to have an expensive thing like an iPod because I have always wanted to be someone who doesn't want expensive things. And mostly, I don't. It wasn't like I was secretly drooling over my friends' iPods all these years; I didn't really care about owning one. I guess that's because I didn't want its middle class luxury sheen coming off on my clothes. Call me self-righteous and foolish; you'd be right. But we all do this, shaking our heads in private sanctimonious condemnation of neighbors with something we deem irredeemably indulgent. Whether we're the guy in a Corolla disgusted by the guy in the Lexus, or the guy in the Lexus revolted by the guy with his own driver, or the guy panhandling on the corner flipping off that smug asshole in his comfortable Corolla, we are constantly judging others for the amount of purchasing power they command. Are there legitimate values in there somewhere, or is it just base envy? It wasn't until iPods multiplied to fill the pockets of almost everyone I know that I could finally feel OK about finally getting one. Is there a gray area between indulgence and necessity, and is there a name for something that falls in that space? Or are "indulgence" and "necessity" artificial categories -- is it all just a question of what you want and having the money to get it?


Whatever the case, the lesson here is that consumption in our world always has a psychological dimension. Purchases are never just about rational choice and maximization. They're about who you're trying to choose to be. Even in not buying an iPod -- in choosing not to consume -- I was making a choice based in the logic of the identity marketplace. Or is this just a bullshit way of seeing the world foisted upon us in college by academics who need to invent theories to give themselves jobs?

In conclusion, owning this iPod is really fun. I can listen to all my favorite songs!