joy cometh with the morning

Not Buying It

Photo of a leaf caught in a spider's web against the sky

Call me Odysseus, ‘cause I’m a man of many devices. At the beginning of the year I had managed to accumulate:

You get the point. It was a lot of things. I’d had reasons for buying all of these, and some of them I’d had for ages, but after a certain point I was forced to admit many of the items were basically unnecessary. Each one is meant to solves a problem—and some of them do, in a way, but ultimately not really, and I felt like they were weighing me down so I got rid of most of them.

It’s possible that this is what maturing looks like, but despite wanting one I am not going to spend too much money on the latest exciting device that promises to solve all the problems of how I relate to computers. The Daylight DC-1 looks really nice and basically exactly what I would’ve described if you’d asked me what my ideal device was. It has a display that isn’t actually e-ink but has many of the best properties of e-ink but with an actually-good refresh rate, nice amber backlight etc. For me it would sit somewhere between the BOOX Onyx, the Remarkable and the iPad. It would do a whole bunch of things I would really like.

But here’s the thing: while it would be absolutely smashing to have a tablet that’s “less distracting”, I have come to realise that the fundamental problem I have is not a lack of devices, or a lack of a certain kind of device. Equally, it's not that I’m surrounded by devices—or at least, not just that I’m surrounded by devices. My problem is that I’m me, and have a condition that causes me to fall down holes of stimulation- and novelty-seeking even when it’s to my detriment, and this applies not just to my behaviour but to my meta-behaviour; to the way I think about how I relate to my devices. I can sit there imagining how cool and different life would be if I had one, how it'd make me the person I *really *am, the one I want to be, the one who can just resolve to sit down and read rather than having their brain roll a dice beforehand to determine whether that ability will be granted to me.

The DC-1 might be the best thing in the world, but it would not be able to solve the true problem I have, which is the true problem that pretty much everyone has: wherever you go, there you are. My brain keeps coming back to it over and over again—I’m writing this at least in part to exorcise this desire for now. I may well, one day, buy one. At some point I may feel the threshold has been passed. But it's not today! Today, I can instead do the slow, tedious work of helping myself cope better with my boredom, and then just suck it up and use the devices I have which do all the things I'm after anyway.