I can’t stand my chair anymore
Now, after yesterday’s dark post, here’s a post about a chair.
Living in the age of excessive consumerism definitely has its sweet side.
On one hand, I have endless options to fully enjoy my passions and hobbies. If I like something and it’s popular enough, there’s the book, the movie adaptation, the cereal, the T-shirt, and an infinite amount of merchandise related to that thing I love so much.
But on the other hand, my soul desperately screams for a break. Because in order to consume all of that and show the world that I’m the biggest fan of X thing, I have to work nonstop to get the means to CONSUME AND KEEP CONSUMING AND CONSUME without rest.
Everywhere. At home lying in bed scrolling through the Chinese shopping app, in the park when the esquites vendor walks by, at the mall when I see a piece of clothing I “need”, during my downtime scrolling through the “educational” content I enjoy so much, and so on and so on.1
You like coffee? Why not buy the coffee machine, sign up for a barista course, and order that imported Vietnamese blend from Amazon to see if it’s really as strong as they say?
We have every option imaginable available to us, with the ease of just a few taps in a perfectly designed app that makes it effortless to consume whatever we want.
And I’m not the first person to say it or the first to realize it, but becoming more aware of this made me question my consumption habits and put a stop to it once and for all (after spending a considerable amount of money on many games I honestly wasn’t going to play in the short or medium term).2
(So why did I buy them?)
But it’s not just about money, it’s also about time. The time I spend hunting for deals, the time I dedicate to researching something before buying it, and the time that disappears on YouTube watching another essay about something I honestly don’t care that much about.
So I decided to stop. To enjoy what I have and stop buying shit for no reason. I didn’t become a minimalist, or frugal, or anything like that; I just stopped.
Now every time I feel the urge to buy something, I look at what I already have and try to enjoy it.
My mouse is falling apart, but it has my fingerprints all over it and still works wonderfully.
The backpack I’ve had since university is losing all its color and the design doesn’t fit me anymore, but it works, it’s useful when I need a backpack, and the sentimental value is immeasurable.
The headphones whose ear pads started peeling—and that I almost replaced because of it—ended up feeling brand new with a pair of generic replacement pads.
The chair I hate so much, with the armrest eaten by one of my cats, the seat completely flat, and the height that slowly sinks until I’m almost touching the floor, still works.
It looks bad, it could be more comfortable, I could buy a new one and it would be a justified investment.3 But it still works. It has my essence and my cat’s teeth marks on it. I’ve spent countless hours here doing dozens of things, including writing for this blog.
It’s mine—more mine than any other chair in the world.
Now I enjoy using everything I have as much as possible, and I’ve found a lot of pleasure in doing that. In watching things slowly wear down from use until they simply can’t anymore.
And my things die happy because they fulfilled their purpose with dignity; because that’s what they were created for.