About a year ago, on a February night, I was walking back home from the gym when I got robbed at gun point. I was lucky because I only take my iPod or iPhone to the gym. That day I had forgot to plug my iPhone and the battery was low so I decided to take my old iPod classic. I remember saving money to buy it as a teenager (not that long ago) and going to the store and paying for it with my hands shaking. I got my iPod and the experience was amazing, I took my iPod everywhere for the following 3 years. Then I started using my new iPod shuffle that was smaller and more practical, then the iPhone came and I got used to carrying it alone. My iPod was lost in one corner and rarely used. I started using it as portable hard drive to transport large files to friends houses.
When my iPod was gone I immediately started thinking on how much money I had lost. The price was high and right now I could buy a netbook with that amount of money. But it had been so long ago and my iPod was not a part of my life any longer. The feeling of lost lasted about two hours, compared to the three or four months of paranoia looking at all sides when walking alone at nights.
The insight I got from this experience is that a product has a soul. In this case the soul is the experience it gives you. When you buy a product, a new gadget, laptop, tea bag or anything, you are buying the experience of using it. I payed 400 dollars for the chance to walk with music, to run with music, to be able to have all the music I owned in one place and always with me. I didn’t pay for the iPod itself, as beautifully designed as it was. We buy products for the experience and discard them long before their life-cycle has ended because we are seeking for a better experience.
Sometimes we look to find the better experience without noticing that our latest investment in a experience could be just as useful as the new one we had. I get the feeling that marketing has turned products that are mean to improve our experience in a small amount into TOTAL REVOLUTIONS. There have been some TOTALLY REVOLUTIONARY products out there, like the iPhone or iPod when they first came out. But the “incremental improvements” we get every year are not helping our consumption patterns. I would’ve loved to have video in my iPhone, but not at the cost of having to buy a new phone.
Yesterday Tara Hunt tweeted from one of the TED talks going on in California right now, about how happiness doesn’t increase when the income rises higher than US$60,000 a year. This relates to my feeling towards my iPod and other stuff I have in that we always tend to look for the newer, better experience in order to be more happy with our product, to be able to show it to our friends and yet we later find out there’s other product that can do something slightl
Spending money in things you’ll need is good, but so many times we spend money in things we don’t really need and that does harm to our finances and the planet. For example, buying a new iPhone after a year would not have been a good decision unless you were a street reporter. Video and faster processing is good. Does it changes the experience radically? No.
My iPod hadn’t stopped working, yet it was in a corner without soul. My iPod was a valuable product that was still able to play lot’s of music yet I bought a new one to replace it and left it there. I spent an extra 200 dollars that could’ve been spent in other things such as books, useful gadgets, a date or given to charity. I discarded my iPod in my mind long before it was useless. Sometimes marketing pushes us in to getting the latest product and it’s ok to want it.
Some of us consider ourselves early adopters in lot’s of things and we always want those products. The problem I see with getting them is that we are often spending money we could save for later in the latest gadget only to get a small amount of happiness and then lose it again when the new one comes. This generates an addiction to having the latest that’s unhealthy for our wallet and our planet.
So the next time you’re thinking on buying a new gadget evaluate if you’ll use the advanced functionalities, if the products you have will or will not cover your needs and if the money could be spent in something that will yield a better benefit for you. Do a list of all your gadgets and imagine you lost them all. Which ones will you miss the most? Those are the ones you need the most and that have made a bigger impact on you. The rest is probably stuff you can dispose or avoid buying more of. I guarantee that those savings could be invested in your future and could produce so much less plastic trash for the planet.
