Still Arriving Today

I woke up at 3:30 this morning, and before I had even fully gotten out of bed, I checked the tracking page to make sure my new iPhone was still arriving today. Nothing had happened overnight to suggest otherwise. There had been no severe weather, no transportation strike, no mysterious Apple-related emergency. Yesterday it said Friday. Today is Friday. Still, apparently some part of my brain needed confirmation before we could proceed with the day.

This is especially ridiculous because I spend a decent amount of my life thinking about wanting less. I meditate. I read Zen. I think about attachment and desire and how much suffering comes from constantly believing the next thing will finally make us happy. I understand intellectually that consumerism is designed to create little holes in us and then sell us increasingly expensive objects to fill them. I know all of this. But every three years or so, Apple announces a new phone and I become an absolute idiot.

I love cell phones. I always have.

For my 16th birthday in 1994, I got my first one. Calling it a “cell phone” by modern standards feels generous. It was mounted in the center of my car with a cord that made it look less like futuristic technology and more like someone had ripped the kitchen phone off the wall and installed it in the dashboard. I was driving into the country almost every night to see Mary Ann, and everyone agreed that having a phone in the car would be good for safety. Somehow that practical decision began a 32-year love affair with tiny electronic rectangles.

I’ve been there for almost all of it. I remember the first text message. I remember getting fast enough at T9 that I briefly possessed one of those completely useless skills that felt like a genuine human achievement at the time. I played Snake. I carried BlackBerrys and Sidekicks. I watched phones become touchscreens and cameras and music players and televisions and maps and eventually the place where a truly absurd percentage of modern life takes place. I went through Samsung and Apple and Pebbles and whatever other little technological cul-de-sacs briefly convinced me they were the future.

And I loved all of them.

Part of it is simply that I love watching technology evolve. I’m fascinated by the strange little steps between “phone bolted into a Buick” and “computer in my pocket that can shoot cinematic video, translate languages, identify plants, navigate across the planet, and allow me to argue with a stranger about Star Wars while sitting on the toilet.” When you’ve watched the whole thing unfold in real time, each new generation feels like another chapter in a story you’ve been reading since childhood.

So yes, every few years, despite all of my philosophical objections, I happily walk back into the glowing temple of consumerism and place my offering on the altar.

This year has been particularly bad. Since preorders opened, I have probably watched close to 100 hours of reviews, camera tests, unboxings, comparisons, breakdowns, and videos made by people who somehow found 27 minutes of material in the question, “Is the new button slightly better?” I already bought the phone. These videos cannot change the outcome. I am essentially watching extended advertisements for an object that is already traveling toward my house.

The entire family has gotten involved. Mary Ann is excited about the perfectly reasonable adult things, like better battery life. Jettie, unfortunately, appears to have inherited her Dada’s particular strain of technological enthusiasm. She has repeatedly asked me to leave the tracking page open so that we don’t miss any developments. I’m not exactly sure what she thinks might happen. Perhaps the truck will suddenly begin traveling at 400 miles per hour. Perhaps Tim Cook will personally parachute into Oklahoma holding our phones.

I understand her concern, though, because at 3:30 this morning I checked too.

And this is the part that makes today feel like more than just buying another gadget.

Thirty-two years ago, my parents gave me a phone because I was sixteen years old and driving away from home every night to see the girl I loved. Today, that girl is my wife, and we have an eight-year-old daughter who is just as excited about a new piece of technology as I was. For the first time, I’m going to sit beside her while she opens one and help her set it up from scratch.

That is the part I’m most excited about.

I’ll show her how to move everything over. We’ll set up the screen and the camera and whatever new little features Apple has invented for us to obsess over for approximately three days before they simply become “how phones work.” She’ll probably understand half of it faster than I do. We’ll take pictures. I’ll play with the new camera aperture. She’ll change something in the settings that I didn’t know could be changed. At some point Mary Ann will almost certainly look at the two of us and realize exactly what genetic mistake has been made.

And years from now, Jettie may remember this completely ordinary Friday in the same strange way I remember that enormous phone hanging from the dashboard of my car.

That’s what I think I sometimes miss when I reduce all of this to consumerism. Objects are just objects, but our relationships with them can become markers. They sit quietly in the background while our lives move through them. The phone I had at sixteen reminds me of driving country roads to see Mary Ann. The phones of my twenties contain early pictures of our life together. Later ones hold thousands upon thousands of photographs of our daughter growing up. They have been there for vacations, emergencies, friendships, arguments, music, writing, art, and millions of completely forgettable Tuesday afternoons.

The technology keeps changing while the people around it become the story.

Maybe wanting less doesn’t require pretending I don’t enjoy things. Maybe there’s a difference between believing an object will make me happy and recognizing that some objects are simply fun. I don’t expect enlightenment to emerge when I peel the little paper strip off the box this afternoon. I don’t believe my life will finally be complete because the camera has a better sensor. By Monday, it will mostly just be my phone.

But today? Today I’m going to enjoy the hell out of it. The tracking page still says it’s arriving.