After some thought and a considerable amount of meditation in the service of mindfulness, I have come to the conclusion that my yearning for gadgets is nothing more than a quest for novelty. I will lie in bed after dark looking at new stuff on my phone, checking specs, finding sources, comparing prices, and usually deciding that I either don’t need it enough or can’t afford it.

Which is ironic, because in other places and spaces it turns out that I prefer familiarity. Give me a subscription to Prime Video and I’ll happily watch all the James Bond films over again, instead of starting Project Hail Mary or The Sheep Detectives, which was the reason I got the subscription in the first place.

I suppose I enjoy imagining how different my life would be if I had something new: why, for a start, I’d write more issues of my newsletter if I got a Freewrite Alpha. Only I can’t really justify the price of it, and I can just as easily see myself NOT using the thing and then regretting the money that I could have, no doubt, put towards the new iPhone I dearly need, seeing as my current phone is nearly three years old. Only it turns out that my need isn’t quite as dire as I thought, because I can’t bring myself to sacrifice the larger screen for the smaller one on the newer phone I would get, tempted as I am by the ProMotion display. I’ve been assured by marketing and reviewers that a screen with a higher 120Hz refresh rate will immediately change my life for the better, and I’ll never go back. Only, seeing as I haven’t ever had one, I don’t quite understand what it is that I’d be missing.

There are days where I feel quite alone, convinced that no one would understand the elaborate knots I tie myself into alternately talking myself into and out of imagined extravagance or virtuous prudence, and how afterwards I am forced to watch James Bond thwart yet another villain’s world-ending plans to recover from the fatigue. I could, I’m sure, talk myself into believing the opposite - that people would understand instantly, if only I told them about it, perhaps in another issue of my very sporadic and undoubtedly indulgent newsletter.

How I’d write it is utterly beyond me, since I don’t have a new gadget to type it on - I suppose I could lie in the dark and type it up in the Notes app on my three-year-old phone.

(Who’d have thought that after years and heads of Microsoft Word I’d find that writing on a plain text editor to be much less annoying and also much more fruitful? This reminds me of reading all the marketing materials and reviews of the Remarkable Paper Pure saying how close it gets to the experience of writing on paper, and then realising that I could go one better simply by picking up my 2026 Moleskine planner - nothing gets closer to the experience of writing on paper than writing on paper.)

Which is to say that the lesson in all of this is that after removing as many impediments as possible, butt-in-seat, pen-to-paper (or, in this case, fingers-to-glass) is the way to get things done, and the pursuit of the next best no-doubt imaginary thing can completely obscure the very real and present pleasures that can be had right here and right now.

Unless, of course, you prefer to retreat into the territory of the tried and true and go back to watching Moonraker for the umpteenth time.