Materialism

Jockeystreet and his wife recently purchased a TiVo. He reflected on the significance of this product:

The acquisition of this particular material convenience brought more stress than relaxation, more difficulty than ease, more anger than pleasure. The convenience of being able to record a show without using a tape, and occasionally being able to pause a live show in order to run to the kitchen for a glass of orange juice, cost us hundreds of dollars, a dozen hours, and a good deal of stress. We lost some of the conveniences we already had.

Some of this, of course, stems from the fact that neither of us has any technical know-how to speak of. A fifteen year old kid raised on iPods and laptops and plasma tvs most likely could have set the thing up in a half hour with none of the difficulties we had. But the TiVo, to me, is sort of an exaggeration of our everyday relationship to things, to acquisitions and accomplishments. It's a clear illlustration of the unhealthy way we view stuff.

Related is Daniel Gross' deliciously savage critique of Anya Kamenetz's Generation Debt.