The Thing About Additional Options...
No, I'm not talking about the "Options" of financial markets... read on!
We live in a world filled with novelty and new inventions. Every time I turn around, there seems to be something "new and shiny" coming to market.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I find little reason to embrace new trends unless they substantially offer an improvement over "what already is."
In my world, that implies factors like actually saves time or actually makes life easier, or saves me money. Absent one - or all - of these, why would I be interested in changing the way I do/use things?
Alternately, I could pose the question of "what problem in my life does this solve or mitigate... that I previously did not have an answer for?"
Of course, the marketing world considers me a "lousy consumer" because I could care less about "ego-based reasons" for pretty much everything in my life. In truth, the whole angle that I am somehow "out" unless I have/do something sounds more cultish to me than it sounds appealing.
Going back a very long way, it was a primary reason why Apple products never made it very far onto my radar screen. That, and the fact that when I would ask dedicated Apple users about the functional capabilities of their tech, they'd get oddly defensive, almost in a "one does not question Apple" sort of way.
To this day, the only Apple product I own is an aging iPad I have, primarily because it's needed for my Square point-of-sale system we use when we take our artwork to outside events and festivals. It's a decent — albeit overpriced — piece of technology, but definitely not enough so to get excited.
Of course, many people's argument here would be that I "don't fit the desired target customer and user profile."
Useless Push Technology?
Which leads me to consider the seemingly dominant approach of (particularly technological) innovation: is it driven by a "push" approach ("we invented a cool solution, let's go find a problem... or even CREATE one") or is an actual "pull" approach ("we saw a problem, and now we have created a solution") still relevant in out world?
Sometimes it feels like more and more of the world is made up of window dressing and vaporware that doesn't actually move anything or anyone forward in their lives...
Maybe it's not all that new... even when I was a teenager, I remember my dad talking about "products being made with no other purpose than to be SOLD."
It's a bit thin, if you ask me...
Maybe the thing that worries/bothers me about it is this subtext that society has reached a saturation point where there is more and more "selling air" primarily with the purpose of keeping the economic engine moving forward... in its seemingly eternal growth cycle.
I need one running car, and one working phone and one place to live and I don't need any of these things to be "improved" to do things besides their fundamental functions.
In some ways, it reminds me a bit of those combination stereo-record player-cassette player-radios- all in one things from back in the 1980s... clever, but if one thing broke, the whole unit was sort of useless...
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Created at 2024-09-25 21:58 PST
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Embedded electronics with web connections in numerous products requiring none of these features to work, but which now don't work when the added clutter fails.
Boots and shoes with packages and advertisements loaded with marketeering jargon to make a shoddy product sound exciting and capable.
Please buy into this new subscription service sending clutter to your home, or even just a new digital streaming service, and maybe sometimes you'll get something you need, but mostly it's a steady paycheck for some corporation syphoned from your savings monthly.