Nothing New Under the Sun

This morning, without so much as a by-your-leave, my Yahoo! homepage changed its entire format, disconcerting and confusing me before I’d even taken two sips of my tea. As usual, this change has been done under the guise of New! and Better! and numerous other exclamatory claims that I find myself less than convinced of. These claims are everywhere. Every time I turn on my computer, it seems, some program wants to update to the latest newer and better software (you know—8.1 instead of 8.0). I have been doggedly ignoring the prompts from iTunes for weeks now. The last time I updated their software, all it did was change all of my song listings from a neat, easily (and quickly) scrollable list of names and titles to pictures of all the album covers. Now it takes three times as long to scroll down and I have to go through the extra step of clicking on the album cover to get to the songs. And despite all the boasts about how many great new features I’d be able to enjoy with the updated software, I have experienced absolutely no improvement in my iPod experience. It’s the same old same old, only now with new annoyances.

This is not to say that I am a complete Luddite (or neo-Luddite, which is probably the most appropriate term—honestly, even the terms require newness!), although I must confess that I do have strong Luddite tendencies. I recently bought one of those netbooks that have been heavily advertised lately, although I didn’t even notice the advertisements until after I bought it and my reasons for buying one have absolutely nothing to do with what the cool, hip, or hot trend is right now. For all I know, netbooks are already so five minutes ago. What did convince me to get one was the ease with which it would allow me to write and have access to the internet while traveling. I was also attracted to the built-in camera and microphone that made it possible to have a video Skype call with my nieces and nephews this past weekend.

So now and then new is good—even great. What I get miffed about and am practicing my own small resistance to is the strident onslaught of “new” and “improved” that is so overwhelming and inescapable that the pull to slide into passivity and just accept it can be almost impossible to resist. I have to be careful, though, not to slide into the opposite end of the passive spectrum and just automatically say “no” all the time either. What is required, I am beginning to realize, is an active evaluation of whatever is being offered and an assessment of what it is I value: is this truly going to improve my quality of life? Does what I currently have really need improvement/replacement or am I happy with it the way it is? What, if anything, is being sacrificed or discarded to acquire or make way for the “new"?

The latter two questions are the ones I can most easily forget to ask myself. When I do feel an urge to go “new” with something, there is often an underlying fear driving my decision, as I imagine there is for some other people as well—a fear of what we might be missing out on if we don’t get the latest and supposedly greatest. Everyone else is getting or has [fill in the blank]—what if we get left behind or left out or suffer some kind of lack? And it’s usually pretty difficult to think about something being sacrificed or discarded when you’re caught up in the heady, early-days infatuation with the shiny, pretty, new whatever it is. But something new will always take the place of something else or occupy some space of its own in your life, which means something else has to give way. In some cases that’s a necessary and good thing, and some of those old things need a good purge and the money is well spent. But not always, and even perhaps not often.

So while I might not be able to stop Yahoo! from changing my homepage, and while it might be just plain silly for me to resist updating my Adobe flash player, I am still going to do my best to stem the tide of "new" flowing at me and make decisions on my own timetable and according to my own vision of a quality life. I’ll probably still get swept up in the waters now and then, but hopefully the boulders of common sense and a life that transcends consumerism will pop up now and then on my way downstream so I can grab hold of them and catch my breath.