Living in a materialistic world

I bought myself a brand new 64 gigabyte (GB) iPod Touch for Christmas. The 64GB iPod holds approximately fifteen thousand songs.

That’s about forty to fifty days of music.

It can connect to the Internet and browse Facebook. There exist about one hundred thousand downloadable applications.

Now, I bought myself this paragon of technological magnificence to replace my ageing 32GB iPod Video.

I was attached to my Video, with it’s archaic click wheel technology and heavily scratched stainless steel backplate, which at this point more resembles brushed aluminum.

I’ve had it for almost four years now; it’s been returned under warranty twice, it’s been stolen out of my car and looted from my jacket.

I did all I could to return it to my music deprived grasp.

We’ve been through a lot together, and it hasn’t exactly aged well. It’s in two pieces, held together only by its internal components, and there is a lot of damage to the LCD screen – long story short it still works and is still the brain and DJ to my car’s sound system.

Now, this reads kind of like an obituary but in all reality its just as functional as the day I bought it.

I’ve moved on to bigger and better things I guess, the thinner, sleeker, touch-screen iPod won me over but I can’t help feeling a strange tinge of guilt.

Why should I feel guilty? After all, it’s just stuff. I contributed to the movement of merchandise through the economy in a recession, I deserve a pat on the back if anything, right?

Really, I think what we have here is a classic case of an inanimate object becoming something greater than the sum of its parts.

After all, think of all the stuff that the iPod can bring. No more tapes and disks, the iPod is the hive-mind of your musical delights.

Think about what you can tell about a person from looking at their music library and playlists – probably more than you could from palm reading.

When my iPod was gone, either by malfunction or thievery, I felt like listening to that song “Ain’t no Sunshine” by Bill Withers but couldn’t. I had no iPod.

I think it’s the same feeling people get with their first car. The most valuable things we own act like extensions of our personality.

Things make us feel good and are what we miss when we are without them.

However, because it’s just stuff, chances are we toss it aside when the next best thing comes along.

We might even trade it in for chump change so we can get it sooner, or cheaper. We throw it away for the 2010 model with chrome accents and heated leather seats or the touch-screen high capacity iPod.

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