i miss being excited about a new phone. i miss the anticipation of wondering what this new device will do that my previous one cannot. i miss waiting for things in the post, for my brain to forget i had ordered something and for it to feel like christmas day in the middle of april when a package appears at my doorstep. i miss holding cds and carrying my little cd player around the house with me when i was a child. i’ll never miss physical books because those will never go out of style. i miss things i never had, like a childhood game console, maybe the ones that were clear so you could see the inner workings of them. or ipods that came in all colours of the rainbow with the saturation turned right up.
i miss technology that seemed to remember that a human being would be holding them and not simply a user or a money sign, that phones and mp3 players and consoles would come in different shapes and sizes and colours like they had their own personality. phones that twisted like an acrobat to reveal a physical keyboard and hot pink phones that you instantly knew your best friend would love. and you’d look in the shop window and choose which item called to you the most because it looked like you and it would slot perfectly into your life.
now all of our phones look the same. all of our houses look the same. our closets are starting to resemble each other. even some of our speech patterns are getting eerily similar. phones come out and they look exactly like the previous one. people walk around like clones watching the same short-form content, reading the same five books recommended on rotation. it was murakami who said “if you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” and i think this applies to more than just books. are we losing ourselves to the ever-increasing homogenisation of our society?
new phones have better cameras, bigger screens and fancy new ai features that i’m almost certain no one really cares about. yet people still shell out nearly, if not more than, a month’s rent to make sure they have the newest device (all to try and use it less anyway). is this their own way of trying to stand out, even just for a few minutes? what if we didn’t give in to consumerism in this way and sought out products that genuinely appeal to us in one way or another, or even better, took what we already had and made it our own?
apart from a year or two during university, i’ve pretty much always had a samsung phone. i love a samsung thing. and at least i can say that they think a little bit out of the box when it comes to their range of phones (i’ve been waiting for them to do the thing with the cover screen on the z flip 7 for years). i remember having the s6 edge and being blown away by the curved edges of the screen. i remember getting my current phone, the z flip 4, and being blown even further away at the fact that this huge screen could fold in half. now that is innovation! i still love this phone, but a weight presses down on my shoulders a little more every time i see a new phone come out with a huge screen and no buttons or the same flatpack furniture being delivered to our doors or people rushing to buy the exact same white tank top just because they saw a kardashian wear it?
my current youtube feed has become a delightful place where people are modding ipods, decorating their tech with ungodly amounts of stickers and buying old consoles they never had as children or simply because they are more interesting than whatever is coming out today. i had to get my partner to literally deshell my nintendo switch just to make it pink. one of the buttons is still a little dodgy but i’d do it all over again to make that thing feel like mine. they’re buying second-hand phones i loved as a teenager and seeking out smaller companies that still care about design and purchasing phones you probably didn’t even know existed.
if you’ve been craving an actual flip phone, the samsung folder exists. if you miss your blackberry and physical querty keyboard, this phone exists (it’s not the cutest i’ll give you that) and if you want even more retro and you want that old fashioned number pad but you still want to have access to google maps, banking apps and you can’t bring yourself to live without a touchscreen, this phone exists too. in fact, i just bought myself one, and i haven’t felt so excited about something arriving in the post in years. i’m even having dreams about it.
and even though i most certainly won’t see anyone else walking around with this phone, that won’t stop me from making it mine. i have already mentally planned which stickers are going where and which launcher apps i’m going to use as, like most things in my life, i want it to be pink and cute, just like this one. i want the things around me to signal who i am. just like when we gather our friends who don’t know each other for birthdays and celebrations, and we can see the different aspects of our personality within each of them, the material things we surround ourselves with should serve the same purpose. otherwise we’re just like everyone else, and isn’t that just a little boring?
hang pictures up on your wall from niche finds in the charity shop. cover your phone in stickers only you would like. wear clothes that feel like you, not a kardashian. paint your plates purple. paint your walls blue. spray paint furniture. sew bright colours into your clothes. get iron-on patches and add them to your clothes. take a skirt and turn it into a top. take a mug and turn it into your dedicated paintbrush pot. doodle in your books and use sticky strips to remember the parts that touched you the most. buy the pink chair. buy the yellow rug. buy the green toaster. add stickers to your water bottle. save the snack wrapper from your trip to japan and frame it. by cds and display them. collect things and display them. hang your favourite t-shirt up on your wall like it’s the most coveted item in a boutique shop. make your nintendo switch pink. make it green. cover it in stickers so you don’t know what colour it is at all. don’t settle for apple or samsung. buy a tamagotchi. buy a nintendo ds. cover your journals in washi tape.
add a personal touch to your life. it’s yours, remember?
hello quiet readers, i hope you enjoyed today’s post. what do we think about this topic? are we losing the art of personalisation? is everything starting to morph into one? also let me know what you think about phones nowadays because i’m so interested in all these different smart-dumbphones coming out and the quiet move back to analogue/older tech. i’m so here for it.
i hope you enjoy the rest of your week! also pls do something special on friday for me as it’s my birthday! so i’m giving you an excuse to treat yourself hehe. i’ll also be giving you a little gift that day so watch out for a message on our chat!
okay i’ll see you next wednesday <3
I totally get what you mean, and I want to offer another route to the same end: remember that your things don’t have to define you. How much of today’s commerce runs on our desire to signal parts of our personalities to other people through our stuff? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a piece of tech is just a piece of tech, and sometimes a water bottle is just a water bottle (says the girl with stickers all over hers).
(Also please be careful painting your plates—seems like it might be safer to just thrift cute ones than accidentally eating paint ok bye 😘)
Companies have started making the most mundane products to appeal to the widest audiences possible. We need to seek out the authentic beyond what a corporation provides us.