When looking to buy any new device, I get sucked into a rabbithole of youtube reviews that talk about products from the point of view of the most technical and experienced person in that area. Looking for a new monitor? well, why not compare the TLA435-X with the TLA435-Y (both models are made up, but what’s up with screen names?); look, there is some minor difference in the blackest black in this specific quadrant of the screen when certain conditions are met. I guess I need to keep looking, otherwise, how will I enjoy the black in that area?!

You can spend hours watching and reading reviews to end up with choice paralysis at best, or an increase of budget of 200% at worst. In the end, after doing this several times and buying just one that didn’t look too ugly, I really never thought about it again. The monitors were fine. I don’t notice any of the things the reviewers mentioned.

So why is it that I want to buy a new 4k 160hz HDR OLED display now? Did my current screen break? It didn’t, but… Mine doesn’t have that!

This can be applied over any other tech product I bought over the past 15 years. Some of my oldest gear is still working great, and even if they don’t have all the latest bells and whistles, they fulfill their purpose. But I still get bombarded with new reviews, headlines about the latest and greatest. Look at this chart! (lower is better).

Entire youtube channels, blogs, and talks about what was released. A whole internet about comparing, benchmarking and analyzing every new product. Discussions in forums, social media, comparisons between brands, people taking sides. I have a mac M1, should I buy a mac M2? What about M3? I’ve heard M4 is out. It is honestly exhausting.

Enough! I’ve finally seen the light. I can break free from the constant upgrade cycle. I’ll keep using whatever I have that works until it breaks. That will be the end of it, right?

Except… Software is the same. Have you been using this program? Well, a new version just came out! Your desktop environment? That’s 6 months old! have you heard about this new one that has a tiling window manager? What about the new framework for making websites, I’ve heard people at Popular Company™ are actually using it and it increased their productivity by a million percent! Look at this graph 📊 (lower is better). Should I start using that new framework as well? Should I install the latest version of this critical note-taking software? (changelog: fixed bugs and general improvements).

There’s blogs about the latest updates, discussions about which programming language is the best (spoiler: the latest), what trends are showing up now in silicon valley, youtube videos comparing them all, benchmarks (lower is better), and… you get the idea.

After being grabbed by the ankle and pulled deeper and deeper into this madness, I see that I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to keep up with the trends. I don’t need to participate. I don’t have to buy the latest tech. I don’t need a new phone with the buttons and cameras in a slightly different position. I don’t need to use the Blood Drone operating system.

Tech is opt-in. And we can just use whatever it works. I haven’t seen any significant improvement in tech in a very long long time. Except for a few exceptions, most of the software today is marginally better (sometimes even worse) than what came before them. So I’ll do my best to avoid spending another minute in a benchmark video of a product I wasn’t even interested in buying in the first place.