The Next New Thing

There's always something new. It might be the new Mac Book, iPhone, or $200 shoes. Now, here's something that I've been thinking about in my own life and why I do what I do and why I have what I have. So sit back because this is about to get pretty real.

I was raised in a family that knew they wanted financial stability before they even started a family. A father who had a solid job with a steady income and same with my mother. They never wanted us to worry about weather or not we would have food on the table for dinner. They never wanted us to not be able to go to college because we couldn't afford it. They prepared for that long before we were even born.

So I grew up pretty damn lucky. All three of us - myself and my two brothers - all went to Catholic school. We always had breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We always had a roof over our heads with lights, food, and water. We never really had anything to worry about.

But here's what I've been thinking about: growing up, my dad seemed to always need the new thing. The iPhone, the Mac... flash forward to iPhone 7 and new MacBook - more guitars that we actually use, and more sound equipment than we know how to actually operate. I started to think of why that was,
I enlisted in the United States Marine Corps the year after my Senior year in High School. I had gotten used to living with what we absolutely needed and I actually liked it. Going through training, there was always something new happening. Always a different situation always different people. Something new every day. But when I would come home it would be different. People would still be doing the same things they were doing when I left. When I would ask "what did I miss?" They'd tell me I'd missed absolutely nothing. And I believed it. Because they were stuck on the same schedule every day. Wake up-- food --- work--food -- work---food---sleep. Repeat.

That's when I started to realize why we'd go after the new thing. That new thing in our life gave us that little adrenaline rush. That change that we crave came in that physical object that we just spent a part of our savings on.

I had that new change in life. A new way of looking at things. Instead of going out and changing yourself, learning new things, and experiencing life - people find that fix in the "next new thing". That gives them a reason to sit back and watch the world instead of actually living in it.