Title: Paring down and chilling out
Music du jour: various mp3's and Phantom Regiment Classics,
Volume Two
I'm thinking today about paradigm shifts and Zen. I know that sounds strange. Bear with me for a minute here.
I live in Denver, which as you may or may not know, is in the middle of what is probably the biggest economic boom in its history. The tech industry is moving east from Silicon Valley, and innumerable tech companies are landing here -- Sun among them, which is who I work for. The end result is there are herds and herds of well-to-do yuppies clustering in the outlying suburbs -- places like Westminster, Broomfield, Thornton, Northglenn -- even Boulder is being affected by the influx of young tech workers. Mostly they're yuppies in their twenties or early thirties -- some have young families, some are single. But they all have two things in common: They work in white collar jobs, and they have money. Lots of it.
Me and my boy fall into the lower bracket of this demographic segment, but that doesn't exempt us from falling prey to the most common ailment that plagues geeks our age who have money for the first time: the almost manic urge to buy up everything new and trendy. I'm speaking specifically of tech toys here, but it's not limited to electronic gear. When my friends and I graduated from college, I can't tell you how many of them went out and bought a brand-new car first thing after they got a job and an apartment. In the rosy-cheeked glow of being out on their own for the first time, most of them didn't stop to consider that in the space of a month, they'd just sunk themselves over $20,000 in debt -- and they hadn't even bought a house yet. Fortunately for my finances, I was still living at home right after graduation and delivering pizzas. I didn't like it at the time, but I couldn't afford to buy into the money madness that my friends were experiencing, which turned out to be a good thing. It's the same thing with the geeks moving to Denver. They have money now, and they're spending it by the bushel load, on everything new and cutting-edge. Even my house has an alarm system, an X-10 Firecracker system, a home LAN and a satellite dish (no, you may NOT have the address so you can come rob me...). We're not exempt from this syndrome.
What's my point? Just this: There's a marked contrast between the pace of life up here in Denver and what I grew up with in rural Mississippi, due to the economy, the rate at which the city is growing, and the influx of the tech industry, which is bringing young techies in by the truckload. And I'm noticing some things. Like the fact that the resulting culture that's growing up around the affluent suburbs of Denver -- and, indeed, among most of the geeks my age everywhere -- is one of instant gratification. Geeks are hair-trigger, on-demand type of people anyway; if they can't get what they want, when they want it, they tend to go ballistic. And the fact is, there are always new toys to be had. Diamond Rio mp3 players, the Palm V PDA, the iMac, Pentium III chips, nifty new Qualcomm cell phones, two-way alpha-numeric pagers... the list goes on. Among the Denver geeks I know, having the latest electronic toys is a status symbol. It says you're cutting-edge, which is terribly important to geeks. "What? You're still using the Palm Pro? That's so last year." Nobody likes to be yesterday's news.
I have to admit to getting caught up in the culture of buy, buy, buy. Around here it's hard not to. "I NEED that new Palm Pilot! And I NEED that IBM ThinkPad! And I NEED..." You get the idea. I was getting completely into the suburban, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses mentality, something I swore I would never do. But it's a snowball effect: the more you have, the more you want.
Then the Air Force banished me to Texas for two months.
I lived out of a dorm room and was authorized twenty bucks per day by the Air Force for food. Relatively speaking, I was virtually possessionless: I had a shelf of books, my CD player and about a dozen CDs, my computer and a few T-shirts and jeans. I lived very minimally for that period, because I had to. Oh, I had luxuries -- there was cable and air conditioning, and I had my computer and music -- but compared to the clutter of my daily life at home in Denver, I had very little. Except for the weekends I went up to Kansas to see Cynthia, I rarely spent over thirty dollars a week on living expenses. (I did spend more on the weekends with Cynthia, due to paying for gas and food, but my expenses in Texas were almost negligible.) It surprised me how little I needed to get by. And it REALLY surprised me how much I liked that. Having very little in the way of material possessions made my life so much simpler. It got me thinking about what we really need to make our lives complete, whether all those THINGS that we pursue are worth the trouble.
So. I'm experiencing a shift in my thinking lately. I'm longing for simplicity in my life. It's too easy in America, and especially in the tech industry, to overdose on information. There's so MUCH out there to know, so much to learn and find out about and, yes, so much stuff to buy. The easiest thing in the world is to get swept into this frantic mode of right here, right now, gotta have it gotta have it NOW. I don't think I want to do that any more. There has to be a balance between complete austerity and gobbling up the latest greatest toy just to have it. Somewhere I hope to find that line. So I'm going to continue to think about this concept -- this paradigm shift that more of my techie friends seem to be realizing -- and try to chill out a little bit.
Okay, it's not really Zen, but can I call it close enough?
-- marcie.