The best things in life are not always new

Anyone who has read this column for a long period of time knows that I have a guitar. It’s… Anyone who has read this column for a long period of time knows that I have a guitar. It’s nothing too special, just a standard learner’s acoustic. And as opposed to the last time I wrote about my guitar, just about a year ago, I can actually play it a little bit now. I’ve moved beyond two-chord songs, at least. Don’t make fun.

But anyway, the point isn’t really the guitar I have. It’s the guitar I want to have: a late-model Fender Standard Stratocaster in either navy blue or chrome red. As far as electric guitars go, it’s nothing too amazingly special – it certainly can’t compete with a high-end American Deluxe Series Stratocaster, let alone a Les Paul or anything of that nature. But some part of me just really wants a nice, middle-of-the-road electric to play around with.

This is a difficult impulse for me to counter. I know I don’t need something like a Stratocaster, or really any new guitar at all. It would be a total extravagance, a completely selfish purchase that would take up about two months of rent and grocery money. And given my current level of ability with all things guitar-related – i.e., not too much – it really would be a ridiculous thing for me to do. But the thing is, I can’t help but still want it anyway.

I know that part of the desire for it is the simple yearning for stardom and glory that I think every person deals with. I mean, who doesn’t want to be a rock star deep down inside?

But I can’t help but also think that, just by virtue of having a better guitar, I would become a better guitar player because of it.

To me, this is something pretty deep down in the American psyche. If we buy new, better versions of things that we already have, we’ll be better just because our gadgets, or clothes or whatever are better. Need to be more productive? A new computer should help you out. Need to be more powerful? Try this watch and these shoes!

I don’t think anyone is immune from this. As an example, I’m going to use a pretty easy target: the iPod. How many of us, honestly, can say that they have a real need or desire to carry around all our music with us all the time? Prior to 2003, when the iPod became a hit, the answer would have been pretty close to zero. But when the iPod started becoming popular, people stopped seeing these things as luxuries and started looking at them as necessities, almost like prerequisites for being a functional part of society.

Nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who not only owns an iPod or some other functionally similar device but has upgraded it more than once from an older, “out-of-date” device.

The same thing could be said of just about anything else people buy to get some use out of.

We see a nice BMW or Lexus on the road, and see the beat-up Oldsmobile beside it, and think that the person in the nice car is better somehow, and if we had the nice car, we’d be better, too. Even if the nice car actually has tons of mechanical problems or the owner is a jerk, and the Olds is a great car driven by a nice guy.

Part of it is just the new factor, where new stuff is just automatically better than old stuff. We’ve been trained to think that a 4-year-old computer is basically a relic of the Paleozoic era, and I know people who have never listened to a vinyl record or cassette tape.

Now all our DVDs are becoming obsolete with the advent of Blu-Ray discs, so that we can see the same movies we already have in a better resolution.

Does any of this stuff really make a difference? Are we really better people when we get better stuff?

I’m sure we’d all like to think that just by having a new computer, we’d automatically get more work done and have better lives because of it. But really, all that happens is that we get the same amount of work done on a nicer computer.

So what to do?

I mean, there is a point at which new things are better than old things. Nobody would try to argue that you could get as much done on a mid-80s IBM with a floppy drive and 2MB of storage, and they wouldn’t argue that we should still be flying biplanes instead of jets. The key is to decide whether what we want is better for our lives, rather than just expecting our lives to get better with all our new stuff.

So I know I don’t need a new guitar. I wouldn’t be a better guitar player because of it, and my old one works just fine, even though it’s not a Stratocaster.

But just because I don’t need it doesn’t mean I don’t still want it.

E-mail Richard with more general prescriptivism about American consumer culture at rab53@pitt.edu.