Right time
A guide to combatting purchase anxiety
When it comes to buying gadgets I live in constant fear.
What if? What if a new version is released just after I buy the thing? What if I waited and got a better model? What if there’s a big discount? What if I’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake?
The words haunt me like a character in a Dickens novel. I imagine sitting in my room. I hear a pop. A ghostly figure appears standing next to a more successful looking version of me. And, when this doppelgänger sees me, he points and screams, “the horror, why, spectre, why torture me like this, why?” before the pair disappear again.
What if.
Thankfully, there are some gadgets that buck this trend. You can set your watch to the iPhone’s release date for example. Yet this is a rarity. A moment when you feel some sort of control over a purchasing situation. And, really, isn’t that what we’re all after? A sense of agency?
Let me blast a concrete example at you.
Recently, I bought a new TV. This meant I needed a new media streamer. Specifically, an Apple TV.
But here’s the thing, I dropped into a mental rabbit hole about when to buy one. The latest model was released in 2022 and the online rumour mill was weaving a tapestry proclaiming a new one would arrive in the first half of this year.
This put me in a quandary.
I required an Apple TV, but those familiar words haunted me: what if? What if Apple released a new model just after I bought the older one? And the return period had ended? What if this new model was faster? Sharper? Sleeker? Sexier? How would I live with myself? These thoughts tormented me for weeks.
But in the end? I bought it anyway. I’m lucky an updated Apple TV didn’t drop shortly after, but even if it did, I wouldn’t care.
The key to my mindset change was asking myself an entirely different question from what if: why not?
What is it that I’d want from a new model that the old one doesn’t have? The answer — beyond the novelty of newness — was not much.
As I’ve covered before, it’s a waste of time worrying about what could be. By living too much in the future, we interrupt the present, the actual events happening to us right now. Being too tuned into the unattainability of the perfect moment ruins the enjoyment of the moments we actually live in.
It’s a Schrödinger's scratchcard situation. By waiting for some imagined future, we reduce the potential of something good happening now.
If that thing you want fulfils the criteria you require at this moment, why worry? Would a builder wait to buy a drill? A painter a brush? Stop worrying. Get that thing. After all, why not?