Recently I went and bought a laptop from a guy. I didn’t really understand why then, and to be frank I am still not sure I do now. It started with me watching YouTubers talk about their beloved ThinkPads. How CUSTOMIZED AND TAILORED they were. How much they loved their machines. And I found myself jealous. I did not love my machine, I did not customize my machine. I was just a pleb missing out.
Luckily I had an idea. I could just go buy my own cool laptop and have it customized for me. No problem a little money couldn’t solve. So after spending some time hunting, I found a laptop that I liked. It was pretty: Sleek, Black, LEDs, Sharp Picture. But importantly it was POWERFUL. Power being the only quantifiable metric for a laptop and therefore the most important.
The laptop was decked out in specs. 64 GBs of ram (silicon gold in 2026), 2TB M.2 SSD, RTX 3080, and a Ryzen 9 cpu. For those of you uninitiated it, these specs are pretty powerful and don’t come cheap – I however snagged a DEAL And so I was expecting the joy to settle in shortly.
But now here’s a question for myself. Why? Why do I need this, why do I have this, and most importantly why do I want this?
I realized there was something different between me and the ThinkPad community, they did not have to use quantifiable metrics to justify themselves. They just loved their ThinkPad, and somewhere along my way I failed to emulate them properly. That my decision making was confused.
When I imagined my new laptop, I didn’t see a computer—I saw an image of myself. A young man editing photos, rendering films, 3D modeling, coding. Someone interesting. Someone alive. Yet, I don’t do those things now. I have not approached the limits of my relatively modern and powerful tech, and so a computer was not what held me back. But then again it is a fast way to get a hit of I am interesting, beautiful.
In answering why, I must acknowledge a key characteristic of mine, one that maybe we share. I have a lot of desire. Personal desire. The kind you can not rush. The kind you can not act on quickly. The kind that I bank on making me feel complete. Becoming great at something, leaving a legacy, proving I am better than those who have doubted me. But I can not manifest these on command, and in the meantime I am forced to stew in the fears and anxieties motivating these desires. So, why waste the time? Why not spend it on what I can pursue now. Pursuing the shiny thing in front of my face so I can be preoccupied with something manageable. Making myself beautiful and doing it NOW!
But, I am not here to muse on desire today. I am sure there is a long discussion to be had on it’s ability to drive us forward. But today we discuss wanting. This kind of which I think is can really distract us.
I have adhd, so it is hard for me to regulate my excitement. I find myself just through the moon excited over ideas. Hyper-fixating and manic. Truly in a state of just wanting. But, the pursuit of these wants never gets me anywhere. In fact almost inevitably I crash land into a directionless depression. Regardless of outcomes, I just end up with a newly familiar lack of purpose.
This is because those wants never gave me purpose to begin with. The truth of the matter is that I was choosing to distract myself. Instead of stepping into the ambiguity of pursuing my desires, I did something easier. Something faster. I stepped into my own mind. I created images of myself, phantoms. I tried to actualize them, not understanding they lacked the depth of a real person. A man with a canvas is not the same as an artist. But a canvas is the easiest part of the artist’s motif to recreate.
It turns out the answer to my why isn’t rooted in a healthy motivation. Actualizing myself with a used laptop- if only it were so easy. But, I think I have learned something. That what is important on this journey is need. An artist does not carry his canvas because he simply wants it, nor does he because he wants to be an artist. Instead by necessity of what he/she is they need it. When I am truly passionate about something, I don’t find myself obsessing over it. Wanting. In fact I find the opposite of wanting inside of it. Contentness, Fullness, Completeness.
My camera is an old DSLR, I like DSLRs. They may be heavy and slow, but I simply like them. They are fun. I write in a notebook I bought from amazon, or a diary I bought from CVS nearly ten years ago. I write with a $15 dollar Lamy Safari or a Uniball Vision Pro. And the experience of it all is bliss. Does that make me an artist? Well it certainly does more than the laptop, but still no. And yet I need those things to be me. I am not concerned about becoming when I play with those toys, I am content with being. They are an extension of my own breath.
My Raspberry Pi and Macbook currently fulfill my compute needs. So I don’t know what to do with this new laptop. But I do know that I don’t want to spoil the flowers of passion with the rot of want. It is too easy of a hole to get lost in, more concerned about the gear than the experience. I am going to have to have some conversations with myself because I do like it a lot haha. But a need, in need of purpose, is a want.
Also what those ThinkPaders had. What at that moment I wanted. That was passion, that was need. That was love and completeness, they had nothing left to want in that moment.
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