SexySam182 Wrote:
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> Thus leaving me with a battered Nokia 6230 until
> my contract is up in February.
You hush now! The 6230 is a brilliant phone, and almost impossible to destroy. The 6230i is still serving me well! Sure you won't impress your friends with it, but if your friends have to be impressed by the stuff you have instead of who you really are, what does that tell you?
Monza972 Wrote:
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> Phones just seem to die aimlessly these days.
This is on purpose. All the major manufacturers have publicly admitted, that their design specifications are aimed at a 1 to 2 year life expectancy. If your trusty 6230i does not implode, what possible wish could you have for buying a new phone? Except capitalist induced peer pressure, that is designed to prey on your low sense of self and shaky self-esteem, of course! Once everyone has a phone, the market is saturated and sales plummet...
I come from a time when all homes had hard-line phones, and nobody had cell-phones. Those phones lasted for decades and where not doodads to showcase (lack of) identity. Strains of this culture still carry on. While you can buy hard-line phones for the same price as mobile phones, people still expect the hard-line phone to last for years and years. Nobody would accept the product quality that is currently rampaging the mobile market.
They only reason mobile phones are so crappy these days, are because you as consumers decided to vote FOR IT, with fistfuls of cash, in lame attempts to one-up your peers.
As former president Jimmy Carter put it in a speech in 1979:
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In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
Unfortunately, we did not discover what Carter said we did. We never broke free. So the emptiness in our lives, that comes from mindless consumption, we now medicate with more and more consumption.
It's only after we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/05/2010 07:52PM by Morbid.