Sometimes, things break.
Sometimes, these things are large systems, such as a car, that we spend countless time and money maintaining, in the hopes that it outlasts our use of it, and not the other way around.
My PC, which cost more than my car, and that I believed was a solid workhorse with many decades of vitality left, decided this afternoon that it had had enough of the thing we call existence. For the following hour, low-level panic continued to grip at my chest as I recalled yet another thing that may be effected by the death of my PC. Did I back-up those crypto keys? I should cancel that software subscription. How will I create that new graphic design idea? What about those games that I had just purchased from a Steam sale?
This isn't the first time I've danced this dance.
My first ever computer, that I loved dearly, and that claimed thousands of my hours by offering entry to the World of Warcraft, and social media posts, and this new thing called Youtube, left me in much the same way.
When I finally recieved my first paycheck I purchased an MP3 player, and completely wore the thing out. The play/pause button, which was also the on/off button, disintegrated one day, and for the following month or so I was using the curved metallic back of a friend's earring to touch the contacts whenever I wanted to listen to music, before I finally decided that it was time to move on.
The truth is, that I was both sad and relieved when the MP3 player stopped working. As a kid, I didn't quite know how to articulate what I was thinking, but I was just very aware all of a sudden of how reliant I was having a personal theme tune constantly playing, while I did things that only a year before I would have done happily with nothing but the sound of swishing clothes and chirping birds. I was worried about my hearing, too, and despite me regularly turning the volume down in a conscious effort to give my ears a break, I knew it was still not the same as not having music channelling into them at all.
So why not just stop using it? Well, I was torn, you see. It was my big purchase that I had saved for quite a while to afford. Also, it wasn't like I didn't enjoy being able to listen to my own music, whenever and wherever I wanted. I figured, heaps of people are using them and seem unaffected, plus, the all-encompassing 'they' wouldn't let an MP3 player go to a dangerous volume, surely? Maybe I was just over reacting? This settled the voice in my head, but not the feeling in my gut.
Similarly when my first PC died, I felt instantly lost and confused, but I also felt lighter. More free. I realised that I was lost only because there were suddenly so many paths that I could take, and felt energised by the potential that I could now see before me - potential that I'm sure had been there from the start, though my MP3 or PC reliance - perhaps addiction - was both a crutch and a hindrance for my participation in life.
It is with this as context, that I sit in my room now, broken PC before me, and wondering not just how I might try to fix it, but whether I even ought to bother doing so. When it comes down to it, something like a broken computer is hardly enough to solve all of my problems, but realistically it's not likely to make any of them worse, either. All I can be certain of is that without it, things will be different.
Maybe, for now, that's all I really need.
- Aluca Sol 