Growing up, we weren’t rolling in money, in fact we didn’t have much at all. But I never felt it.
The physical stuff that mattered to me in the first decade of my life was plentiful – toys, bikes and books.
The toys evolved over the years, but the pattern was the same.
Action Man, Britain’s Tractors, Star Wars, He Man, Transformers, Lego…
With each I enjoyed a growing collection, and as much as I loved what I already had, I would eagerly look forward to the next addition, which opened up new options for play and adventure and escape.
My nan on my dad’s side came every Sunday, inevitably with a new toy from whichever range I was into at the time.
So as well as larger new hauls on birthdays and Christmas, I had a pretty steady incoming supply. Wow I sound spoilt thinking back now.
When I’d grown out of toys, but before I’d embraced music, my biggest source of “new” was computer, and then video games.
Again I didn’t have a massive collection, but remember vividly the thrill of going to the backstreet games shop in the nearest town which had the more obscure releases and Japanese imports for my beloved Super Nintendo console.
Music came along, and for years existed alongside the video games, but overall is a louder, larger, longer standing love.
As we’ve spoken about before, a collection of hundreds of CD albums evolved into tens of gigabytes of mp3s, and then Spotify.
But that hunger for the new remains.
And of course as you may know, from 2012 – 2018 or so, it was fed by photography, with me buying cameras like they were going out of fashion.
Oh no, hang on, all of them already were long out of fashion, sometimes by decades!
Anyway, that cycle remained, of having something new to explore and play with on a regular basis, around a hobby I love.
Lately, the camera buying has slowed to a standstill.
I haven’t bought any cameras at all this year, and the last was the Lumix FZ38, back in September of last year.
Looking at my eBay and Amazon history, the objects I’ve bought most of by far over the last 12 months have been books.
But whilst they have been a steady incoming stream of new material, the slow rate I read means it’s certainly not anything like the purchasing rate of cameras or toys or music in my past.
Nowadays, books, music (I listen to something I’ve never heard before at least every few days on Spotify) and online articles, give me enough “new” to satisfy my curiosity and my hunger for learning and experiencing something different.
Along with reliving large swathes of childhood through our own children as they grow of course!
How about you? Do you like a steady stream of new in your life? What form does this most often take? Cameras? Books? Music? Something else?
As always, please let us know in the comments below (and don’t forget to tick the “Notify me of new comments via email” box to follow the conversation).
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35hunter 
The new in my life these days takes the form of physical infirmities that interfere with daily activities rather than enhance them. It is a challenge, but no place near as much fun as the new Lesney Matchbox cars of my youth (yes I still have some of them). I did buy a new camera recently, a Sony a6000, and am now laid up unable to continue the testing phase.
My advice is to buy and use what you enjoy while you can, before you can’t. Life without even little pleasures is no fun at all.
Oh sorry to hear that Marc, that’s not a welcome kind of “new”.
Oh yes I had a few Matchbox cars as a kid. My oldest son (8) has maybe 25 or 30 Hot Wheels cars and some track, and his brother (2.5) is getting into them quite a bit now too. Think they’re one of those toys that have spanned generations and generations, almost entirely unchanged.
What lens do you have with the Sony, a native one, or are you using other lenses with adapters? What do you make of it so far?
In our household, we always have 50-100 books at any one time, from the library. I go once a week to get a cache for my boys (as well as for myself), they go through books pretty fast.
Wow! I think we have a limit at our libraries, though I’ve not got near enough to it to question what it is. Nowhere near 50 books though!
The trouble I have with library books (and I absolutely love the concept of libraries generally, on so many levels) is that every time I see a book I have loaned, let alone pick it up, I feel a tremendous pressure to finish it and return it as soon as possible. You can renew a few times so in practice you can have a book out a couple of months or more, but I don’t know, I just don’t like that someone else is dictating the speed at which I am to finish the book, especially when I don’t find much reading time anyway. It’s like another pressure to get somewhere or get something done on someone else’s timeframe, be it school, work, kids clubs etc. I have more than enough of that in life already, reading a book is the antithesis, the opportunity to immersive myself indefinitely (well, at least 15 minutes before I start to nod off) without watching the clock.
I guess for the quicker reader, and the less over-analytical mind, this is a non-issue, ha ha!
Fortunately our library has five million books in circulation. And most of the time I don’t feel any pressure to finish a book in a hurry unless someone puts a hold on it, haha
Wow, that’s a huge number of books. Is that all from one physical library or a connected group of libraries? Over here we join a county library service, then can borrow books from any of the libraries in the county, either by getting them from one of the libraries directly, or ordering them to be sent to our library of choice, to then collect. Yeh I think often the books I wanted were on a kind of waiting list, so I could only renew them once or twice and then someone else was waiting as they’d ordered the book. Hate that pressure! Generally I buy used books online then if I know I’m unlikely to read them again, donate them to a charity shop. Not as cheap as using a library but affordable enough, and I can take as long as I like to read them!
We have nearly thirty branches across the city.
I like a steady stream of new experiences. The last two years that has been challenging to do.
Have you explored new avenues for new experiences in the last couple of years because of it being enforced almost?
I have. But the options were very limited and some weren’t enjoyable.
I didn’t like the new experience of funerals over zoom (we lost an elder), of photography workshops over zoom, virtual coffee hour over zoom, virtual beer drinking with friends over zoom, birthday celebrations over zoom, thanksgiving over zoom, and Diwali over zoom.
I somewhat enjoyed the experience of trying to exhaust the video catalog on Netflix. Without Zoom. 🤣
We have work meetings over Zoom or Team and for me they’re infrequent enough that they work pretty well. I rarely have more than two in a day, and when I do and/or they’re back to back, they suddenly become very tiring – and tiresome – more than a meeting in person seems.
Netflix and Disney Plus is pretty much our family’s entire TV intake, which is incredible considering we’ve only had them about two years.
I almost forgot the two weddings over Zoom.