Outside pressure, be it obvious or unconscious, has such an enormous impact on our behavior. I know, this might make you roll your eyes, but I thought I wasn’t impacted, influenced or manipulated by advertisements, influencers or general consensus. Surprise surprise, I actually was. For the longest time, I thought that Apple products were shiny, unnecessary status symbols. No-one in my close circle was in the apple bubble or cared to spend thousands on a phone. So I had this almost Anti-Apple attitude for a long time. When I started to watch more content on YouTube, I think is when everything started to slightly shift. Seeing creators hyping up the brand, I thought wouldn’t matter since I already had formed my own opinion. But this is what I think is the power behind being influenced by ads or content you watch – you don’t realize it’s happening.
The underlying message of “You need this product to be successful” was fed to me for so long, that I eventually caved. I started to believe that in order to create beautiful content, work proficiently and have my life in order, I needed the newest, best and most expensive MacBook Pro that was out there. I thought that it’s all or nothing – no other laptop would make it on my wishlist, and I didn’t want to settle on anything less powerful. So I decided to start saving and after I hit my savings goal, I would buy the newest and best model and have it forever. Unfortunately, or in hindsight, luckily, these computers are very expensive so it took me a long time to be within reach of the savings goal. But before hitting the goal and going out to buy the Mac, I had a shift in perspective.
I realised that in order to pursue what I wanted to pursue digitally, I could get away with using an older and less powerful model. I realized that a refurbished MacBook would be just fine. I realized that I’d rather have that cash saved for my future than sitting on my desk, too shiny to be carried around and too heavy to work on from the couch. I realized that if you want to pursue something, you should do so with whatever device / material / resource you currently have. Because imagine what you could do with all the time and energy invested into pursuing the material item; all the research and thought you put into it… What if you used all that energy to actually do the thing you wanted to do originally? Imagine where you could be, what progress you could make!