Buy One Thing(Soon): A Book Light
A cheap enough way to marginally improve my life.
Every night when I finish working and crawl into bed to fall asleep eventually, I read. Usually it’s a frantic scroll through the internet until my brain calms down; sometimes it’s a book on my Kindle. Occasionally, it’s a real book, but less so at night.
Once I’m in bed, though, barring natural disaster or the cat vomiting spectacularly on the rug, I’m in. When I’m done with my activity, I want to simply close my eyes and drift off into fretful sleep, without having to disturb my carefully-positioned nest. I don’t want to get up and turn off the light. I don’t want to move. I just want to be awake one moment and then asleep the next — a seamless transition.
What I really need is a book light — one of those dumb things that clips onto the back of a book so that I can read in bed with the lights off and then turn the light off and go to sleep. They’re not expensive — maybe $20 or so — but I move them out of my Amazon cart weekly, saving them for later along with the other not-expensive things that I move around and never buy.
It’s not that I don’t have the money. Buying a book light and a $7 sweatshirt to replace the one that is permanently stained with toothpaste would not be a huge imposition on my finances. Winter is here; it’s cold and I work from home. There are days when I don’t leave the house and therefore days when I don’t spend money — an involuntary and unintentional money fast, driven purely by laziness. But out of an unnecessary austerity, I will tell myself that I don’t need the book light or the sweatshirt — I just want them. That usually stops me dead in my tracks.
I’ve spent money on dumber things in the past with a freeing sort of desperation that comes from having so little money that it seemed pointless to hold onto it. I maxed out my first credit card in college by using it to fund a variety of things I didn’t really need like pants I wore once and various plane tickets and honestly, I’m not sure what else. I want a lot of things, but I need very little. It’s okay to indulge in the wants sometimes, just as long as they don’t overtake the needs.
The book light will improve my life; I will be able to read in bed without having to move to turn off the light. It’s such a dumb little thing to want, but if $20 buys long-lasting happiness, then why would I deny myself the chance?
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