As I was rummaging through my old CDs and cassettes, I came across a collector’s box set of Iron Maiden with some recordings from their early days, and inside it a scroll that traced the band’s journey and how its members changed over the course of that journey, which was held shut by a ring with the figure of Eddie on it, the band’s mascot.
And that’s how I remembered the story of how I acquired it.
I was about 12 years old then, and I had an older cousin who was the classic 90s metalhead, and every now and then he’d bring me a magazine or a cassette so I could listen to new releases. So in one of those magazines, this box set was featured. Obviously, because I was growing up in a provincial town, access to such things was minimal to nonexistent.
Luckily for me, the family of one of my childhood friends, Thanasis, had a shop selling CDs, cassettes, band t-shirts, and so on. Don’t imagine anything special, but for me back then it was like a temple. I was almost embarrassed to go inside.
And so I set out with the magazine in my hands and made it to the record store. I showed it to Thanasis’s father, and he told me he’d get back to me in a few days about whether he could find it and how. Anxious as I was, I went almost every day, waiting for the long-awaited answer, until 4 days later he told me he’d bring it in about 3 weeks. He had to order it from England. I didn’t ask the price; he said he’d bring it either way, I’d see it first, and if I still wanted it I’d take it.
Obviously I took it, even though it cost me the money I’d been saving from my parents for 2–3 months.
And as I was going through it once again after many years, I thought about how much things have changed today. That sense of anticipation, of searching, of not knowing what you’ll hear when you press play, it no longer exists.
We live in an era where, unfortunately, literally whatever we think of, we have it right away. Even this collector’s item you can find easily with a quick search, and it’ll arrive at your door in a few days. But it’s not just music.
I’ve caught myself scrolling through Netflix trying to decide what movie to watch, and taking so long that I got bored and closed it.
In the old days, you’d simply go see a movie because of a poster or a trailer at the cinema. You’d rave about it, hunt for posters to put up in your room, or if it came out on DVD, you’d buy it to have it in your collection. How do you even do that today? You put on a movie, you don’t like it, you press back and go pick another one. You just consume; you don’t even give yourself time to discover the magic of any given movie.
You have favorite actors, but at the first bad movie, you dethrone them from the pedestal you yourself had put them on.
Desire for something gets an immediate response, with the result that we’re never fully satisfied, because there’s no time and no space for it. You’re no longer excited by an album’s cover, but simply by the fact that you’ll open Spotify, listen to it, and at the very most add it to your favorites.
But we both know very well, you and I, that we’ll never actually open that list, except maybe to show it to someone. That might be the best part, because at least then we’ll socialize.
It seems that the answer for a large part of society is more. Extreme consumption of everything. What usually counts nowadays is quantity, not quality. How many trips I took, how many countries I saw, how many bands I know, how many movies I watched, how many seasons of shows I finished, how many books I have on my bookshelf. But no one talks about these things themselves. Their significance, how much they impressed you, what different thing you saw, how they changed you as a person, what you’d want to share or how they made you feel.
And I come to this conclusion:
we may have figured out how to have almost everything in our hands, but we still don’t know how to want it, how to explore it, how to find ourselves through different stimuli.
That’s probably why there will never be an app for it, I hope.
Continue the Journey
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