What Changed Between the Generation That Slept with Its New Shoes and the Generation That Turns Its Nose Up at the iPhone?

The years when I had just finished middle school and started high school. Back then computers were only just beginning to make their way into people’s homes; the first steps of the personal computer craze were being taken. Just like today, back then too there were computers ahead of their time, turned into a kind of center of attraction, but ones we could only look at from behind glass-partitioned shop windows. The one I wanted, though, was an ordinary one sitting at the very bottom of the glass display, one that could run the game the neighbor’s kid played. Not some fancy, expensive model, mind you.

As in many families in Turkey, in ours too you can’t just come out and say you want something. First you broach the subject with Mom, and you have to describe how much you want it with so much excitement that you can win Mom over. Mom is the first step to opening the door to Dad. And the process doesn’t end with convincing Mom. You go to Dad one step behind Mom, and while Mom explains what her child wants, the child’s face turns red as if he’d asked for the most expensive object in the world. I don’t know whether the thing gets bought, but if there’s one thing for certain, it’s that Dad says no at first. The child’s wish is never accepted right away; the value of the wanted thing has to be raised so that buying it is worth it!

Long story short, the computer I wanted wasn’t bought the first time I asked, of course. Months passed, and as meals went uneaten, faces grew long and the path to Mom started to wear thin, and once Dad realized things had reached just the consistency he wanted, we began pacing the road to the computer shop. That road I remember like it was yesterday, that shop, the tea served at the shop that never seemed to end, the ordered computer not arriving for ‘days’ as if we’d ordered a nuclear component, those days that felt like centuries, and then, when the computer guy came home, set up the computer and pressed the power button, all of it giving way to an indescribable happiness, remains a taste I still can’t forget. High schoolers wouldn’t know, but seeing the tiger below still brings tears to my eyes even today.

Don’t get me wrong, we were all members of a middle-income family of civil servants. Maybe we couldn’t always get whatever we wanted the moment we wanted it, but it never happened that we didn’t get what we wanted; time was partly a matter of how you looked at it, too. After all, as Keynes said, in the long run we were all dead.

The point I want to make is this: we were people who were made happy by the things we bought. Maybe what we bought wasn’t anything fancy, but the possibility of it being stolen was enough to keep us up at night. That’s also why we slept our deepest sleep when we put our new shoes next to our pillow.

If we set aside the sterile debates about how healthy it is to find happiness in purchased objects and focus on what has changed after all these years, we reach this conclusion: we are now talking about a humanity that finds happiness not in the objects it buys but in the act of buying. Take a look around you; which of us is satisfied with the things we buy? Neither the latest-model car we buy makes us happy anymore, nor the smartphone. But none of us gives up buying! We don’t give up, because we find happiness not in what we buy but in buying.

Shopping malls are, in fact, no different from a small slice of The Truman Show, hidden behind walls that look real through a set of illusionist tricks. The only difference is that none of us is brave enough to even think of tearing down the virtual walls!

And in case I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.

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