This is a hard one. I am now staying with my mother, who is a very successful professional that is also a hoarder. She goes to the extreme when it comes to frugality, tearing apart old tshirts and towels to turn into rags that are then used for decades. She gave me leftover baby soap from 1989 for my baby, born in 2023.
It thus feels awful to, under her roof, quietly order not two, but three new gadgets for a dream writerdeck, on top of what I already have (a planck keyboard that was on the expensive end as it came preassembled, a raspberry pi 4000 with a cyberdeck extension, a raspberry pi 4 with a long, narrow screen). A just got the now-discounted Boox Palma 1 and a new low-profile ortholinear split-keyboard, AND because i couldn't bear the chance of missing a Micro Journal drop, the rev.6, which is itself a raspberry pi powered planck keyboard and eink device (aka what I wanted to build myself but failed because I didn't have the energy in me to learn and invest in 3D printing).
If I can successfully return the split keyboard, I'm still looking at around 1000 euros of investment in a "minimalist low-tech solution to distraction-free writing" when I know that I could've and should've just shut up and write. Like I am now with my Planck and my smart phone.
Meanwhile, my mother is using a desktop upstairs from the early 2000s, it still has the static external speaker set and a keyboard that connects with the dual-colored plugs. She uses an open source word processor and writes all day long on that thing. She would never have dreamed of (she would in fact be quite disgusted by) any of my purchases. And she gets everything done. She doesn't procrastinate, she knows who she is and what she is capable of, and did I say that she writes?
I, on the other hand, am a washed-up wanna-be, it seems, trying to throw money at the problem (including money for an expensive therapist to talk about this issue).
When the world is turning to war and I have very limited resources to survive what is to come, I know what these purchases are doing. They are an attempt to grasp onto a world that I wish I were in, where I could carelessly and frivolously enjoy fun gadgets and write for/out of pleasure.
Now that that is out, I do have to say that it was a pleasure typing on this thing.