Ch 16 — Shinies

The Omega on the wrist versus the watch that quietly does a hundred useful things. What did you buy for the feeling — and did the feeling ever arrive?

The chapter's framing keeps nagging at me: Phil doesn't say the feeling never arrived — he says it didn't stay.

Which raises a genuinely interesting question. If the feeling of significance arrives on the day you buy something and fades within a fortnight, what exactly did you purchase? The object, or a brief neurochemical event that the object merely triggered?

I'm not sure the sceptical answer here is "therefore the feeling was fake". Anticipation is real. The problem may be that we're terrible at predicting how long feelings last — what psychologists call affective forecasting. We buy for a peak we accurately imagined, then forget we didn't budget for the plateau.

So the sharper question, for anyone who bought the Omega equivalent: did the feeling actually not arrive — or did it arrive, do its job, and then end?

Those are different problems with different implications.