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I love the little phone I gifted my beloved. It’s one of those new-fangled flippity smartphones, which bend in the middle, folding down into the palm of your hand. Well, her hand, not mine. It’s a cute little thing, ever-so-neat. So neat that daily I find myself coveting its shiny form factor.

But in truth I know I must resist the urge to upgrade to the next best thing. She was justified in upgrading, for she was running a budget handset several years old, missing a few key features. My phone, on the other hand, is still going strong, providing all of the functionality I need.

Mine is a flagship phone taken on contract a year after release, five years ago now it seems. In the planned obsolescence mindset of the tech industry, that is apparently ancient. But in the reality of a world of finite resources, it’s actually not that long ago at all. In that time it has once had a new motherboard under warranty, eleven months into our relationship, but has behaved itself ever since.

Much as the flippity phone has me enraptured in its hold, I know I must resist. I have decorators to pay, tuition to fund, a new garage door to fix, replacement balustrades for the garden, a bathroom requiring a new floor, upcoming service for the car, and the list goes on. Adding an object of desire to the list hardly seems sensible as the bills mount.

So instead I will look on from afar, admiring the folding and unfolding of a futuristic slab of digital wizardry, reminding myself to control my nafs, separating want from need. No doubt in years to come, we will all have such a device, all of a sudden ubiquitous like today’s multi-camera handheld supercomputers which two decades ago we would have laughed at as completely unnecessary in the life of the common man. Until then… resist.