Are you buying a new phone every two years or so? You probably didn't know about this.

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If you anwered yes to to that question, this is exactly for you.
Chances are that you keep on buying a new phone every year to keepup with the best performance, design, features and so on.
In most cases we do buy new phones not because we have so much money to throw around but instead because we do wish for a better phone. It doesn't matter how good our phones are we always just feel like getting the latest and greatest available. Now, you could be a geek, a tech enthusiast who is about the numbers game, one who would prefer a smartphone packing a snapdragon 845 processor to one with a snapdragon 835. Maybe you want 6gb of ram over 4gb of ram. Maybe you are tired of phones with 3gb ram.

Nowadays phones have become an extension of our lives, calling which was the main purpose of a phone has become a secondary feature, we mostly use our phones for other activities than calling. It has become a norm in our daily lives to have the coolest gadgets and owning a great phone or let me put as it, an expensive phone that commands a certain class. It is even potrayed in Oems adverts where it's all about marketing.
Speaking of marketing.

You buy new phones each year not because you need a better performance, No. Marketing makes you buy things whether you need them or not.

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People who sell these products aim at making you feel like a king, like you are so important. Their products maybe good but that's not what they concentrate on, they concetrate on you the consumer. So in most cases we do buy phones because we already feel like we deserve the phone.
We are selfish creatures by nature, we care about ourselves so much that other people are just secondary, and even when we do care about other people we still relate it to ourselves.
Have you ever taken a group picture? Of course.
Most of the time you look at yourself in the picture most of the time, and even when you look at other people in the picture it's only because you want to look at your face again.
Most of these companies know this. They know you pick up your phone every morning when you wake up, they know you, know that most of the time in the day you are holding your phone in your palms and so they give just what you want.
They aim at giving you the good feelings.
Apple just made to a trillion dollar company. And each of us has heard of apple, whether you own one product from apple, your friend owns a macbook or you heard someone talk about an iPhone.

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There are long queues for the next iphone purchase as long as it is annouced available.
That's how far buying the nextier phones has gotten us.
Now apple has sold almost the same kind of phones for three years and people still would just buy the next phone regardless of the improvements.

What changes in new phones
Literally the processor which is always claimed to be faster, like 35% faster, 40% more power efficient and all those things.

Improved camera, addition of more cameras, with new potraits modes, wide angles cameras which can take photos with a wide view.

Addition of features like wireless charging, ip rating(phones which are water resistant).

New software which is always claimed to be faster.

So most of those improvements can be true in one way or the other though in most cases those improvements don't actually change much in the real world experience of using the phone itself.

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Now if you owned a galaxy s8 of 2018 and you were persuaded well enough to buy galaxy s9. We do understand. But sincerely speaking apart from the claimed moving aperture on the camera on the galaxy s9 and the bixby physical button. there was no major improvements on the newer phone. The upgraded processors never brought much to the table, and the improvements on the fingerprint placement, as if they didn't know about it on the s8. It was more expensive at the time lf the launch and the s8's price had dropped significantly.

The example i have given is more obvious but this same thing happens all the time and we keep on spending our hard earned cash to buy the latest phones to boost our self images, self confidence, self esteem, self love....you can name them..

At the end buying trending phones is going to leave you with no money to buy important things.

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No wonder sometimes you feel like a mini heart attack when you misplace your phone, it's because you spent alot on it, you give it more value that you have never given any other thing you own.

What's the solution?
The first thing is to buy phones out of an informed decision. Some phones age well with constant software updates and great build quality.
It will not matter how much it will cost you to get a great phone as long as you don't plan to make long queues the following year to buy a new phone,

Ofcourse sometimes you would want to get a better new phone which is fine, though falling for the trending stuff can waste alot of your money. Some phone features are just fads that are more likely to fade in a year or two. Think about the 41mp camera on the nokia Lumia 1020 or samsungs air gestures on the galaxy s4 that were gimmicky
You can buy a functional phone without going so much into the speculations and the numbers game that these companies lead to us to believe in.

As always
@tesaganewton