I almost bought a tablet last week.

I spent hours comparing screen sizes, reading reviews, and checking specs. I kept telling myself it would make me write more, sketch better, and organize my thoughts. But when I actually sat down to write what I needed it for, the list was stupidly small: a pen and a blank book did the exact same thing.

Yet, I was ready to spend hundreds of dollars on a glass screen, but would have complained about buying a five-dollar notebook.

It’s a weird form of self-deception, but we do it all the time. We buy phones with three cameras just to scan QR codes. We buy studio-quality headphones just to listen to streaming platform audios. We are paying for the fantasy of a future self—someone who is suddenly creative, organized, or active—while ignoring the person we actually are.

Growing up, my mother had a simple way of cutting through this.

Whenever I asked for something, she never gave me a flat no. She just told me to wait a day. If I still wanted it twenty-four hours later, we would talk. Almost every single time, I forgot about it by the next morning. She knew that childhood desire is just a sudden fever. If you let the clock run, it usually breaks.

One of my favourite lessons from her was the notebook.

It was the start of a school term. The teacher told everyone to bring a notebook the next day. I immediately went to my mother, anxious and demanding, expecting a trip to the local market for a brand-new one.

Instead, she opened the cupboard, pulled out last year’s half-empty notebook, tore out the few used pages, wrapped it in fresh brown packing paper, and handed it to me.

I was horrified. I lay awake that night worrying the teacher would call me out in front of the whole class for carrying a recycled book.

The next morning, check time came. The teacher walked down the aisles. Some kids had nothing, and she insisted, without fail, that they bring one by tomorrow. Then she reached my desk. My heart sank when she picked up my wrapped notebook.

She didn’t get angry. Instead, she held it up for the class to see.

“There is no need to buy a new one if you already have a recycled one,” she said. “Reusing it doesn’t make us look bad. It isn’t about your parents’ financial situation. It is about you, and how you are going to use it.”

The teacher asked the class to clap for me. As they clapped, I felt a rush of pride, but I knew the applause wasn’t for me. It was for my mother, and the quiet sanity of the way she lived.

Today, everything around us is built to make buying too easy.

We buy things with one tap. We are flooded with choices, and we are trained to buy the absolute limit of what we can afford instead of what we actually need. We buy running shoes instead of running. We buy a tablet instead of writing. We try to purchase the habit, hoping the object will do the hard part for us.

But that old notebook taught me that the tool is never the bottleneck. A screen won’t write the article. A fancy lens won’t make you see better.

The value is never in the object. It is in the work.

My mother taught me to wait, to reuse, and to look past the polish of new things. It is a slow, old-school way of looking at things. In a world of one-tap subscriptions, it is the only thing that keeps me grounded.

We buy the best tools hoping they will do the work for us, when the work has always been ours to do.