Doesn’t have to be a thing you bought. Just some thing you didn’t have but then once you did it expanded your scope of actions.
The first obvious example that comes to mind is a car. Plenty of drawbacks to prevalence of cars, but being able to go where I want when I want, and far away, is very transformative.
I’m interested in other examples of things that aren’t just useful, but that open new possibilities.
Quitting smoking
Creatine
I quit my job. Not sure if it gave me something but it sure took away a lot of asses I had to kiss.
Does that work?
The Dark Side.
Now I have unlimited power.
Reading regurlarly, It really improved my attention time, and it definitively helps to manage my anxiety, weirdly enough.
The first was my bike. Totally changed life. It opened up the entire county to me, though the far end was not viable time wise.
Then my first car.
After that, I suppose it was a cell phone. Gave me the freedom to travel and stay in communication on my terms. However, part of that was caller ID by default. The freedom to ignore calls and make the decision based on who was calling without having to worry about missing an important call was big time. Since I could do this anywhere my car could reach, it was the pinnacle of freedom, with subsequent iterations only expanding the use.
After that? My cane.
After my body fucked up, and I was on a walker for a while, being able to walk steadily without the walker was freedom again. It may seem like the walker was that, but it never felt like it. I went from jogging and walking and hiking freely to crawling, literally in a second.
From crawling, a walker sure was better, but it was as much a symbol of limitations as it granted more mobility.
But the cane? That’s when I knew I would be able to have something resembling the life I had lost. It isn’t the same as it was and never will be. But the difference between having the cane and not having it is what makes it powerful.
I really thought when the cane came up you meant taking over the world one hard smack at a time
Wellll, I have done that a few times.
Back when I got off the walker and faced a cane as permanent, I went to my old dojo and got hooked up with some lessons and sparring practice to kind of work around the issues. I’m not what I used to be, but the few times I’ve run into people that thought a middle aged disabled guy was a victim, there was some smacking done lol
Confidence.
Underrated answer here. Real, or outwardly displayed, it’s a game changer.
Becoming proficient with Linux.
Psychedelics. Very eye opening.
an oscilloscope.
Speaker enthusiast?
My divorce. I didn’t even realize that my ex-wife was abusive until getting into the divorce process. Once I got away and started to understand, I began to take some of my power back and develop even more. I went from terrified of her to strong and confident.
I hope your new positive path continues. Good luck, said the survivor or a bad marriage.
A low-powered zoom microscope. I can again look at and work on tiny things, fix jewelry, electronics, remove splinters. Use it WAY more rhan I ever thought I would.
For anyone interested, just Google “stereoscopic dissecting microscope used”. The ‘used’ part is to makes it less expensive. They can cost a lot. I used to use my lab sonicator water bath to clean my jewelry, and our dissecting scope to check the jewelry to make sure all the skin crud is gone from every crevice.
When I figured out how to run computational chemistry software on my home pc. It entirely changed how I saw chemistry because I could tinker and experiment with (virtual) molecules on a grand scale. Being able to run five maybe ten thousand simulations significantly increased my understanding.
Real-time live AI captioning.
It’s not perfect but more words than none.
I hold daily Scrum meetings in Zoom and everyone benefits with the transcript saved at the end of the meeting.
I raid with my guild, with Live Captions window overlaid onto of my chat box.
Going super sayan.
