A dumb little thing

Having it all is disproven. If you're going to have one thing, make it...

Ariel and her threek

As someone who grew up in peak Beanie Baby mania, I love trinkets, gadgets, doo-dads, and everything else Ariel hordes in her dumpster-diving underwater cave. The way I pined, yearned, and plotted with the potency that only a child’s pure longing could produce to collect whatever latest non-functioning obsession of the moment was…I honestly do not believe I’ve wanted anything — not a job, a partner, an apartment, anything in the apartment — as much I coveted those silly little tchotchkes back in the day.

This makes unequivocal sense to me, especially in hindsight. Because all of my mature desires have been in service of some kind of fleeting totem for status or identity. That Instagram pan, that pour-over electric kettle, that influencer sofa (I do not own the sofa and I feel like by the time I can afford it I probably won’t want it anymore), and several ill-fitting Reformation dresses. Acquiring some of these things has pleased me — mostly in the way that being able to afford nice things is pleasing. But their satisfaction was the most fleeting—perhaps because it was the getting that gave them value, not the things themselves. Consumerism’s greatest energy resource respawns in the space between getting and gotten.

Satisfaction is a fickle thing. We may put it on a pedestal, self-mythologizing its lore as justification for our greatest ambitions. We may put it off, edging ourselves being the only seed of motivation that germinates any form of action. And sometimes or often, satisfaction evades our best efforts, just as it’s within reach, and just as we’ve achieved the things we thought we wanted, only to discover it was really some other mysteriously obvious thing. The princess is always in another castle.

Wanting is exhausting. It’s not the kind of thing that makes the having any better, the longer you do the wanting, either. That’s why, when it comes to having, I derive great joy and wholehearted pleasure from having a dumb little thing.

A Dumb Little Thing™ is generally non-functioning and non-essential in nature. It exists to make you go “aww” or “cool!” It sits on your desk, on a shelf, dangles from somewhere, or else is just there. A dumb little thing doesn’t have to be cute but I highly recommend that it is. Because when dumb little things are cute, they do something astonishing to the brain that would generally call for mood-altering drugs or rollercoasters for similar effect. They are dopamine dowsers.

My dedication to pleasure is unwavering and thankfully cheap to appease. This is how I’ve come in possession of many dumb little things. And they all make me smile, shudder in a fit of cute aggression, or think hehe in my mind. Sometimes all three!

Some of my favorite dumb little things include a Jiji plushie that I keep in my purse, a happy little face peering up at me every time I unzipped it to loot for lip balm, my wallet, or just to say hi.

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Recently, a friend sent everyone in our group chat a blind box item. Blind boxes are perhaps the epitome of dumb little things. First of all, they are usually always little — no bigger than a ping-pong ball, generally speaking. The blindness in question indicates that each box contains one unknown item from a small collection of known things — it mercifully absolves you from having to make a decision (choice is, as we know, one of the most formidable modern agonies that we call freedom and luxury). Sonny Angels are a prime example of blind boxes. (My personal Sonny Angels were the now discontinued FriendsWithYou Luckies zipper pulls.)

I remember receiving the friendly package on a day I was scowling with the general malaise I feel anytime I trudge up my 6th-floor walkup with a grocery-stuffed Baggu bag slipping off my shoulder. Mad. I tore open the padded envelope, and my eyes widened at the little box of hamsters saying something captioned in Japanese. I ripped open the foil pack to reveal… an egg-covered hamster! ლ(◉‿◉ ლ)

Suddenly the moody mood I was in was gone. My pupils were fully dilated. Joy! It is not so elusive! It is simply a little hamster wearing a fried egg as a blanket.

Similarly, the day that Frog Pen came into my life was Very Good Day™. It was a lovely little “saw this and thought of you” gift from a friend. Frog Pen technically breaks the rule of being a DLT because it has utility. It is a pen. I can write with it, which I sometimes do. I love watching it bob around as I scribble away dumb little notes. It inspires endless hehehe.

However, the best part of Frog Pen also perhaps is its downfall in design, in that the frog cap — arguably the entire draw of the pen — is a pull-off, which requires you to store the pen tip-up. This makes the ink settle toward the end of the pen, so it sputters out mid-stroke until gravity can lure it back down to the tip. So, frog pen sits in a little cup of pens on my desk, happily being a frog on an ink-filled stick. Gorgeous uselessness!

Satisfaction may often be found at the end of a hard-earned effort or an abundance of patience. But pure and simple joy does not ask so much of you — just whatever cozy receptor fold of your brain it can nestle in. The easy pleasure a well-timed and well-placed DLT can provide is often a welcome invitation to soften, to forget that thing glaring at me from the back of my mind that I’ve been committed to resenting for some reason I’ve all but forgotten. It’s a discovery of an extra scrap of dopamine in my mind that I previously believed I’d depleted but wait there’s more! All these dumb little things have saved my ass countless times — pulled me back from the nebulous electrical storm of brooding in my mind that I refer to as the darkness.

If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love DLT actually is all around. And sometimes you can eat it.