Questions With A Decay Rate

Desire is a door-to-door salesman who never rings the bell. It lets itself in, and it usually arrives wearing the voice of someone you love.

We almost bought a new couch this spring. Nothing was wrong with ours. It hadn’t sagged, hadn’t squeaked, hadn’t committed any of the crimes couches get replaced for. What happened was that a couple of family members mentioned, separately and casually, that they’d gotten new couches.

Two sentences, delivered as innocently as weather reports. Within a week we were saying things like “maybe we should look.”

So I sat down on the accused and asked it the only question that matters. Why do we have this couch?

The couch, being a couch, said nothing. But the answer stood up anyway. It is still doing the exact job we hired it to do, holding the exact people it was bought to hold. The chain closed in one link. We kept the couch, and I got to feel briefly like an enlightened man who floats above wanting things, a feeling with the approximate shelf life of a banana detached from its family.

Enough is not a trophy you mount over the fireplace and dust twice a year. Enough is a question with a decay rate. You answer it, the answer sits there quietly losing charge like a flashlight in a junk drawer, and then fate deals you a card and you have to answer the whole thing again.

My card came as a job offer. More money than I make now. The kind of money that shows up wearing cologne and pulling out your chair. And I had to ask the same dumb question about something much bigger than furniture. Why do I have this job?

I asked it again. And again. The chain refused to close at the salary line. It closed at the shape of my days. I’m home when I want to be home. My work bends around my family instead of my family bending around my work. That’s the why, and the why doesn’t take a raise. So I said no to the bigger number, and it wasn’t noble. It was arithmetic on a question I usually quit asking one why too early.

Now the confession. I make temptation cards for a living.

I’m a marketer. Strip the paint off the whole profession and what’s underneath is a thumb resting gently on the scale of your why. Every ad ever made is engineered to end your chain early, at “because it’s newer” or “because you deserve it” or “because everyone else already did.”

But notice what actually got me. It wasn’t an ad. No brand laid a finger on me. It was family, mentioning couches. Word of mouth is the most effective channel in marketing precisely because it never looks like marketing. Your defenses are calibrated for billboards, sirens, men in sandwich boards.

Then want slips past security disguised as small talk, holding a paper plate.

Which is why the counter-move can’t be avoiding temptation. You can’t unsubscribe from your relatives.

The counter-move is asking why until the chain actually closes. Not until you’re tired.

Those are different endings, and from the inside they feel nearly identical. Fatigue stops at “I don’t know, I guess it’s fine.” Closure stops at an answer you’d defend out loud, in front of witnesses.

The couch closed. The job closed. Plenty of other things in my house, I suspect, would not survive the questioning, which is probably why I haven’t asked them yet.

That’s the exhausting part, and I won’t pretend otherwise. The work never stays done. You will answer the question perfectly, your brain will lose the receipt, and somewhere a relative is already shopping for who-knows-what-next.

Stay Positive & Ask Me Again Next Month