Years ago (at least five or six?), I had this idea that I only wanted to get "consumables" as gifts. That is, stuff like food/drink, cash, etc. The idea was that one source of problems in our lives is the accumulation of a bunch of stuff that isn't particularly useful.

I think I understand a bit more why I had this intuition.

Sometimes I find that things I own drive my decisions rather than the other way around, which should be the case. What should be is that we make use of the things we have for some other goal. Instead, I may find myself saying "well, I already own XYZ; so how should I make choices to make use of XYZ?"

There is nothing inherently wrong with a bicycle, or a microwave, or even some useful books. Let me pull out a quote I learned of studying statistics:

To the hammer, the whole world looks like nails

Imagine owning a hammer and therefore thinking that everything you did should involve maximally efficient hammer usage.

What is absurd is the presupposition that hammers are the best tools for every job. Certainly, there are certain tasks in which a hammer is the best tool. But for everything? We know this isn't the case.

Technology, generally

A more recent realization I had is that we might look at other sorts of tools we have, such as computers, and then think about the world like in the hammer example above. Just because computers can be applied to many domains, does that mean we should maximally computerize everything?

While the world may be heading in this direction (and therefore it doesn't hurt to learn about computers and how to interact with an increasingly "digital world"), I personally do not think that we have any sort of moral imperative to push the world towards a more interconnected/digital/global/etc future.

Problems such as "sharing information among scholars" might seem urgent to some; but really, we can do this via e-mail. What is more important is that the relevant parties are able to find and contact each other. How this happens is a topic for a different time.