There is a hungry ghost within me, haunting online stores and desiring things that I/he does not need and may not truly want. Once the ghost obtains these things, it will enjoy them. There is the joy that the novelty of the new provides, a dopamine rush once the package arrives and he gets his grasping hands on the newly procured item.
The ghost is excited.
He opens it and admires the new thing, starts to use it. What he finds is that the new thing is what he expected it to be, maybe even more, or so the ghost thinks. The senses are keenly focused on the new thing and its use. The ghost smiles. The hunger has been satiated.
It thinks that it is becoming more defined. The ghost thinks that it has become more than the spectral thing it was before obtaining the object of its desire. It feels complete. Now its life can be more fulfilling like the people who have reviewed the thing he wanted. Like the ads showing people using the shiny, always new things, forever smiling and using the things.
Days go by, maybe even 2 or 3 weeks. The ghost has noticed the shortcomings of the shiny new thing. Also, the shiny new thing is no longer that shiny anymore. It is no longer new. Now the thing is dulled with use. It is no longer a desired thing, but a used and tarnished thing. The ghost has left its fingerprints on it. The thing is not the same as it was before when he first started to use it. When did the object of desire become less than what it was originally? It does not even wonder if the thing had always been less than the ideal that he had first experienced it to be because that thought would illuminate a undesirable idea. The idea that things desired and obtained may not be as wonderful and useful and self-completing as they were advertised and thought to be.
Now the ghost, having used the thing continuously for weeks, begins to compare the thing against its many other things that do something similar to it. The newest thing does somethings better than the older things that the ghost has abandoned to the old and used pile. It starts to rediscover the good things that it used to enjoy about the old things that he no longer wanted to use. The transformation becomes complete and the newest thing is now just an old, used, flawed object that is no longer desired.
The ghost starts to become more transparent. The hunger returns.
The ghost is not as completed as it thought that it was. The promise of the thing has failed to complete him again.
Now the hunger turns into starving. None of the used things are as good as he thought they were. The search begins anew for a thing that will do what it promises, and maybe even help to define the ghost into a person that he desires to be.
In the ghost's dreams, it uses the shiny things and it never needs to hunger after a new thing. In the dreams, the ghost is more than its former incomplete and insubstantial being was before. The dream drives a hunger, and the hunger is all the ghost knows. A hunger for the next shiny new thing that will complete the ghost and make it real and not some specter haunting a world full of things and empty promises and other ghosts that hunger for completeness as well.
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