The other day, as my team at work was eating our traditional holiday Qdoba lunch, our boss asked was what we were planning to get ourselves for Christmas (at 32, I’m the youngest person in the group, so this is mostly adults with grown children or older adults without children with two other exceptions beside myself). We bandied back and forth a bit, talking about upgrades to home theater systems, parts for a boat someone is building, good suppliers for smart home appliances or gear until the conversation began to stymie and I tossed out my answer. Since my PC is about eight years old and can’t play more and more modern games (the latest updates to Cyberpunk2077 upgraded it out from underneath my ability to play it), I’ve been saving up for a new high-powered gaming computer and will just be tossing a bit of money that way rather than buying myself anything specific. One of my coworkers joked about Gamer LEDs, water cooling systems, and overclocking computers but, once we’d gotten all the jokes out, I said I was planning to buy a computer strong enough that I wouldn’t need to overclock it for the stuff I wanted to do since I could just save a bit longer and not potentially shorten the lifespan of my computer by putting too much stress on it. My boss commented that I’m so practical, which was probably just an offhand comment in his mind, but it’s been stuck in my mind ever since.