Amidst everything going on, I appear to have won the small lottery that is “getting the opportunity to buy a Switch 2 via my Nintendo Online account.” I’ll admit that I completely forgot that I’d signed up to particpate way back when they announced that it would be a thing, mostly because I saw the requirements for eligibility and I’m not eligible according to them. I don’t share any of my data with Nintendo, I don’t get advertisements or emails, and there is nothing in existence that would convince me to willingly give a company my data in exchange for a chance to pay that company for a product I’m only interested in purchasing if it doesn’t inconvenience me. When I realized that those were required, I put it out of my mind and resigned myself to taking a lackluster stab at ordering one from a retailer online, which I forgot about until it was too late at night to bother with that. Which really goes to show how unexcited I was for the Switch 2. Still, when I got the email telling me that I could now purchase one (within a seventy-two hour window) and verified that this was not some attempt at hacking my Nintendo Online account (which it could still be since my only way to verify that this was correct was looking for other people getting emails from that same address and this could just be a giant campaign meant to steal the credit card and account information of a lot of Nintendo Online users that has fooled tons of people), I decided to wait a bit to actually buy it.

Not much has actually changed since I decided to wait for a moment of convenience and I’m not willing to commit a few hundred dollars on a luxury item without deeply considering it. There’s a lot more I could be spending my entertainment budget on, though I will admit that it’s overflowing a bit more than usual because I’ve only paid for Final Fantasy 14 so far this year and that’s a relatively low cost compared to my “one and a half games per month” budget allocation. Nothing else exactly comes to mind, of course, since I’m not really looking forward to any games since I haven’t even played any of the games I pre-ordered that have dropped so far this year on account of spending all my time on FF14, so that specific argument doesn’t exactly hold a lot of water right now as I could buy a Switch 2, a controller, and a carrying case all without emptying out my entertainment budget (I really haven’t bought a lot of stuff lately since I replayed a lot of games in the latter half of last year and have only really played Final Fantasy 14 so far this year). Which means this might be the moment of convenience I was waiting for. I don’t know. I’m having a difficult time pulling the trigger on this for all my usual reasons (I struggle to spend sums of money over one hundred dollars) and my general lack of urgency around buying a Switch 2.

Honestly, at this point, the only compelling reason I can think of to buy one now rather than wait until I actively want on is economic uncertainty. Who know what things will look like a month from now, so maybe I should buy this while it’s not an unmanageable expense. Maybe I should get one right now before Trump figures out how to immediately collase the world economy rather than continue to slowly slide it toward the garbage pile like he is right now (and it is really only going slowly because the so-called economic powerhouses of the stock market don’t actually believe that Trump is serious about what he’s doing and probably won’t be until long after all the normal folks are unable to find anything that is even remotely touched by any kind of Chinese production and its related tariffs). Maybe I should get one while they actually exist because who knows what kind of disaster is going to strike next, perhaps eroding the world’s ability to actually move products around the globe. There’s a lot of potential futures where it just becomes impossible to get my hands on one and while I’m not certain that any particular one of them is likely, there are enough that one of them happening is a significant enough risk to consider. I don’t know. Acting now rather than waiting for an unknown future feels like the move to make these days. Even if it feels a little bit hedonistic and lacking in foresight. After all, I’ll only know if it was lacking in foresight once it is too late to do anything but stick with the decision I make today.

I am writing this last paragraph with my shopping cart open, my items selected, and my cursor in the “enter your credit card number” field. I don’t know when it will get this convenient again and it might, actually, be really nice to be able to play that new 3D Donkey Kong game when it comes out. After all, Donkey Kong 64 was my first N64 game and I have a lot of fond memories of waking up at five in the morning in the week after Christmas to play it before anyone else woke up. They were very peaceful mornings where I got to do something fun without disruption, a very rare occurrence in my childhood, so it’s difficult not to want to create a similar feeling for myself in this day and age. Maybe I won’t move everything from my Switch to my Switch 2 when I get it up, but I can’t deny how nice it might be to lay in bed and play some new 3D Donkey Kong on a lazy summer morning. Maybe this is the brain fog talking, or maybe this is me finally yielding to nostalgia for once in my life (maybe because this is the only bit of nostalgia I’ve ever experienced that wasn’t bittersweet), but I think I’m going to look back at my life some day and wish I’d spent more time enjoying myself than trying to outmaneuver every possible bad future I can imagine for myself. So yeah, I’m going to indulge for no other reason than “because I can” and let whatever happens happen. Now all I’ve gotta do is hope that the package tracking will be accurate so I can be around to receive it when it gets here since a Switch 2 being mailed to me seems like exactly the sort of package that would get stolen from me. Hopefully it’s in some kind of discrete, non-Nintendo packaging. Three weeks and counting, according to the estimated delivery date (as of writing this, anyway). We’ll see how it goes.