The phone that is still fine

At the end of the year, every shop window on the main street in El Arish says the same thing in a different way. Your phone is old. Your screen is small. You are missing something.

It is a persuasive message, and it is meant to be. Its job is to make a perfectly working object feel like a small embarrassment, and to make the gap between what we have and what is on offer feel like a lack.

A few streets away, a group of men sit out on plastic chairs most evenings. Their phones are cracked, outdated, held together with tape in one case. Nobody comments. Nobody is comparing. They are passing one phone around to look at a grandson's photo, and then going back to the conversation.

The market and the street are saying opposite things.

The market is built to find the edge of what we own and point at it. That is not wicked; it is simply what selling does. A shop that told people they had enough would not last long.

The people around us work differently. A neighbour lends a tyre pump rather than suggesting we buy one. A friend says the old phone takes perfectly good photos. A family shares one car without anyone feeling poor. In company, the question of whether we have enough tends to answer itself, and the answer is usually yes.

Both voices will keep talking. What matters is which one we spend our evenings listening to.