The Saturday Night Truth

I was reading up on the Nikon D90, drinking ginger tea and lusting for this hot new piece, when I found a beautiful little note pages down in Ken Rockwell's D90 review:

Marketing: 16 page brochure. The photo examples suggest that buying a D90 will earn you a lot of young, colorful, outgoing and active friends. No photos are credited. As usual, most of the example shots are made with lenses like the 85mm f/1.4, 14-24mm f/2.8 and 24-70mm f/2.8 that each cost as least as much as the D90 body alone and weigh several times as much, and would never be carried by someone young and exciting.

Notice that you will never, ever see anyone in a brochure sitting in front of a computer screen dicking with raw images. All you will see is skateboarding and bicycling, and the only time you'll see a person portrayed as cool with any electronic device is if Apple is trying to sell them iPods, or a cell phone company is trying to push wireless devices, which do cause cancer. You also will never see anyone holding a camera, unless it's a camera ad. Cameras and electronics are not cool. Dealing with people in person and participating in, not watching, active sports is where it's at.

Thank you, Ken, for this reminder that spending $1000—money that I don't particularly have—for a new camera body will not make me happy. What is it that makes me happy again?