When I was a teenager, I bought headphones. As many internet-addled 15 year-olds do, I found gaming (Diablo 2) and I found forums, one of which was head-fi.org. It's still running today — it's great, you should go! — but back in the early 2000's it was home to a few thousand people really obsessed with pairing great music with equipment that evoked its Platonic ideal, its highest fidelity.

I got hooked. I started small, as obsessions often do, but at my peak — and remember, I was 15 or 16 years old, with very little disposable income — I had seven or eight pairs of very good, carefully-picked headphones to pair with music tastes that, in retrospect, were not that discerning. I wasn't particularly interested in listening to Brahm's Violin Concerto on my Sennheiser HD600s, nor test the soundstage of a deluxe pressing of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue on a pair of Grado SR125s. My musical world was small and fragile, but I kept yearning to find ways to eke the best possible sound from Radiohead's OK Computer and Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick (I inherited my dad's taste for weird, early 70's prog rock). I would replace one set of headphones with another, constantly trying to contrive the perfect three-minute window to whatever profound truth was awaiting me on the other side.

Being dissatisfied with what you have isn't good, but trying to improve what you have is empowering.

Today, that same quest for perfection continues to propel me forward, but my canvas has changed: the perfect cup of coffee; the right watch; the ideal phone. In fact, I turned that longing for something better into a career (I'm a lucky guy), and the disorder that is my office will attest to that fact that I don't remain contented for long. Part of that is the job itself — I'm always testing a new phone — but part is something else, a driving need to find the right phone, the right experience to fit into my life.

What I didn't realize until now, though, was that with every new Android phone I now immediately try to recreate the same experience. Call it the minimalist in me — really, call it getting older — but I've pared down my digital life to 20 or so apps and services, and now use the same home screen layout (a saved Nova Launcher backup) on every phone.