Or we would if we could afford them. To fully understand our collective shock over our pulse-less economy, take a good look at the upgrade cycle that we’ve been gleefully riding for at least three decades. Until last year, if you were living the 2.3 version of Life, you had your eyes on version 2.4 and odds were pretty good that you’d get it. Maybe on an overextended credit card, or from a loan that you really couldn’t afford. But you’d get it.

Now, if you’re living Life 2.3, your ambition is to avoid Life 2.2.

Forget the upgrade. The game now is avoiding the downgrade. This is grim and troubling, in part, because so much of our consumer culture is built around the enticements of the Better.

Entire corporate strategies target the bottomless American appetite for the upgrade. Holders of American Express’s regular old green card might eventually get an invitation to upgrade to a gold card. (More privileges, more perks! For a fee, of course.) And once you’ve swiped that baby for a while, you might get an invitation to upgrade to platinum. (Yet more privileges, yet more perks! And higher fees.) If you behave yourself with the platinum card, you could join the purportedly exclusive ranks of black card holders, who pay a one-time initiation fee of $5,000 and then $2,500 annually.

All of these slabs of plastic do basically the same thing  help you acquire stuff  but they also confer ever larger increments of cachet on the holder. This allows you to upgrade your material life while signaling, to anyone who can see you in midpurchase, just how upgraded your material life already is.

No company has exploited America’s upgrade fever quite as deftly as Apple. The company is one of the very few that has kept most prices at prerecession levels while managing to report profits, as it did last week. Of course, Apple makes wonderful computers, software and gadgets, but is also brilliant at making everything you bought from it nine months ago seem slow, fusty and passé.