Before heading to Europe I got a new phone, my first in six years. I replaced my old Motorola with a Samsung. Not this year's Samsung, mind you, last year's, and in a stupid color (lavender), but that doesn't matter because it's covered in a big honking Otterbox so I can drop the thing on the ground and not worry about it. Of course I got last year's because they didn't charge me any money for it, they just had to lock us in to another couple of years with the mobile carrier, which we were gonna do anyway.
I had always been one of those people who charges my phone more or less incessantly. If it's no up above 70-80%, I'd start to get nervous. If you can have it at 100%, why not, I figured. This was mostly driven by a couple of near death experiences with the Motorola, including one in 2022 around the time of Natalie's graduation which came from letting my battery get too low.
Turns out, keeping your phone fully charged all the way doesn't help it last longer. In fact, the opposite is true. I won't attempt to explain the physics of it all because even if I could string all those words together I wouldn't actually understand them. Google that shit. Mary had told me this but of course I had to look it up myself because, sadly, I don't always trust her to be 100% authoritative. But if she says something and then the interweb confirms it, that seals the deal.
Of course the underlying issues here are clear: I have a lack of overall trust in the universe and a tendency to overcompensate through compulsive behavior correlated with simple numerical metrics (how charged is my phone?), but that doesn't necessarily serve me well. Had I managed my battery better, maybe I could have held onto that Motorola for 7 or 8 years and thereby avoided going to that store for longer.
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