why do i want to buy a macbook air/pro?

Good for you, being more self-aware. I believe self-awareness is a HUGE benefit of being pornography and masturbation free: you are knowledgeable about your feelings and emotional drivers that porn used to medicate over.

I used to sell expensive equipment as a career; people buy emotionally, then justify it afterwards with reasons. You have made an emotional decision, to get that device to feel better about yourself, to appear cool in public, to enjoy the hours of discovering the latest OSX UX enhancements. You for sure have a list of reasons in your own rationale. But there is no difference in what that item is: for you it’s a laptop, for some other man it’s a $7K Rolex, for someone else it’s a $130K luxury car.

We buy for a number of reasons, whether or not we 'need' them, that's for sure.

On writing a book, I wrote a self-published book last Fall, and really enjoyed the experience. I too was tempted to buy software or other 'tools' that were really unnecessary. For example, using a simple Word Processor that gave me a word count was fine. (I used MS Word FWIW). What I would say is that you need to spend the money (it runs into the many hundreds if over a thousand $) on quality editing by a professional. The other thing is to spend the money (several hundred $) on a quality cover. Authors cheap-out on these two things, and it really, really shows.

 

A few years ago for work I was forced to adopt an additional computer (a powerful MacBook) as some video software I had to run only ran on OSX.

After some 10 or 15 years in Windows, wow was it difficult to adjust to the new OS, and was very frustrated (this was about 2014 or 2015) with the fact that MS Outlook was missing some key features in its calendaring, and some other nit-picky things. To this day I still wonder why oh why did Apple in its wisdom reject the alt key in favor of some crazy symbol key, and have a whole set of different keystrokes for common commands. The file system still baffles me to this day (I have an older MacBook Air sitting in my closet as I write this).

On the book, the goals I had have been achieved much above and beyond my expectations; making money off the effort was NOT one of them, that's for sure. (FWIW at the end it cost about $3K to publish, and the income to-date has been on the order of $400 after some 4 months, so break-even may not come for what another two years!)

A ton of effort, completely worth it, and something I can say I can check off the bucket list. Feel free to PM me ("Conversations" on this platform) for additional detail if you'd like to take it offline.