Shuffle Guilt

I got my first mp3 player during college. It was an off-brand, but it worked, and I liked it. I later got an Ipod which was then top of the line. It was stolen within two months of moving to LA, and I did not replace it until recently. I now have the Shuffle, which is a tiny little marvel. It's one fourth the size of a saltine cracker, and I love it. You can play the songs straight through, but what one mainly does is let them play at random, hence the name. You're not always going to want to hear the song that comes up, even though it is presumably one you like

When I skip a song like that, I feel guilty. I don't quite know why that is. As I said to a friend, it's as if I'm letting someone down. Is it the artist? They don't know me or that I'm in possession of their music. If they were to be let down, it would be if I did not buy their music, and even then it would be at people in general and not me specifically. I don't know that they would have any real emotional investment in what becomes of music once paid for.

Is it the Shuffle itself that I've disappointed? It's not sentient, although it can talk and does, telling me after I press a button what the song title and artist is. If it were sentient, however, would it be plunged into an existential crisis every time I skipped a song which I have solemnly charged it with storing? I know that if I were led to believe that a job I was doing didn't matter at all to the people who hired me and paid me to do it, my morale would suffer terribly.

Maybe the one I am failing is none other than myself. By not listening to a song which I decided I liked, am I failing yet again to see something through? This is the only real possibility, and yet I wonder if I'm granting far too much gravity to the situation. A person's wants change from moment to moment, and if I don't feel like listening to a particular track one moment, that's not to say I won't want to hear it soon enough. After all, it didn't rise to the rarified heights of my most played list and thus onto my Shuffle for no reason. I guess there's nothing to worry about here after all. I'll go back to wringing my hands over imagined health crises.