| > A few years after leaving office, Richard Nixon mentioned that the richest people in the world are some of the unhappiest, because they can afford to never struggle. Except for those who choose a cause. Bill Gates comes to mind. > You feel that, gee, isn’t it just great to have enough money to afford to live in a very nice house, to be able to play golf, to have nice parties, to wear good clothes, to travel if you want to? If that's the vacuous extent of your life, the problem doesn't lie with the money. > Something you can easily afford brings less joy than something you must save and struggle for. “The man who can buy anything he covets values nothing that he buys,” Dawson wrote. Except that it's not true. I was easily able to afford the air fryer that I bought two years ago. Every single time I use it, I'm amazed at how easy it makes preparing certain meals, and I am thankful to the friend who recommended it. Every single thing I buy is carefully thought out (sometimes over months) to improve a specific part of my life. And every single thing I own is valued because it has a specific purpose. Dawson may have thought he'd stumbled upon some great wisdom, but all he was actually doing was looking in a mirror. > Your brain doesn’t want stuff. It doesn’t even want new stuff. It wants to engage in the process and anticipation of getting new stuff. Uhh wuuuuut? That's the most bizarre thing I've ever heard. What's the point in getting "stuff" over and over? You're not going to have any use for it. > When you get a $10,000 car you dream of the 20,000 car. Uhh no. I have a $5000 car and have absolutely no desire to buy another one until this one becomes too expensive to fix. I could buy a $50,000 car tomorrow, but what would be the point? All I'm seeing in this article are confessions of a greedy person. |
> Your brain doesn’t want stuff. It doesn’t even want new stuff. It wants to engage in the process and anticipation of getting new stuff.
On the contrary, I find myself avoiding hedonistic consumption more and more as the years go by. I scrutinize planned purchases for months, even if I can easily afford them, and I do wish the the world was less of a place where the solution to every problem seems to be to purchase something.