The Problem With Buying Stuff

April 26, 2020

One of the things I’ve strived to do in my life is to limit the amount of stuff I have and the niceness of whatever that stuff that I’m using is with varying degrees of success. I’ve had mixed success on tech - I’ve bought nice computers and phones and whatnot, though that’s slowing down now. I’ve been pretty good with housing - my wife and I live in a very small apartment that’s pretty cheap and we don’t have much stuff to fit in there.

My rationale for trying to limit the niceness of the stuff that I buy is that in my experience whenever you make an upgrade to a nicer thing, whatever that thing may be, you set a new floor on what you consider acceptable. For example , let’s say you currently own a full size mattress. It’s fine, but you sure would love some extra leg space. So you buy a queen sized mattress. You’ve now set the floor for what’s acceptable when it comes to mattresses. If you were to be forced to use a full sized mattress again, my experience is that you would now find it significantly less comfortable than you did before, because your new floor of acceptable sizes for a mattress has been bumped up to queen.

The reasonable counter to that idea is that you set the new floor because the new thing is nice, and you’re that much happier because you have this new nice thing. But I’ve found that I’m actually not that much happier. As a matter of fact, often these sorts of upgrades make no discernible difference in my level of happiness at all*.

But what they do do is remove my ability to be happy with whatever calibre of thing I had before I upgraded. So, in reality, getting better stuff limits the avenues I have because my standard has been raised, and going below my standard causes active unhappiness.

I was making breakfast this morning and I thought of a decent way of conceptualizing the issue.

Imagine we all have a sort of comfort bubble, surrounded by a plastic shell. The plastic shell represents things that impede on your comfort - small house, old car, noisy neighbors, etc etc. When you buy a bigger house, the assumption is that the plastic shell is pushed farther away and thus you’re permanently more comfortable. The problem is that while that shell has been pushed away, your bubble is always expanding to fill whatever space it can - so in a small amount of time you’ll be just as close to that “discomfort” shell as before.

What I’m trying to get at here is that in my experience I’m always operating at the same level of general discomfort. That’s true of the time of my life where I lived with two other people in a studio apartment and the time of my life where I had my own one bedroom apartment. It’s different things that are causing the discomfort, but it’s always the same amount of discomfort. It makes trying to solve the individual discomforts seem less important because other discomforts will just take their place.

I think this is caused by the fact that many of us are always searching for the problem to be fixed. And there are always problems to be fixed, so that’s what our mental energy is focused on. Fix one problem and a new problem will present itself because your mind is actively hunting for problems to fix.

I have no answer to that problem so there’s no advice in this blog post. Just an observation of a personal phenomena.

* There are obvious exceptions to this rule. If you have two people sleeping on a twin mattress, that is uncomfortable enough that it’s probably making you not want to sleep with that other person, and upgrading to a queen or full or whatever mattress will have a meaningful impact on your happiness. It’s all relative, man.