This is surprisingly hard for some people (including myself) to do.
I make my work high quality, and I want to spend the time I have using things that are well designed and well thought out. In some small way I hope that seeing those things will inspire me to keep my quality up. It’s extra work, but I think that allowing things in one area of my life to be “kinda shitty” will creep into other areas of my life.
How I’ve dealt with this is just doing less. I live in a smaller, more maintainable house. I drive nice, but not luxury, cars that I can afford to keep maintained (both in the sense of time and money), and while I have hobbies (wife says too many), I go for nice gear that is a good value and easily maintainable, that I can resell if I need to.
That’s not to say the most expensive is the best, but I find Kinda shitty comes with the cost of our initial research, purchase, downtime after it breaks or just a less safe/enjoyable experience, trying to get out of the first thing by selling it with a low resale value, then re-purchasing a nicer thing.
I guess my metric is: if I can’t afford to pay for it in cash and don’t have the time or money to maintain it, I probably shouldn’t be buying it - or I should be getting rid of something if I do.
I make my work high quality, and I want to spend the time I have using things that are well designed and well thought out. In some small way I hope that seeing those things will inspire me to keep my quality up. It’s extra work, but I think that allowing things in one area of my life to be “kinda shitty” will creep into other areas of my life.
How I’ve dealt with this is just doing less. I live in a smaller, more maintainable house. I drive nice, but not luxury, cars that I can afford to keep maintained (both in the sense of time and money), and while I have hobbies (wife says too many), I go for nice gear that is a good value and easily maintainable, that I can resell if I need to.
That’s not to say the most expensive is the best, but I find Kinda shitty comes with the cost of our initial research, purchase, downtime after it breaks or just a less safe/enjoyable experience, trying to get out of the first thing by selling it with a low resale value, then re-purchasing a nicer thing.
I guess my metric is: if I can’t afford to pay for it in cash and don’t have the time or money to maintain it, I probably shouldn’t be buying it - or I should be getting rid of something if I do.