I think the failure of both of these articles is that they imbue things with meaning without considering that doing so is a choice.
Curtis buys "the best" things so that the things he owns reflect back an ethos of caring about the things you build, making choices deliberately and carefully, and being able to rely completely on what one owns.
Moxie buys "the worst" things so that the things he owns reflect back an ethos of focusing on people and experiences over material acquisition, and having a life of serendipity and unexpected but gratifying hardship.
Neither of those are wrong, but the mistake is to believe that the items themselves carry that connotation. They don't. Curtis could carefully select a perfect spoon from the 50 cent thrift store spoon bin and that spoon would still be "the best" and reflect his values. Moxie could win the lottery, buy a yacht, and run it into a jetty without a care in the world and that yacht would be "the worst" according to his principles.
Conversely, Curtis could feel obliged to use some $1,000 parachute material daypack perfectly designed to carry his equisitely selected pen and paper when what he feels like right then is grabbing the pretty purple bag because he is an unwitting slave to having his stuff reflect his higher principles. And, likewise, Moxie might refuse to be caught dead behind the wheel of a BMW even though it turns out he would love the experience of roadtripping it in with friends and the way it feels cruising down the Interstate at night because having it would mean "selling out".
Curtis and Moxie can still both end up slaves to their things because they've given them totemic power without realizing it.
The trick is to realize that we can choose to apply meaning to things, or not, and we can give and take it when we want.
My take is that contrary to Curtis, Moxie is exaggerating or highlighting some extreme instances of "the worst" to make his point. I doubt he actually systematically goes out of his way to buy the worst stuff, as his point is to not care that much about stuff.
For the longest time I had this crappy serving spoon that I got in college. It was flimsy and would bend almost to the point of breaking every time you used it. It made it difficult to use it for its one job of scooping food out of large containers into smaller containers, but still I put up with it for years.
I don’t know why it took me so long to realize I could just, you know, buy another one. Eventually I did, and it’s much more pleasant to use.
I don’t see any particular virtue in burying yourself in daily annoyances out of…what exactly? So you can pretend you’re better than other people because you “don’t care” about material things? So you can play at being a fun-loving free spirit who stomps on their flatware during an impromptu dance party?
You can buy decent stuff and still not need to feel owned by it. That’s an issue that’s all in your head. Pay $50 for a fork but also let it go that your friend might ding it up.
He’s not saying functional though, he says the worst version of something, which usually means crappy and unpleasant. Things like that make your life a little worse every time you use them. If it’s something like a fork that you use a lot every day, that’s just adding a lot of low-grade background unpleasantness to your life that is completely unnecessary.
"The okayest" would have made for a much better article. I get what he means, but it's really not an argument for the worst thing, and I suspect that if pressed, even Moxie wouldn't deliberately e.g. buy a boat with a gaping hole in the bottom! But generally buying an okay version of something, which has no glaring problems and is available right now for a reasonable price, works pretty well.
Perhaps the comparison between cutlery and motorcycles in the article is a little unfair, because (I imagine?) few people develop experience, knowledge and deep insights into cutlery that lead to a sense of blissful freedom, whereas that can probably happen to someone who gradually learns motorcycle maintenance by overcoming a series of practical real-world challenges.
> No matter how much research they do, a partisan of the best might not ever know as much about motorcycles as the partisan of the worst who takes a series of hare-brained cross-country motorcycle trips on a bike that barely runs, and ends up learning a ton about how to fix their constantly breaking bike along the way.
I don't know much about motorbikes, but I do about mountain bikes. Since it's so expensive, your first bike can and almost should be a shitty one, just to validate you like the sport. But once you determined you like it, you're so much better off investing in a good, stable, reliable bike, and go into harder terrain, rather than risking your life on simple trails with a shit bike. For once it will be more fun, but also you'll progress faster with equipment that you already over-class.
If the point is to maximize your enjoyment of life, I think generally speaking it makes sense not to spend on stuff that doesn't matter. But saving your nickels and pennies on stuff you actually enjoy doesn't make any sense, because it will in fact make your experience worse.
When you're buying tools, buy the cheapest one that will do the job. After you use that tool for a while and it breaks (because it's cheap) then go out and buy the best one you can afford, because you're already justified that you use the tool enough to break a cheap one.
Not quite: upgrade tools when they annoy you, not when they break. Almost the same, but you're not left suffering through using stuff that you hate. You'll never spend extra money on tools you don't use, because if you don't use it, you can't get annoyed!
And if something somehow manages to break without annoying you -- perhaps you used it for a truly difficult task -- then you can and probably should go ahead and buy another of the same.
> But once you determined you like it, you're so much better off investing in a good, stable, reliable bike, and go into harder terrain, rather than risking your life on simple trails with a shit bike.
No, no, no - get the worst bike with the worst seat, tires and brakes then instead of merely “doing the hill”, if you even make it to the top, throw your bike down the hill and walk all the way down - see if you go too fast you’ll end up missing the little things nature has in store for you
> Any reasonable person wouldn’t feel liberated by a $50 fork, but constrained by it. [...] is it going to get dropped or stepped on if a dance party erupts in the kitchen?
I've always thought part of the "flex" of owning certain expensive things isn't just that you're rich enough to afford it, but that you're rich enough you don't care about it getting damaged.
Plenty of people could afford to buy a $10,000 watch (if they wanted to save up a bit). Not many people could afford to lose a $10,000 watch.
If you buy a $100 wine glass and a guest drops it by accident, you gotta be ready to laugh it off.
> A whole language can start to develop around not just the consumption of goods, but the consumption of experience: “We did Prague.” “We did Barcelona.”
Couldn't agree more with that statement. I hate that terminology, it maps travel and experience into check-boxes that you ought to complete. I don't know why, but it feels wrong to me.
Even accepting the consumption part as something reasonable that people should do, it still ignores the Time coordinate completely.
The first time I visited Prague, torrential rains had been falling for a while. Half of the city was flooding when I stepped off the bus. I had to wear flip-flops to cross some streets, which looked like shallow paved rivers, otherwise I would have ruined my sneakers. I stayed at my Czech girlfriend's place, a brutalist block built during Russian occupation which fortunately sat on an elevated piece of terrain. We then canoed the Ohře river with some of her friends (perhaps not the brightest idea, given the rains). We were so young.
I have visited Prague a couple more times after that. Each time, everything has been different. The city was no longer flooded. I was with different people. I did actual turism and everything. I ate different things. I was different, myself. I still don't feel I have "done" Prague. And the same goes for the rest of the world.
Charitably, the word "did" implies a more active interaction with a place and its inhabitants than "visited". The latter sounds like a tourist looking at a city like one might observe fish in a fish tank, where to "do" a place sounds like you're diving in and getting wet.
Saying "went to" conveys nothing about whether it was a destination or just a stop on the way.
"Do" doesn't have to be construed in the sense of consuming or aquisition. It's just a word and short old verbs in particularly have thousands of shades of meaning. I can do the laundry, my wife, a watercolor painting, my hair, a steak, and I assure you those are all quite different activities.
How an utterance is interpreted often reveals more about the listener than the speaker.
Uncharitably, "did" implies a box-ticking mindset: when you've "done" Barcelona, you've seen all that's worth seeing and can move onto the next. Even if all you actually did was eat tapas at some tourist trap on Las Ramblas and queue up for Sagrada Familia.
One thing you realize about travel as you get older is that you cannot, in fact, "do" a place: the rustic fishing village on the beach in Thailand you went to 20 years ago is now a rat warren of concrete hotels and package tours that bears no resemblance to what you once saw and experienced, and what's more, your experience now is quite different if you have a wife and kids in tow.
There’s an ad I see a lot for a travel company with a catch line that goes like ‘what do you think you’ll regret more when you’re old, [scene of production of perfume/couture ad in background] the things you didn’t buy [cut to generic-looking sandy beach] or the places you didn’t go?’
Every time I see it, I think ‘well obviously neither, that’s not what people regret’ and I guess I’m just worried that people believe the message of the ad.
What I hate is the implication that there is a correct way to "do" a particular city. It takes all the adventure and serendipity out of travel and reduces each city to a standard and usually bland set of experiences.
I have an appreciation for Moxie's argument but I think the first guy (Dustin) is a bit of a strawman here. As someone who more or less agrees with the "buy nice stuff once so you aren't constantly accumulating shit" mantra, I would never buy a $1000 silverware set. My personal silverware set I think cost maybe $40 because as Moxie mentions, I'm not particularly worried about a fork malfunction.
I have a $200 coffee grinder though. I use it once or twice a day and it's 3 years old, meaning I've paid maybe 10-20c / use over it's life time and it's 20x better than the $50 one I used before it that constantly caused me headaches and was terrible at it's only job which was to grind coffee.
I also don't wanted to be surrounded by other peoples old gross used junk. I'm not a slave to my $40 dollars in silverware and I'm happy every time I used it that I'm not wondering if it was some rat's and cockroaches play thing for 20 years before someone found it behind a refrigerator while cleaning a house and threw it in the good will bin.
> I'm not a slave to my $40 dollars in silverware and I'm happy every time I used it that I'm not wondering if it was some rat's and cockroaches play thing for 20 years before someone found it behind a refrigerator while cleaning a house and threw it in the good will bin.
I assure you that after a good wash there's no permanent damage a roach can possibly do to silverware. I'm not about to throw around the word slave in regard to silverware or consumerism, but you've fallen for the "used is unclean" myth that's partially contributed to the absurd amount of waste in the world.
Yes, we all make these decisions in one way or another... but this blog post is in a response to another post that extols the virtues of always seeking "the best" to the point of claiming that everything he owns is "the best."
If you value silverware of a specific quality that's fine, but insisting that everything you own be the best feels like it exists somewhere between banal and foolish.
Seeking out the extremes on either end feels like navel-gazing, I agree... and I think finding a middle-ground was the purpose of the author's counter-examples.
He is explicitly advocating for the worst. That's the literal title. If you made a spectrum of options, he's advocating to go as extreme on that spectrum as you can.
According to him, anything beyond the good will used bin is the wrong choice. He's advocating for an extreme.
Yeah I can see that, I guess I wasn't taking it as literally.
> But the worst counters that if we’d like to de-emphasize things that we don’t want to be the focus of our life, we probably shouldn’t start by obsessing over them. That we don’t simplify by getting the very best of everything, we simplify by arranging our lives so that those things don’t matter one way or the other.
My take away from the conclusion was "care less about stuff" and I interpreted the counter-examples as more demonstration of why "the best" doesn't always literally mean "the best" and that sometimes "the worst" ends up better in a different way.
I'm not sure I understand the scale from exuberant consumerism to rodent play thing. I think your middle ground is still just a singular point at the consumerism extreme.
One could argue that "old gross junk" is just another strawman. Not something that can really be quantified outside of your personal feelings.
I think we might be better off if we came to terms with the fact that old gross junk may actually be all we have in the future if we continue our current way of living.
Old gross junk isn't all I have right now. So I'm happy to take the option. I guess I'm supposed to be embarrassed by that according to certain people? I'm not at all.
I don't really have a comment except some random associations having to do how people feel about objects and processes. It sounds to me that Dustin Curtis and the HN people responding favorably are searching for material objects that give a certain feeling.
I first heard the word Numinous used by Terrance McKenna to describe objects with spirit:
numinous, adjective, having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity,"the strange, numinous beauty of this ancient landmark"
Upon further research, I found a related Japanese word "Tsukumogami":
"tsukumogami are tools that have acquired a kami or spirit. Today, the term is generally understood to be applied to virtually any object "that has reached its 100th birthday and thus become alive and self-aware", though this definition is not without controversy.
Robert Pirsig wrote a book related to these concepts:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values is a book by Robert M. Pirsig first published in 1974. It is a work of fictionalized autobiography, and is the first of Pirsig's texts in which he explores his "Metaphysics of Quality".
Finally I once picked up a stainless steel spoon at a Portsmouth, Virginia thrift store for a quarter while in the Navy that had "NYC Rikers Island" engraved on it. That was my favorite spoon for a long time.
"Any reasonable person wouldn’t feel liberated by a $50 fork, but constrained by it." I mean define "reasonable person".
I feel content is just about being divisive now-a-days. Moxie is someone I always put on a pedestal for his seemingly altruistic values. But this content seems to be a passive aggressive attack consumerism (nothing wrong with that) through Dustin Curtis, which in turn seems kinda personal.
I don't know when we stopped: "live and let live".
As with most things, the real answer is somewhere in the middle.
Obsess over extremes of design or performance if that's what you need. Cheap out on the dollar store version if it gets the job done. Buy the middle-of-the-road version if that's the best value.
The "best" of anything can be defined along many axes (price, performance, design, durability, weight, etc), and compromise is usually necessary. It's strange that both authors abandon this nuance.
Neither extreme makes sense as an absolute, however I think there is more truth in "the worst" or maybe "the ok" or "the threshold after which diminishing returns take a nosedive", we certainly shouldn't be owned by our possessions and the vast majority of people can't afford the best of everything.
However for select items it is worth taking "the best" route - the key is to not be owned by them even then, find the best item (for a usually more subjective definition of "best") and use the fuck out of it, because that's what it's for. Identifying when it's worth getting "the best" is the trick to learn, but it should be a low number of items.
I think the problems comes when "best" is distorted into something highly biased towards aesthetics, taste or status - which is a consumerism trick - I'm not a brutalist, I understand aesthetics are important to the human experience, but when those attributes become the main focus people start behaving weirdly, and not necessarily in a healthy way.
Ha, the best part of all this is due to these posts that cutlery set is being copied by a Chinese manufacturer and will be on Amazon next week so others that share “the worst” philosophy will be able to buy it for 20 bucks for a set of 4 and use it to play spoon drums all day long.
Far be it from me to suggest that the $50 fork is an artificially constructed edifice set up for the sole purpose of being tilted at, but the $50 buys an entire place setting of five items, not just the fork.
A set by the late David Mellor, the British designer who invented the pillar box, the traffic light and the bus shelter as well as arguably the 20th century’s most iconic cutlery, will set you back twice that much.
$50 for a place setting is not that outrageous for something of quality. My one suggestion would be to get twice as much silverware as you think you need because somehow pieces end up going missing. Our pattern was discontinued and when I looked up getting replacement pieces, it was going to be some ridiculously large amount per piece (I think $40 or $50—whatever it was was high enough that I’ve been trying to talk my wife into just getting a whole new set of silverware with at least 12 place settings, but better 16).
> My one suggestion would be to get twice as much silverware as you think you need because somehow pieces end up going missing.
This is not the way. No!
Perfection is to get one of each type of cutlery per person. Then if something goes missing you get, no, not a replacement—you get the very best household metal detector. You do meticulous research—probably using the 50-book Searchum Arcanum collection, leather-bound—meditate on your findings, and then finally ask for a second opinion from the best person you know (skip the last step if you are the best person you know).
Maybe this is a dumb question, but why is it so important that all of your flatware match that you would replace your full set because you can't replace a few pieces with ones that match?
50$ for a place sounds insane to me. That's 800$ just for your set of 16. My whole set of 12 set me back 80€ and it still works six years later; if it ceases to do so at some point, I'll gladly get another one. I'm not saying you should buy cutlery where you'll eat paint after the second dishwasher run, but you can get something solid and nice looking for far less.
I'm much more in favor of the original compared to the cynical response.
The original focused on owning few items of ultimate quality. When you read about the examples, they are not status items, they are "best" in their utility and durability. Owning few items of high quality is not snobbery, I consider it common sense.
It's more sustainable. It rewards good product design and craftsmanship. I hope we can all agree that expecting a towel to actually dry is not an elitist thought.
The only matter worth discussing is whether you should obsess in finding the best in every single category of products that you buy. No, probably not. But you can make the counter point that this means that apparently we don't have reliable reviews. Because if we did, somebody else would have done that for you.
Meh. Own what you want. I get personal satisfaction out of having all of my items be high quality. The hand feel, the weight, the craftsmanship. I feel comforted and at home when surrounded by "the best."
Just because I own nice things doesn't mean that they are the "focus of my life," but rather that I simply appreciate owning nice things.
I feel comforted when I buy nice things, use them however I feel like, and have them hold up for years.
I feel annoyed when I own something that so nice, but otherwise useless, that I don't feel that I can get rid of it and so I carry it around for years.
Me too. I love my Vitamix. But I've never had cutlery break. In fact, I frequently use the same forks, spoons, and knives that I used when I was 5 years old. They look like shit too.
I think Seneca said it best: “It is a great man that can treat his earthenware as if it was silver, and a man who treats his silver as if it was earthenware is no less great.”
My life is more similar to that of a "partisan of the worst", so I sympathize with his general sentiment. However, this is full of strawmans.
For example, this is from the Dustin Curtis post he's criticizing:
> Reasonable people would probably not spend the time to read a book about the history of flatware, buy twenty sets, and test the feeling of each metal utensil against their teeth. That sounds completely insane. But who cares about reasonable people?
Moxie reduces that to just "internet research [which] isn’t necessarily the same as understanding".
Curtis buys "the best" things so that the things he owns reflect back an ethos of caring about the things you build, making choices deliberately and carefully, and being able to rely completely on what one owns.
Moxie buys "the worst" things so that the things he owns reflect back an ethos of focusing on people and experiences over material acquisition, and having a life of serendipity and unexpected but gratifying hardship.
Neither of those are wrong, but the mistake is to believe that the items themselves carry that connotation. They don't. Curtis could carefully select a perfect spoon from the 50 cent thrift store spoon bin and that spoon would still be "the best" and reflect his values. Moxie could win the lottery, buy a yacht, and run it into a jetty without a care in the world and that yacht would be "the worst" according to his principles.
Conversely, Curtis could feel obliged to use some $1,000 parachute material daypack perfectly designed to carry his equisitely selected pen and paper when what he feels like right then is grabbing the pretty purple bag because he is an unwitting slave to having his stuff reflect his higher principles. And, likewise, Moxie might refuse to be caught dead behind the wheel of a BMW even though it turns out he would love the experience of roadtripping it in with friends and the way it feels cruising down the Interstate at night because having it would mean "selling out".
Curtis and Moxie can still both end up slaves to their things because they've given them totemic power without realizing it.
The trick is to realize that we can choose to apply meaning to things, or not, and we can give and take it when we want.