Money as a proxy: against calling the purchase of the cheapest and most convenient as rational

Money is an interesting all-around proxy for value.

Let’s say that you plan on staying medium-term in a city. Let’s say for 10 months.

So you find a barely furnished apartment with a suitable location and sign a rental agreement. Now, let’s say that lately, possibly as a by-product of growing up, you have begun to notice how surroundings in the places you frequent the most can have an effect on the overall agreeableness of your existence. That they work like a background frame for your day-to-day and colour your moods in very subtle ways.

You receive the keys, you open the door and you find yourself face to face with this barely furnished apartment. It. has some potential.

Now you have at least three options regarding how you’re going to make it look like a home:

1. You fill it with anything you can dig up from the local charity shop and the local online marketplace. Anything that will perform its function and that looks relatively decent will do.
2. You furnish it with the most convenient option available, something affordable and functional that provides a fair sense of aesthetic coherence to the place (ie. IKEA).
3. You invest in the place. You carefully look for furniture and objects that speak to you. You look for things that match the vision that you have of what you would actually like it to look like. You can even go further and go straight to digging into your mind and heart to see what your ideal home looks like, and use that as your overarching criterium. If you find beautiful things in shops that snatch your attention like love at first-sight, you buy them even if they are rather costly.

With option 1 you are definitely saving a substantial amount of expenses. You buy second-hand furniture and kitchenware for very low prices and, in no time, you have a functional home: you can cook, eat, sit, sleep, work and invite people over. Moreover, you feel proud that you made use of foresight, since inevitably you will have to move out of this place and get rid of all these things. So you save even more money, time and energy because you won’t need to organise any transportation for your things, since you don’t want them anyway. And even if you don’t manage to sell them, you didn’t spend much money on them in the first place, so it’s not a big loss.

In option 2 the situation is similar. However, the difference is that the process is much more streamlined, albeit significantly more costly. The process consists in taking a trip to IKEA, choosing the affordable versions of each thing you need, all of which are fairly neutral and pleasant looking. Then IKEA ships it to you. You put it together with the tools that come included in the package and you are done. Now, your home is functional and there is an aesthetic coherence that you find more agreeable and calming than a mishmash of haphazardly selected things that most probably will hardly create a coherent whole, be it in shape, colour, texture or overall style.

Nonetheless, it feels all too generic and there’s a slight bitter taste in your mouth from having taking the easy road and contributed to a multi-national conglomerate’s domination in the furniture retail market. In a way, given how generic it is, it is fair to say that even though pleasant-looking and functional, your home doesn’t feel like it’s completely yours. On top of that, when moving out, you will want to sell most of what you bought, because the overall cost was non-trivial, so there will definitely be a few headaches in the process.

Now, with option 3, the costs seem even greater. Even though sometimes you find great pieces at bargain prices, it does take time to find them. And some of them might even need some extra work to fix the flaws that made them a bargain in the first place. But in general, good quality objects tend to be expensive, even the vintage ones because their original price can sometimes be exorbitant. And the cost can become even greater as you continue acquiring love-at-first sight things to make your home even more pleasant to you as the weeks and months pass.

These purchases may seem compulsive or whimsical, but the essence of a love-at-first time, valuable find situation is that if you don’t decide quickly, the opportunity will be gone. For example, you find a beautiful tray and a set of cups three months into your stay and you buy them for a relatively high price. Now in your home they become a source of pride for you. You look at the tray with its skilfully, tastefully designed shape and its unique woodgrain and you feel a sense of satisfaction. The same happens with the cups. Every-time you drink your morning beverage, this ritual that repeats almost every single day becomes less frictional. The friction in this case is that you don’t have to use a cup that you don’t like or that you don’t find any value in. On the contrary, this tiny piece of the full-picture of your daily routine will now feel always just right. It will be daily amplified by your consistent exposition to the inexhaustible liking that you have for that cup. It is an ephemeral encounter that ever so slightly supports the personal idea that you know what you like, that things are never merely things, and that you consistently aim to make life just a bit better, detail by detail.

And this is just regarding tiny single objects. In the bigger picture, you exercise a more deliberate choosing process of what populates your home. You contemplate the reasons why one option is better than the other. And you test whether what you thought you wanted in your mind actually stays the same once you have it in real life, you develop your taste and your self-knowledge. You also develop a sense of what makes something be of good quality as you are bound to make wrong choices here and there, where your acquisition turns out to be a disappointment or break in no time. And not least important, you become more discerning on whether a thing is actually necessary or it’s just a whim of the moment (sometimes in the zeal of desiring something, we come up with momentarily convincing explanations for why we need something, and then after some days, we realise that it was completely unnecessary). You also become more wise about the fact that some things may seem of great value to you, but it is also important to keep in mind how they will combine with the space they’re going to join and everything else that is already there. The truth is that many times beautiful, useful things just don’t belong to a certain place and you might have to learn this lesson by making these mistakes.

Now, back to money. If you were to think solely about a compromise between expenses and the value of what you buy, option 2 would probably be the first one that comes to mind. You buy things that are not downright unpleasant to use and have around, and you don’t spend loads of money on things that you know will be a burden by the end of your 10 month stay.

However, I have a case to make for option 3, aka the splurging option, which depends upon a highly selective but more often than not fallible judgment.

With option 3, you bought some expensive things, and you experimented with your sense of taste. Sometimes you end up full of regret as you realised that what you acquired wasn’t at all to your liking, that it feels like a perpetual stain in your environment, a reminder of an important amount of money wasted. Some other times, after a couple weeks of cohabiting with a thought-through acquisition, you bask in the pure delight that you made the perfect choice, that this is something that you love and were someone to ask you what your ideal home would be, you would certainly include that thing in it. This can extend for example to clothing, where you experiment with different pieces and learn mistake by mistake, delight by delight what works for you and feels just right and what doesn’t.

So by the end of your stay, you look back at how much money you threw away on all this trial and error process. Compared to your option 2 version, you have a significant lower amount of money, you had in total less available time to be productive or for leisure, as you did spend more of it buying things, testing them, getting rid of them or not, and now you have the burden of deciding whether to spend even more money to ship them all to your new destination or to get rid of them and somehow recoup at least a fraction of what you spent. Should you feel guilty about this? Should you feel irresponsible, like you are just snapping out of a materialistic consumerist frenzy now that reality hits? Surely it would seem that you didn’t make the best use of it, that you could have been wiser with your hard earned money and think long-term instead of succumbing to short-term gratification.

But that’s the problem. You would be using money as the chief proxy for assessing the quality your decision-making. What about all the gains related to self-knowledge and a more discerning ability to choose quality over quantity that I listed before? Isn’t that an almost invaluable gain? In reality, it’s not such a complicated idea: “Sure, I wasted a lot of money on mistakes when I could have chosen the convenient, risk-free option, but it was worth it. I lost in numbers, but I gained a lot in something very hard to quantify, and no-one can take that from me. Of all that money, only a fraction of it was actually destined for the objects themselves, the rest went to teaching myself these lessons.”. All these gains are surely not represented by money. In other words, money is not a quantifiable proxy for them. So you are left with having to count the gains of your decision by including your financial bottom-line only as one of the many proxies that you use to employ. You evaluate your satisfaction on your choices and how you would do them all over again, share the mentality that supported them to others, or let it inform future mentalities that you adopt with the help of many other variables. That sophisticated understanding of exactly what proxies you are going to employ to calculate value, gain and loss in decision-making is in my view conducive to a more rational purchasing behaviour.

To learn these lessons is actually an exercise of even further-reaching long-term thinking. Maybe in your next destination you will stay for much longer, and the 10 month stay was but a dress-rehearsal. You will inhabit this new place for a long time, so it is important that it suits you more than well. Luckily for you, you already cut your teeth in your previous experience, so every choice you make will be more precise and you’ll know much better what you want, what you need and what seems necessary but isn’t well-suited among the other things.

In the end, in the big scheme of things this splurge that you went through in the previous phase is the best compromise you could have thought of. It is simultaneously the least irresponsibly consumerist thing and the most personally-beneficial attitude you could have adopted. Now you can buy things that last (functionally and in an aesthetically timeless fashion) that do precisely what you need and that you won’t want to replace so quickly because a new well-engineered ad campaign will try to convince you that there is a new best choice to be done. Quality over quantity. Mind over matter.

And on a deeper level, you explore as a human just what your relationship with objects is. Because there is something magical about it. I think that we cannot overcome the unavoidable invitations of consumerism if we do not develop a philosophy of what objects mean to us and what tangible value is vs. intangible value.

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