Chai's Blog

Our pos­ses­sions should be suit­ed to our bod­ies and lives, just as our shoes are suit­ed to our feet.

Epicte­tus

I recent­ly read The Man­u­al: A Philoso­pher’s Guide to Life and have been pon­der­ing over the above quote from that book.

That’s the phi­los­o­phy I apply when I buy things, from the clothes I wear to my phone and even the car I dri­ve.

I vivid­ly remem­ber in 2008 iPhone 3G was hot, and I real­ly yearned for it. I could have stretched my sav­ings, but I was­n’t feel­ing great about my life over­all. So I with­held the iPhone pur­chase until I can com­fort­ably afford iPhone 4 in 2010, and impor­tant­ly, when I felt some hope for my over­all life sit­u­a­tion.

I think we can extrap­o­late this rule to any mate­r­i­al pos­ses­sions: Any­thing I buy should first be with­in my means. And then it should fit my over­all lifestyle. I don’t stretch my mon­ey and myself to buy things that aren’t con­gru­ent with my lifestyle. No point in own­ing flashy things when you are emp­ty and mis­er­able inside.