The Worst (2012)
moxie.org
moxie.org
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.
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.
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.
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
/s
Was it yours?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a middle ground.
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.
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.
According to him, anything beyond the good will used bin is the wrong choice. He's advocating for an extreme.
> 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.
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.
Might as well try to get along today.
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":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_...
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.
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".
I don't want to make assumptions about your perception of timeline, but it's worth noting that the blog post is fully one decade old.
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.
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.
The Best - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755470 - Nov 2012 (295 comments)
I feel like this response also got discussed on HN back then - but if so, I can't find it. Anyone?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838109 - Nov 2012, (209 comments)
The Worst - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838109 - Nov 2012 (207 comments)
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.
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).
2. They stack in the drawer better when they all match.
3. If the silverware is different, people may think the specific ones they received in their place setting are a deliberate message, for good or ill.
You might be able to buy the missing piece.
If not, especially if that missing piece seems to expensive, then you can sell yours.
As usual in life, the middle path seems best.
Unless it is your hobby, it isn’t worth finding the absolute best of anything. Find something that is good and that you like and you’ll be doing well.
At the same time they are just material possessions, so don’t get too attached.
Things were meant to be used. When they get scuffed, scratched, and dinged in the course of duty why worry about it (unless it impacts the use of it).
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.
I don't know... if you write a blog post about the shit you bought being the best, that kinda sounds like a status item to me.
Now I don't really give a fuck if my phone breaks.
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 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.
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".