Comment by anm89 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anm89 | Hacker News Reader

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.

There's a middle ground.

> 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.

Sure. I just don't care. I've got $40 and that's my preference.

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.

Might as well try to get along today.

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.

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