Doesn’t have to be a thing you bought. Just some thing you didn’t have but then once you did it expanded your scope of actions.
The first obvious example that comes to mind is a car. Plenty of drawbacks to prevalence of cars, but being able to go where I want when I want, and far away, is very transformative.
I’m interested in other examples of things that aren’t just useful, but that open new possibilities.
Relying on a basic understanding how things/situations work.
At a new school, I really messed up a math test. I was studying like crazy, learned all formulas that I would need and managed to apply them all in each question on the test, combining all off them each question. Lowest score possible (1 out of 10), as I really messed up. Next test I didn’t study, I jusy flipped trough the book, checked 1 situation I didn’t understood and made the test. On handing out the teacher asked what I did different then the previous test. I told him I didn’t study, I just checked if it was logically to me and decided I understood as much as I could. He told me to do just that on all tests and I’d have no problems with education and gave me the result, a perfect score. (10 out of 10)
That was 34y ago and still I want to understand things and see the logic behind it. Works perfectly on almost everything. (Humans behavious still mostly eludes me though, totally illogical 🤨)
We’re not rational, but there are patterns. If you’re willing to do some reading Thinking: Fast and Slow is beefy, but helps to show some of the patterns of irrationality in a structured way, from one of the leading experts on human behavior. If that’s too much, Thinking in Bets is a nice taster that still is well backed by much of the same research, but is shorter and more accessible.
Interesting… time to dive into those books.