What are some of the best purchases of your life?
For me it has to be:
- Helix mattress ($1,217). Sleep is great.
- Home gym power cage & weights (~$1,000). Look good, feel good, get strong.
- Netgear Nighthawk AXE7800 ($339). No more random, annoying internet disconnects/slowness.
- Books ($0 @ library)
- "Ultralearning" - Scott Young (how to learn efficiently)
- "Enlightenment Now" - Steven Pinker (the world overall is improving)
- "The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing" - Taylor Larimore (how to invest)
- PS5 ($500). So many great games like witcher 3, god of war, spiderman.
I'm searching for some more deep value purchases. Give me what you've got.
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Both specific and in general 1.) Nectar mattress. The only mattresses i'd ever bought were from amazon and very on sale. Important Life Advice: whatever you have to do to make i happen, get a good mattress. Even my bed approves and it thinks everything is beneath it, including me.
2.) My bed.
Oh boy, here we go. This goddamn bed.
I bought it roughly twenty years ago and it literally took my entire tax return at my first job and then some to get it and the very first piece of furniture I personally picked out and bought for myself which may explain absolutely nothing about how I ended up like this.
It's fairly straightforward, plain four poster queen bed but so incredibly melodramatic no matter the room I put it in, this thing will dramatically not fit and carry on like it's actually in a castle tower in 1700s Frances waiting for a princess to sleep in it (it did not act like this at the store, okay). It has an unnecessary number of parts (some really could have been consolidated and a couple I'm not sure even have a function other than to add time to assembling it) every piece of it is awkward to move, even the parts that have no reason to be and don't look like they are, and every single piece is ten times heavier than than look or is reasonable, sane, or really should even be possible. The wood is dark and does a very cool dark gleaming thing, and it takes hours to clean and oil it to a soft gleam (so. goddamn. many. parts). Twenty-four hours later it's sitting there dull and dramatically telling everyone who sees it I never clean it and also use substandard wood oil
It takes a very base minimum of two people to even attempt to put it together and you better not have plans for the rest of the day because it doesn't matter how many times you have done this, somehow, you will always get six parts wrong because whoever designed this has another job making complicated puzzle locks that you will never solve and will die mad about it (this person is a sadist). Just looking at it in any given bedroom I live in, it makes me feel I should be wearing something long, white, and flowy while waiting for my angsty vampire lover to visit me in the dead of the night and not taking my night's sleep shorts and a tank top.
This bed is a snobby, judgemental asshole who acts like I didn't buy it at the goddamn Roomstore at ten percent off because it was a floor model.
But. it's a goddamn tank that's been in substandard moving vans and the backs of multiple trucks and dropped down stairs and sometimes forgets to at least look scuffed. It will survive all the wars and still give its occupants a great night's sleep. Those deceptively slim posts are strong enough to joust with a burglar, beat him to death, and then put back and rehang my very melodramatic bed curtains on them (though I'll need a little hysterical strength to hold them up for very long; I am not kidding how stupid heavy those thing are and should not be). I love this bed, it is my soulmate, and it is where I will sleep until I move to a convenient grave. I hope all of you are able to have one of these in your life and if you already do, you have my condolences; but it's ride or die now.
3.) The best headphones I can afford and a budget for potential upgrade/replace every two years (you don't have to use that timeline,but it works for me). Related: Sonos speakers. No, they are not the best in any class but they are good to really good in multiple speaker classes and are affordable--if you budget strictly and buy a piece at a time or watch for amazon sales like it's your job--for normal people.
4.) Kindle may actually be the most important single decision I have made in my life. I like books; I didn't want to use a screen. I did it and a decade and change greater with slowly degrading eyesight I bless the day I decided to try it every day. Currently on an Oasis.
5.) Giving up and budgeting specifically to pay a ridiculous amount of money for my jeans. Sure, the receipts legit horrifies me, but they fit perfectly,, are crazy comfortable, can pretty much survive anything I do to them (and I am hard on my clothes) and some have been with me since before the Obama administration and don't even have a loose thread on them. I have literally every single pair i ever bought and they still look great (and I never add up the cost of them all and what thing I could have bought with that much money, God).
How you not going to tell us the brand of the jeans?
Unless someone else names them first: nope. Same with my favorite coffee and my favorite tea.
My origin story is this: 1.) parents who knowingly and recklessly got married and decided to produce offspring despite both families having a history of long legs--they knew this!--and produced a five-ten daughter with disproportionally long legs and 2.) apparently, I should have taken better care of my gall bladder (somehow?).
Due to my gall bladder feeling neglected or some shit it punished me for eating and drinking and living before abandoning me via surgical intervention: this has led to slowly growing intolerance for acidic foods and drinks. My favorite two drinks are coffee and tea and I like them caffeiney and delicious. As it turns out,it is not easy to find a balance between very low acid and not something either dark roasted or tasting of feet that I could also easily tolerate for more than one cup.
Then I found my coffee. It was amazing and perfect and I will pay well for not being in pain for my caffeine, I just prefer not to admit it to a living human being. I was innocently excited through that entire five pounds; then I went to get more and everything went very very wrong.
This coffee--delicious, low acid, no pain!--has six (6) unbearably bougie descriptor terms before the word 'coffee' and two (2) after. Worse, they rearrange the coffee there regularly from spite., all the bags look the same totally not pretentious off-brown paper with stupid plain text and I can never find it on my own and suspect they hide it. Every time--EVERY TIME--the salespeople will maliciously make me use ALL EIGHT WORDS (plus 'coffee'), out loud, in the correct order, before they're totally "Oh this [eight words plus coffee}] is right here!'
This is their idea of fun on a slow day; I bet they got perfect scores on the PCL-R, too.
I actually had better luck with tea,. then I made a terrible mistake. One day while browsing, I found a new one I hadn't seen. I didn't read past the words 'low-acid' because why would I? It's just plain black tea. I bought it, loved it, then went to get more. I couldn't find it, hunted up the empty bag from my previous purchase that I'd brought for just this reason, and for the first time read the full label and all the descriptors, and then easily found my favorite new tea. It was beneath a GiANT CHALKBOARD on which the formal name of my new tea resided: five (5) incredibly pretentious descriptors and something new and much, much worse. Once--once--someone went with me to pick it up and I only belatedly remembered that goddamn chalkboard when they said "soooooo....your tea has to be ethically handpicked by specially trained monkeys, huh?" and oh God. No one understands: I saw the words 'low acid' and thought 'cool'. No, I didn't read further, that's on me, but it didn't occur to me ethical monkeys were involved because why in the name of God would they be?
Now I am the girl who buys handpicked by ethical monkeys tea, [eight words] coffee and overpriced jeans and everyone else is "ooh that's nice, i just get my jeans from the thrift store and drink lipton".
All of these psychopaths are five feet seven inches or less and have a goddamn gallbladder; some are first and second degree blood relations ad make really good desserts for Christmas and family reunions so what can you do, but some are people I chose willingly to associate with and call friend and therefore know where I live and all my online identities so I'm stuck with them until I can figure out how to make it look like an accident, hopefully a pretentious one. I hide my spaghetti sauce now when there's any danger one might show up; at some point at the rate I'm going, I will probably have to hide my entire pantry and I'm not sure how to do that in an apartment.
Am I being dramatic about this? Yes, but I deserve it; this has been in progress for fifteen years and the less I can tolerate acid, the more words are applied to basic foods with a corresponding increase in price. I have had to deal with this and every so often, I am wearing one of those pairs of jeans while doing it and I just. Cannot.
Worth noting that Nectar is strongly disliked by mattress enthusiasts. I needed an emergency mattress and bought one because it was extremely cheap, but found it so uncomfortable that I ended up browsing r/mattress for explanations. They are said to be inconsistent, low quality, and falsely advertised the country of origin. They also heavily astroturfed r/mattress with fake accounts, which I find to be less than ethical. The return policy is excellent though.
Not saying yours is bad, or that you’re wrong for liking it, just that it’s controversial and I personally did not like it. I’m glad it worked for you!
Oh, no problem, and thanks for the heads-up! And here's where I say: I'm weirdly not surprised to hear that.
Backstory:I managed to sprain/strain/something my back horribly right when covid hit and couldn't get in for physical therapy for almost six months, so it was slow to heal and I semi-re-whtaever'ed it two more times (once: opening a box. A box) and the low-grade pain constant pain and inability to bend or do certain movements without an upgrade lasted about two-ish years. My mom's amazing mattress: nope. Pillow-top mattress:? Nope. My mattress was a hellscape but again, Amazon sale.
When I got the Nectar, I really wasn't feeling it; it's this weird combination of not-hard and not-soft for a bed (I kept thinking it would make a really good slouchy couch). My son didn't' mind it, but my mom carefully did not say she thought I should consider a refund. I thought: eh, I'll keep it at least the month trial period as I know nothing about mattresses and I know even less about returning them.
My back? LOVES IT. A month sleeping in it, my back only acts up when I actually do things that are not back-friendly. The only thing I know this thing has changed about how I sleep is this mattress super discourages movement once unconsciousness commences; like, it cannot be done, and God help you if you take a sleeping pill before setting your sleeping plans in place. If go to sleep on my left side, right side, back, with my legs crossed or in a pretzel configuration, nothing's going anywhere until I'm fully awake again so I better make sure the position I fall asleep in is one that I won't regret spending eightish hours in (or hope I need to go to the bathroom at some point and wake up to fix things). So yes, you better believe my body position before sleep habits got an overhaul very very fast and I haven't lapsed in a very long time.
Wait, did I mention what caused that first dramatic agonizing strain? Pain that was so bad an ambulance had to be called--during covid--but they advised against the ER because COVID even though I could not stand straight for three days? I had to go stay with my mom to take care of me because movement = screaming until we could get to my doctor on the phone to send muscle relaxants and anti-inflammatories I had to take for months before this mattress came into my life?
One morning, I was sitting cross-legged on the couch like every other day of my life and then I stood up. That's how this started.
I feel like I should defend my mattress's honor or something but--I mean, this is pretty consistent in the pattern of my life to date. Standing up broke my back; a overpriced crappy mattress healed it and then trained me into better sleep posture. Truly, life is a rich tapestry indeed.
Y’know, that makes sense actually. Reminds me of my chairs (Aerons) which, unlike some chairs, promote zero movement and require you to sit in the “proper” position. Like your case, this works best for me because otherwise I am prone to hurting myself by sitting like a shrimp.
It didn’t work for me in mattress form (though for me, it was uncomfortable enough that I moved more), and I ended up being one of the people who got pain from it, but that’s the case with chairs too. Bodies are so damn weird and there truly is no fit-all solution.
That’s actually the other reason I said it’s not that you have bad mattress taste or anything— mattresses are so personal, thanks to bodies being so variable, that trying and returning is the way to go. Mattress companies know everyone is different so they deliberately offer 365 day return periods. In the old mattress sub people were buying mattresses, testing them, then returning them if it didn’t work (the office chair subreddit did this too). It’s actively encouraged by the companies and doesn’t hurt much because mattress margins are huge to begin with.