I suppose there's give and take in everything.
I don't have an ad blocker on my aging computer for the simple reason that the ad blocker tends to make my computer freeze.
Instead, I have some sort of "system resource management" setup that basically blocks any ads that try to eat too much bandwidth and CPU.
Regardless, the point is that I'm exposed to the inevitable sidebar ads as many of us see when we surf the web.
So there was a nice looking bookcase was out in the sidebar, so I decided to click on it and have a look because we can always use more bookcases around here. Besides, it was being offered on a ligit site — Etsy — rather than TEMU or some other craphole. I was hopeful that it might not be too far away and could be bought and picked up.
Well, it was a nice handmade oak bookcase but wow...
$4,295!
Who the hell has $4,295 to spend on a bookcase, and who would actually do such a thing?
The only reason I bring this up is because this was being sold on Etsy where I am selling my own artwork, and this was offered by a small shop that makes handmade furniture, all of which was incredibly expensive.
But that's not my point. Anybody can make something and put it up for sale at a ridiculous price... but that doesn't mean they're going to sell it. But what was eyecatching here was that this particular seller who had been part of the community for about 5-6 years had evidently made over 8000 sales!
Which means there are evidently lots of people who buy $4000 bookcases, and $4000 dining tables, and $1200 coffee tables.
Somewhere in the background I can hear the peanut gallery piping up and saying something along the lines of "yeah, but if YOU had a lot of money you'd probably spend $4000 on a bookcase!"
Not Bloody Likely!
No. No, I wouldn't.
A bookcase simply doesn't have $4,000 worth of utility to me. It does not offer that amount of value. And if my only option were to spend $4000 on a bookcase, I'd be heading out to the nearest lumber yard to buy some hardwood and build my own wood bookcase.
Which all brought to mind that I previously ended up in a similar discussion with a friend, on the subject of cars. I drive a 22-year old pick-up truck that's solid, reliable and paid for. He insisted that if I would a millionaire I would "absolutely spend $100,000" on some tricked out luxury vehicle.
My counter argument was exactly the same as for the bookcase: a piece of transportation to get me from Point A to Point B does not offer $100,000 worth of "utility value," whether I can afford it or not.
Which got me to reflecting on something that I potentially learned from my dad when I was in my teens. You see, I grew up in a household that had plenty of money (yes, the infamous "1%"), but even though we traveled quite extensively we never flew first class.
Financially speaking, our family's bank account wouldn't even have noticed three first class tickets from — let's say — Copenhagen to Portugal for a holiday, but my dad's point was that paying $2000 extra to sit in a bigger seat for three hours just did not make sense.
And perhaps the underlying life lesson I still carry around is that just because you have money doesn't mean you're automatically supposed to spend it, that is to say just because you have money don't spend it "for the sake of spending it," spend it because it gives you something that really had authentic value to you.
Getting back to our family not spending money on 1st class plane tickets, whenever we went on holidays to these overseas places, we always ate at really really good restaurants because both my parents were foodies and loved good food. In other words, my dad saw utility and value in spending $50 a person on dinner (this was in the 1970s, do the math) but not on a variety of other items.
I suppose the point he was trying to drive home was that "being rich" doesn't entail being anything other than an ordinary person, just like you were before you were rich. For him, wealth wasn't an invitation to go on a shopping spree, it just meant you had the safety of knowing that if you need something you can buy it and not have to worry, yet just because you can buy it doesn't mean you're necessarily need to buy it or that you need to have it.
Along the way, I have met a few other people cut from the same cloth as him. You would never have known that they were wealthy, because they felt zero compulsion to "send a public message" to signal their affluence to the world.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Friday!
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Created at 2025.08.14 15:17 PST
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