Sometimes it's easiest to do without some appliances. Blenders are convenient, but also one more thing to maintain, if only just to clean it. Often there's an a

Sometimes it's easiest to do without some appliances. Blenders are convenient, but also one more thing to maintain, if only just to clean it. Often there's an alternative to get something premade. Like, I could make milkshakes...or I could take fresh milk and stir it into ice cream. If it's your hobby to cook more elaborately, of course, you still end up in the position of having no quality options. But if you're dealing with something sufficiently disposable, maybe it makes sense to lean into it. Everyone who writes or draws regularly has extra stationary supplies, for example - but not everyone goes down the route of getting a converter fountain pen and filling it with bottled ink. The extra packaging of a disposable pen body is waste, but the all-in-one nature of it makes it portable, fungible. I actually made an attempt to calculate what it would take to replace everything I seriously use in my home recently - all the cookware, electronics, toiletries, furniture, office supplies, clothes, cleaning tools. I estimate that it would be under $15k. Whatever I have on top of that is essentially just purchases that turned into waste - extra clothes, extra furniture, etc. So most of my outgoing costs are strictly recurring service charges: rent, energy, food, transport, insurance, etc. We often get appliances in hopes of beating those service charges, but then it turns into junk. On balance, most things can be done more easily than they used to be with an appropriate mix of product and service. But we also all got on the hedonic treadmill and the promise of living better by buying better. Maybe that's not how to live better.