Sometimes I'm glad I'm not rich...

Sometimes I end up in these shopping loops where I just look around websites and favorite things and wish for them when I kinda know I'll probably never buy them. Other times I'm looking for things that I actually will buy. But I'm always frugal, even when it's stuff I know I'll never buy. Except being frugal doesn't always mean being cheap. If I'm gonna pay a bit for something, it damn well better be good quality.

But see...if I had a lot more money, I would probably buy all these different things and not really think about it.

Rich people can afford to redo rooms in their house to all match a style, even if it costs thousands of dollars.

Hell, they can afford to buy couches that cost over a thousand dollars.

Not that I can't ever do that if I wanted to. I certainly wouldn't do it causally though.

If I wanted to buy a nice couch, my frugal nature would mean that I would either have to get a hell of a deal, or it would have to be really nice and I would really want it. I'm not paying $1000 for a piece of crap.

But now days, that's a lot of what you get, crap.

Sad fact is that sometimes I think about maybe making my own furniture rather than buying it, because so much of it is such crap for so much. More often I find something used or even being thrown away before I ever really get around to building something. Guess I'm just too slow and not motivated enough. Plus, I'm not that good at building things necessarily and don't really have all the tools yet.

If I did build a piece of furniture myself, I likewise would have to try to get the wood as cheap as possible, if not free. Just my frugal nature. Then that means I have more money for other things.

But, if I were rich, I'd just buy things. I wouldn't care as much about ensuring that I get the best deal and what I buy is really worth it. I'd end up spending a lot more and getting a lot less.

Having various times of financial hardship has taught me to be a bit more careful with my money. Of course, it's also made it so the things that I want and need sort of stack up because they aren't on the top of my priorities list, then the money goes out faster than it came in once I got more than a bit.

It's kinda also started to teach me recently that buying most things "new" is a waste of money. New is for food and toilet paper. You buy new gadgets and furniture and you're just gonna waste your money.

So here I am, sitting looking at cabinets and chairs and hooks with shoe nooks to put by your door and realizing so much of it's not really worth it. If only I could pick up a bit of wood and spend some time, I could probably make something better. That's not worth $600 or $1000 or $1500 or whatever.

The less money you have, the less it's worth it to just buy something that's not really worth it, because your money is worth more than your time, because you worked so hard for it.

The weird thing is that we've setup this whole system where these buildings full of people that hate their jobs make more money on the things they sell than the people that made them.

Hard working people in other countries making shitty furniture that our stores sell for hundreds of dollars when they only make a tiny fraction of that.

My time is probably worth more than to make some piece of furniture, really, but then I'd have to work extra hours making some site or script for some guy that's probably gonna underpay and then argue over it when I spent way too much time and effort on it.

I wouldn't mind owning a furniture company. Make all sorts of designs of furniture and sell them. Maybe go to another country to do it because the cost of labor makes it almost impossible to make anything that's not insanely priced unless you maybe cut out the middle men and even then it would probably be pretty expensive unless you could figure out a way to lower costs or expenses or something.

I probably wouldn't think about any of these things if money was never an issue. Why care if something's only going to last a year or two when you can just get a new one? That's what's gotten us into this trouble in this country. People just buying crap then throwing it out. Of course, if you got money you can afford to actually buy antiques rather than picking them up for free when idiots throw them out.

So much shit these days is so crappy. So if you do got the money, you can either buy the crap for way too much money, or search out better crap for pretty much the same amount likely, or maybe a bit more. If you don't got the money, you gotta live with what you can get, which is often something already used up by someone else.

But I'm not quite sure how they expect poor people to furnish their houses when everything is so damn expensive. Pretty much anyone earning less than $40k in America's house is full of shit they got off of relatives and from the trash and from resale shops run by churches that likely got them off of dead people or from people that were gonna throw the shit out otherwise. It's kinda amazing.

So I'm a lot more careful and thoughtful and think about maybe even making stuff myself or trying to find something that'll do and I'm not too ashamed to go looking in the garbage because it's better than sitting on the floor or in a shitty chair with cigarette burns from the resale. Nothing wrong with taking shit outta the trash, because that's how you get to live a better life when you can't afford all the shit in this expensive ass world these days. Everything's way too expensive.

I'm not gotta pay over $100 for every chair. Every one I've bought hasn't been worth the price anyway. They're all piece of shit. You just can't always tell.

_{Abandoned House by Lode Van de Velde (source)}