Having the best mattress, suitcase, and vitamins nearly broke me - Vox

I would try them all at once, in the service of a single question: Would they actually improve my life?

The short answer is yes. Of course they did! As a shock to probably nobody, the direct-to-consumer mattress was indeed far superior to my regular mattress, which is actually my old roommate’s mattress, which before that was probably somebody else’s too…

But the long answer is more complicated.

I love serendipity and this article was a great one for me. I had become more aware of the toxic marketing idea that “you need, no deserve, the best,". In truth, I had been greatly affected by it and spent money appeasing that inner voice. But now I wonder, as I type on my “best smartphone” (an iPhone XS) if this really was worth it.

Would it really be so bad to choose the average or mediocre option?

One of the versions of “minimalism” that you can come across is “I have less, but I have the best”. If minimalism is about less than I guess it works, but if it’s about being detached from possessions (as Christian minimalism should) then this is a failure in a different form.