Redirect first, then buy#
Start with money already leaving your account, because that spending is invisible and enormous.
- Takeaway → groceries. Good olive oil, bread from a bakery that took two or three days to make it, meat from a butcher. Bread with a properly peppery olive oil and salt is a better evening than most delivery.
- Fast fashion → one good thing. A 100% wool coat or blazer, or vintage cashmere from the eighties and nineties, which is usually better made than what’s on the shelf now and cheaper.
- New → secondhand. Leather bags are the clearest case. They soften and take on a patina, so age is a feature, and the best ones are found used at a fraction of retail.
The small ones that do the most#
None of these cost much, and they run every day.
- Coffee in a ceramic cup, sitting down. Not a takeaway cup at a desk. Annoyingly, plenty of cafés stopped putting out ceramic even for people staying in, which rather defeats the point — so this may be a thing you do at home.
- A morning ritual you look forward to. A Chemex and decent beans. A gooseneck kettle — a Fellow will still be going a decade later and looks like an object rather than an appliance.
- Matching velvet hangers. Twenty or thirty pounds turns a wardrobe into something that resembles a shop. It is a ridiculous amount of effect for the money.
- Fruit or herbs in your water. Lemon, mint, cucumber. Free if you grow the mint.
- Real plants, many of them free through propagation from someone else’s.
- Dried eucalyptus in the shower. Lasts a week to ten days and turns a shower into something else entirely.
- A stovetop simmer — one lemon, a splash of vanilla, a cinnamon stick — for a house that smells like someone lives in it well.
Buy quality only where you’ll notice#
Two items are worth being fussy about because you use them constantly.
A genuinely good white t-shirt. 100% cotton, a reinforced collar that won’t go limp and wavy after a few washes, not see-through, and slightly heavier than you’d expect. The useful finding here is that this is not a price problem — testing across everything from five pounds to five hundred lands you somewhere in the middle. The expensive ones are not the best ones.
Nice bedding. Cotton, muslin, linen, or bamboo in summer for the cooling. Far cheaper than a new mattress and you’ll notice it every night. Silk pillowcases are the small version of the same idea — less friction on skin and hair, and the difference shows up if you stop.
Slowing down is the thing#
The pattern under all of this is that the object isn’t the luxury. The pause is.
Physical books instead of an audiobook at 1.5x. A walk in trees — the Japanese have a name for it, forest bathing, and some doctors there credit it with lowering blood pressure and calming stress. A four-product skincare routine, drugstore prices, done slowly. A monthly manicure. A farmers market instead of a supermarket run.
The list is titled thirty and lands on twenty-nine, which feels about right for something this loose. You aren’t meant to do all of it.
A few small things to try:
- Pick one thing you already buy and buy the better version instead of the extra.
- Put the good coffee in a real cup and sit down with it.
- Buy the hangers. It’s a silly recommendation and it works.
- Grow one herb. Basil or mint. Dried is not the same thing.
