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John_Maxwell_IV comments on How To Have Things Correctly - Less Wrong
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I stopped reading around the cloak part. I don't understand. If it makes you happy to buy a cloak, buy it. If it makes you happy to wear a cloak, wear it. Why mete out wearing the cloak as penance for buying the cloak?
Is this supposed to be a way to save money? If so, maybe this strategy makes sense if you frequently find yourself overcome with difficult-to-resist urges to buy stuff that your rational mind considers a low-utility use of your money? I guess I'm lucky to not suffer from that problem much?
What are your goals here, and how are you trying to achieve them?
I think it's shifting from thinking about buying something to possess it, or to just have it on hand in your magical bag of holding, and actually buying it to use and experience it. I think the muffin tin example was a little more helpful, since the problem is you haven't trained yourself to spot muffin-baking opportunities. Similarly, I might think "Oooh, sweater-weather" not cloak-weather until I build up a new habit.
So, I'll make smarter purchases if I think about the times I want to trigger "I should use this!" ahead of time and make sure they exist, and I'll actually make good on my pre-commitment if I try and train those triggers. It's not penance, it's just habit-making.
This is a fairly common problem. Mostly with girls–it's kind of a Western-cultural thing for girls to go shopping "for fun" and get pleasure from acquiring stuff, which they won't necessarily use frequently. I don't have this problem either, mostly because my threshold for actually buying stuff is really high and I've integrated "being thrifty and good at saving money" as part of my self-concept. But I observe it a lot.
There's also the aspect that using stuff is a good way to increase your day-to-day physical pleasure. A cloak feels nice on your skin, it's warm, it's comfy, etc...and reminding yourself to use it increases the amount of attention you pay to those simple, easy-to-obtain pleasures.
Just a passing thought: frequency of use shouldn't be the only criterion we use to judge whether something was a good purchase or not. Obviously if it breaks before you ever use it, then it was a poor purchase, but if you buy something durable & only use it once in a blue moon, but it lasts forever, I don't think that is such a mistake. I guess this is also contingent upon how much storage space you have & how much you value minimalism.
I like to think of it as purchasing "the experience of shopping", and it's quite pleasant for me. I just avoid bringing home anything that would be problematic to own :)
I object to your attributing this failure mode mostly to women, without additional support.
I've witnessed a lot of men having this failure mode in the form of buying new computer games (particularly from services like Steam or Good Old Games) when they still have loads of completely unplayed old ones. Or buying lots of books and only reading a small part of them.
Sure, but women doing shop therapy codes as normative in Western society, while guys overbuying boardgames is considered inexplicable by society as a whole.
Swimmer963 doesn't need to endorse the normative desireability of this gendered social setup to note its existence, especially when she explicitly noted the cultural context.
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I was talking about what people actually do, as opposed to what the cultural attitudes to it are. (Note that "it's kind of a Western-cultural thing" can be interpreted to refer to either - I'm not sure which of the two interpretations Swimmer963 had in mind.)
I don't expect the one about books to be substantially more common among men than among women.
(As for me, I once resolved to never buying a book before finishing reading the previous one (or giving up), to prevent that. Now I'm more lenient with myself about that, but I still try to avoid bookstores when I have more than half a dozen books in the ‘queue’ -- including electronic ones.)
I'm myself someone who ends up with this "failure mode", but I do like the empowerment from having a bunch of unplayed games at my disposal to choose from according to whatever mood or wants I have at that particular time. Not to mention the ability to instantly play any of these with friends if some of them have one of them and the game has coop/multiplayer, though with my current internet bandwidth that's much less of an issue than it used to be.
However, this doesn't seem like it's nearly on the same scale. Steam probably has a much larger userbase than GoG, and based on the stats I've seen fairly recently it would seem that less than 3% of Steam's 8 million "active" users actually own more than 500$ worth of steam games, which I consider a pretty decent guesstimate as for how much one would usually have to spend before we can consider them more likely to fall into this failure mode.
Those est.-250 000 people seem somewhat of a very minor problem compared to the tens-if-not-hundreds of millions of women falling into the failure mode of "shopping".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haul_video comes to mind.