Ok.. well, if the idea is to buy things... consume..., then you get to a point where you have bought so many things, you think a better life is had by buy more....
False dichotomy. Liking certain things or enjoying certain things is not the same claim is that a better life is had by buying more thing. There are many options between "sell almost everything" and "buy all the things!"
Sure, that's true.
But if someone asks about "buying a better life", then, I'm going to point out what seems obvious to me: maybe a better life lies in other direction.
Maybe it was bit hyperbolic, but the basic intent was to shock someone into appreciating what they already have. That the desire to have "a better life" has nothing to do with material goods. This could be a desire for a nonmaterial fulfillment being expressed that resorts to the materialist method we've been trained to use.
What can I purchase with $100 that will be the best thing I can buy to make my life better?
I've decided to budget some regular money to improving my life each month. I'd like to start with low hanging fruit for obvious reasons - but when I sat down to think of improvements, I found myself thinking of the same old things I'd already been planning to do anyway... and I'd like out of that rut.
Constraints/more info:
Background:
This is a question I recently posed to my local Less Wrong group and we came up with a few good ideas, so I thought I'd share the discussion with the wider community and see what we can come up with. I'll add the list we came up with later on in the comments...
It'd be great to have a repository of low-hanging fruit for things that can be solved with (relatively affordable) amounts of money. I'd personally like to go through the list - look at candidates that sound like they'd be really useful to me and then make a prioritised list of what to work on first.