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:
- be concrete. I know - "spend money on experiences" is a good idea - but what experiences are the best option to purchase *first*
- "better" is deliberately left vague - choose how you would define it, so that I'm not constrained just by ways of "being better" that I'd have thought of myself.
- please assume that I have all my basic needs met (eg food, clothing, shelter) and that I have budgeted separately for things like investing for my financial future and for charity.
- apart from the above, assume nothing - Especially don't try and tailor solutions to anything you might know and/or guess about me specifically, because I think this would be a useful resource for others who might have just begun.
- don't constrain yourself to exactly $100 - I could buy 2-3 things for that, or I could save up over a couple of months and buy something more expensive... I picked $100 because it's a round number and easy to imagine.
- it's ok to add "dumb" things - they can help spur great ideas, or just get rid of an elephant in the room.
- try thinking of your top-ten before reading any comments, in order not to bias your initial thinking. Then come back and add ten more once you've been inspired by what everyone else came up with.
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.
I recommend boxing. Every martial art tries to simulate a different aspect of real fights, and boxing simulates the speed, intensity and scariness of them by banning kicks and grappling which generally slow down a sparring, at least between beginners. Grappling is a lot like "now stop and think what's next" and kicking is a lot like "wow beware that leg, keep my distance", but if people are only allowed to punch, it is highly intense storm-of-fists experience.
This is also fun, and scary, and also great at building courage and a fighting spirit.
I would say that RPG's of the D&D type are correct about the idea of "level", namely that NOT only different skills exist, but "level" as well, in the sense of a guy who spent a year fighting on a battlefield with a rifle will be also better at an unarmed fist fight as well in a bar. Why? Because of the skills like courage, thinking clear under pressure, this sort of mental hardness. This is what makes a 10th level fighter, not simply weapon or style skil. However, what the RPGs get wrong is that you get XP for fights won. No, in reality, you get XP for every dangerous or dangerous feeling situation you get in. One may say IRL you get Skill Points for hitting a target, but you get real XP only by others attempting to hit you, regardless of whether they succeed of fail. Because only this, the felt danger, trains that warrior's mind stuff. And this why I recommend boxing sparring, this has the most "holy-shit-OMG-MAMAAAA help!" scary moments per minute.
It seems like boxing with gloves (vs bare knuckles) is very bad for your brain.