Chris Ziegler on The Verge

I've found that my favorite parts of ownership are the lead-up to the purchase and the wad of cash that lands in your lap when you sell. The part where you actually own something, well, that's a distant third.

As someone who has also been selling off some of his own old gadgets lately (if you want an original Nexus 7, get in touch), I understand his feeling. It is quite satisfying to turn something that you don't use anymore into a small pile of cash. It does feel pretty great.

However, I think Chris touches on something even bigger in this piece, but never says it explicitly. A lot of the gadgets we buy are completely redundant. We think we need them and we think they will make our lives better, but they rarely do.

There are a few specific tech products that I am all in on and would argue improve my quality of life. My iPhone is always at my side or in my face. I won't list everything I do with it, but needless to say, I can manage my life from this thing. My Mac is indispensable and my PlayStation 4 is the best "chill out after a long day of work" machine I've ever had. My mirrorless camera also takes amazing images of moments in my life; it's not going anywhere.

But there are some things that I biught and ended up not enjoying as much as I had hoped. The Nintendo 2DS was great fun for a while, but then I fell out of love. I bought a portable bluetooth speaker that I used maybe 10 times in a year. Those are bigger things, but there are so many $10-40 dodads that I've picked up that have not lived up to my expectations. The products themselves weren't poorly made, but they didn't impact me as much as I'd hoped. When you add up all the little things we get ourselves, we might br shocked about how much money we put towards things that end up not mattering to us.

The best we can do is be mindful of what we're putting our resources towards and make good decisions about what gets our time and money.