Don't Judge Personal Needs by Universal Standards

Sometimes I say that if I ever become financially free, I want to replace my computers with top-end machines every year. The first reaction is almost always the same: Why? Is that really worth it? Isn’t that wasteful? The value for money sounds terrible.

Questions like that used to stop me cold. All I could say, a little helplessly, was that it was my dream. Eventually I realized they were not really asking what I wanted. They were asking whether the purchase could be justified inside a market logic. What they cared about was exchange value: price, depreciation, resale value, specs, return. In other words, a set of standards that presents itself as objective, rational, and universal.

But that has never been the point for me.

Every little freeze I deal with, every moment when memory and CPU usage hit the ceiling, tells me the same thing: when I have the money, buy yourself a good one. So what matters more to me is use value, whether something actually has a living relationship with me. Does it fit the person I am right now? Will I really use it? Will it make me more focused, more free, more at ease in my own work? It is not a price tag, not a benchmark score, not a depreciation chart. Wanting something is an extension of my will.

I believe more and more in one very simple idea: needs come first, tools come after. If there is nothing you genuinely want to do, then even the most expensive computer is just a pile of premium parts. The real question is not the tool itself, but what you are trying to make possible. Ideas, desire, direction: that is where need actually comes from.

And those supposedly objective, rational, standardized value analyses? They may look like discussions about things, but what they often do is erase the person. They flatten why someone wants something, why they love it, why they believe it is worth it. They assume everyone should live by the same scale, judge desire by the same standard, and explain passion with the same answer.

So if someone asks me again whether a top-spec computer is worth it, I probably will not be left speechless anymore. It may not be worth it to everyone, but it is worth it to me. Not because it satisfies some universal standard, but because I know why I want it, how it would enter my life, and how it would help me turn something vague in my head into something real.

The meaning of many things is never really in the price. It lies in whether a real relationship can exist between an object and a particular person.