My current approach to buying and stuff: Never "buy", only "invest". That is, always consider return (happiness, time, money, etc.). Invest in experiences in the exploratory manner of an Angel investor. Invest in things in the more conservative manner of a Series A investor [1].
Second time I moved countries, I realised I had too many useless items. And I was pretty minimal already. I decided I'd try to buy very few things. Stuff that is good and that I really need.
At the end of the day, Pareto principle plays in my favour. We usually spend most of the time doing a tiny fraction of things. I buy items for those, optimising them ruthlessly. I get rid of everything else.
I've ended up with a closed list of less than 60 belongings. Stuff is really good, and the total cost is only a fraction of what a regular apartment contains.
I've been trying to do this for a number of years because I move roughly every year and have been keeping notes of items I use and don't use similar to a cache hierarchy. Upon inspection of my outer layers, I've come to realize that many experiences and crafts are very "stuff-oriented" like working with power tools or supporting a beloved pet or child. Furthermore, evicting cache so often only to need the data again is extremely expensive. The cost must be compared, just like in a computer, of time to possibly regenerate it or if your collective life experience dataset can live without it.
I say this as someone that just lost a pet of 10+ years struggling to find a specific photo that I didn't realize would be of so much emotional value until later. Like stuff, data we painstakingly generate that isn't manageable is data that is lost, and when it comes to management, consistency is more important than purity or even validity. But really, it's surprising how some of the smallest, seemingly insignificant of things we have can become something grossly important. This is fundamentally part of how hoarding happens I know, but with modern tools it's amazing how much we can collect and manage without occupying physical space in our daily lives and achieve a balance of remberance and daily function.
I travel lots and have been paring down with each trip to try to achieve the minimal set of things for my life. It'd be great to see a post to learn more about your experience.
While the community will point out regularly that not all things can be bought for life, many can if you're willing to spend more upfront for higher quality. For example, spending $20 on a pair of socks with a lifetime warranty vs. $2 for a pair that'll last a year.
I also see Jansport backpacks and Craftsman tools mentioned similarly.
A.k.a “The Sam Vimes "Boots" Theory of Economic Injustice”:
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
I like that approach, but getting the very expensive stuff keeps me too worried about it. The $20 socks may last a lifetime on my feet, but they burn just as well as the $2 socks. Likewise, I'm not confident enough to try to fix a broken device worth $2k, but if it's worth $400 I'll give it a go, and often end up saving money on the repair.
[1] See "7. Fundraising gets harder" in http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/06/how-not-to-fail/