I bought a piece of 1.5 inch stiff foam to try to fix a sag in a bed. It didn’t work but having that thick piece of solid foam around has been a life saver.
Need something flat to put a laptop on? Throw it on the foam. Going to be doing something that requires you to be on your knees for a while? Get the foam!
It went from stupid purchase to something I’d gladly replace if it broke.
A bicycle. It was kind of a stupid purchase for me because when I got it I wasn’t really into doing exercise or outdoor stuff. 900 dollar on clearance gravel bike back in March 2019. I wound up living on that thing, worked my way up to a 160 mile solo gravel ride by September 2019, biked to work in 2020, got into running in 2021, ran a 50K in 2022, now I run to and from work. I put 10,000 miles on that bike in 2 years, explored my city/greater metro area until I ran out of things to explore, pretty awesome impulse purchase
This is me right now, I spent ~$2k on a bike 11 months ago instead of getting a second car for our household and had no idea if it would work out. At 1500 miles, almost all commuting, definitely worth the money. I back of napkin calculated that it pays for itself somewhere between 2k-3k miles with saved gas, wear and tear, etc. Also my wife wanted to buy a Tesla as a second car, and me leaving her the car during the workday has essentially saved us ~$45k in that respect. In better shape, eating better, sleeping better, and bike commuting has a lot to do with it.
Sigh… the notion that bikes are just toys or exercise equipment is such a harmful misconception, it’s ridiculous. Rather than writing a huge wall of text trying to explain the vast depths of how important cycling is I’ll just cite this blog post this blog post that explains it better than I can.
Of course, that article was written from an individual perspective, so even it manages to understate how important cycling is. Americans’ dismissal of cycling in favor of driving, and the car-dependent [sub]urban design that results from that choice, is the underlying cause for the housing crisis and all the other crises that stem from that!
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By that I meant more along the lines that I’d never voluntarily go outdoors for anything. I used to schedule my grocery shopping and laundry so that I could wake up on my day off of work and play World of Warcraft in a dark room for 14 hours straight, I was that kind of person.
But I totally agree that cars are horrible. Tire dust is the leading source of microplastics, motor vehicle incidents are the leading cause of death in adolescents, a leading cause of preventable death in general (obesity is one the top causes), average car payment is >700 bucks nowadays despite median savings of people aged 45-54 is close to 5000 bucks, not to mention the sprawl that makes not having a car difficult to say the least.
That’s by far the biggest issue (which I say not to diminish the others, but just to emphasize how bad this one is). The sheer space that cars take up in terms of roads and parking lots makes it practically impossible to design a city capable of accommodating them without ruining it for walking/biking/transit by having to spread destinations too far apart. We literally bulldozed thriving downtowns to make room for them (compare: Houston 1938 vs. Houston 1978)!
On top of that, cars are responsible for facilitating the literal Ponzi scheme that is suburbia. In short: subdivisions full of single-family houses with a lot of street frontage per housing unit generate less tax value per unit area than the infrastructure connecting them costs to maintain, making them inherently unsustainable financially (let alone ecologically, etc.).
Because Americans urban planners in the '50s had a hard-on for cars instead of taking bikes seriously as transportation, almost all of North America and increasing parts of the rest of the world are now fundamentally built wrong in a way that destroys health, the economy, and the environment all at once, and it’ll cost trillions of dollars to fix it.
I say this without exaggeration or hyperbole: ditching bikes in favor of cars may vary well have been the biggest disaster in the history of the world.