There are many products I love and bring me Joy. I had not know about them and the knowledge of them is priceless in some regard. I probably have somewhere around 2-10X the stuff, that I need at any given time. This is all a part of the process, developing taste, trial and error.
For instance, I was never a coffee person but turns out I was drinking bad coffee. From most mass market coffee shops it’s too milky and sugary. I find filter coffee too watery and bitter. Making my own espresso is perfect. Its my morning ritual now. I had to waste a lot of time and money to get to this point and still have some more dialing in to do. There’s the equipment, learning technique, the maintenance. At every step you have to test, isolate, experiment and tinker with different parts of the process.
Both the absolute cost and opportunity cost is high. The time investment, wasting money on bad products or learning through trial and error. All in all, getting to my current setup has produced 3x the amount of things (equipment, grinders, broken machines etc.,) than where I ended up. Therefore, the price of that knowledge is close to that cost.
These things that accumulate, they are the cost of finding products that you love. Personally, I’m too quick to try to solve a problem through throwing money at it. It’s because so many problems were actually poor user experience of bad products. Once I found something delightfully designed, it created the space for the behavior. For instance, I never drank enough water. I could never find a water bottle where the water didn’t end up smelling like traces of the vessel it was in (plastic, metal, glass/rubber), until I found the perfect water bottle. I use it every day, and being hydrated is now something I don’t have to think about anymore.