Turns Out: Quality > Quantity

Annette was right: Buy nicer, but fewer, things.

A daily column about freedom, exploration, life in general, and creating work and a life you actually like. There are stories.

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Just a few short weeks after high school graduation, I moved from Montana to Utah, ready—so I thought—to begin adult life.

I moved into a dumpy-but-fun apartment where my friend, Lynette, was already living. My days were spent job searching and getting a killer tan at the pool. And there was that one day I worked as a Cutco Knife sales rep, but that’s a story for another time.

Anyway, another roommate in this apartment was Annette. We remember Annette because she was pretty and stylish, with a closet right out of the Banana Republic catalog. She had relatively few clothes, but everything she had hung in her small closet was well-made, timeless, and simple.

How an early 20-something had the maturity to learn to appreciate quality over quantity, we may never know. I’m just glad I got there eventually, even if the path there was riddled with too many low-quality, high-quantity spending sprees in my teens and twenties.

Because, as it turns out, quality products last much longer than cheap ones in terms of style and construction. And life is simply easier with fewer, but favorite, things to maintain and choose between.

Even if she never explicitly said as much, Annette was right: Life is better when you buy less, but better.

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