The first price I saw set the whole decision, and I only caught it because the expensive option was so absurd it made the cheap one feel like a bargain. How I started choosing which number to look at first.
Writing down the regret was easy. What the list revealed over two years is how much work I do to make a bad purchase retrospectively reasonable, and what that costs beyond the money.
I spent a month recording where each purchase was actually decided. Almost none of them were decided at the point of sale, which is the only place I had ever tried to exert control.
The number itself was uncomfortable. What it actually did was resolve a category of small decisions I had been making badly for years.
