The Price of Buying Anything

A few years ago, I worked for a sheikh in the Middle East with a small team on a personal project. He had over a thousand cars. Not a figure of speech — a four-digit collection, climate-controlled, catalogued, most of them barely driven. While I was there, a new supercar was delivered. He glanced at it, nodded, and moved on to the next conversation. Not out of dissatisfaction — out of saturation. The car was extraordinary. The moment was ordinary.

I’m not a big spender. I’m generally happy with little. But I like well-thought-through products, and when something catches my attention I save for it. Around the same time, I’d been setting money aside for a pre-owned IWC Pilot’s Watch Chronograph Top Gun — the most expensive thing I own, since the house is a mortgage and the car is a lease. I’d been thinking about it for the better part of a year, comparing references, watching prices. When it finally arrived, the feeling was out of all proportion to what I’d spent. I remember strapping it on more vividly than most holidays. Not because the watch was extraordinary, but because the distance between wanting it and having it had been long enough to mean something.

I’ve spent most of my career in industries that serve people who can buy anything. I earn a fraction of what they earn. And I’ve started to wonder whether the gap between us contains something they’ve lost and I still have.

The pleasure of not yet having

In 1987, economist George Loewenstein published a paper on what he called anticipatory utility — the finding that the act of looking forward to something generates genuine, measurable pleasure, sometimes more than the thing itself.¹ In one experiment, people were willing to pay more for a delayed reward than an immediate one. The waiting wasn’t a cost to be minimised. It was part of the value.

That tracks with my experience of the IWC. Saving for it stretched the anticipation phase. I browsed references, compared prices, imagined what it would feel like on the wrist. By the time I bought it, I’d already lived with it in my head for months. That wasn’t wasted time — it was where most of the feeling lived.

When you can buy instantly, you could skip the wanting entirely. There’s no gap between desire and possession. And without the gap, wanting never fully develops. The thing arrives before the feeling does.

The treadmill

Psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell identified this dynamic in 1971. They called it hedonic adaptation — the tendency to return to a baseline level of happiness after positive events, purchases included.² Later work by Lyubomirsky and Sheldon showed that the speed of adaptation depends on frequency: the more often you experience something, the faster the emotional return to baseline.³

For most people, a major purchase is a punctuation mark — it breaks the rhythm of ordinary life. For the ultra-wealthy, there is no rhythm to break. Every purchase is routine, and routine is the enemy of feeling. The first yacht is extraordinary. The third is a logistics decision.

Malcolm Gladwell framed this as an inverted-U curve in David and Goliath: more of a good thing is advantageous only to a point, after which it becomes a disadvantage. He tells the story of a self-made Hollywood executive, a multimillionaire who grew up lower-middle-class, who knows that his children will never have to work for what they want the way he did. The constraint that shaped him — having to earn everything — is the one thing his wealth can’t pass on. As Gladwell puts it: it’s much harder to say “I won’t buy you a pony” than “I can’t buy you a pony.”

The labor in the purchase

In 1959, Aronson and Mills demonstrated what they called effort justification: people who invested more effort to attain something valued it more highly, even when the thing itself was identical.⁴ The effort doesn’t just precede the reward — it becomes part of the reward. Take away the effort and you take away the meaning.

I wrote about a version of this in the context of brand imagery — the effort heuristic, the finding that people use perceived labour as a shortcut for judging quality and value. The same mechanism operates at the personal level. Saving, comparing, choosing one thing over another — these are forms of labour. They’re how a purchase becomes yours, not just something you own but something you earned.

There’s an irony here that I sit with daily. The products I help market are built with extraordinary effort — years of naval architecture, hand-finished interiors, the accumulated craft of an entire yard. But for the buyer, the act of acquisition is often effortless. The effort is in the product. It’s been removed from the purchase. And it turns out that removal has a cost.

The quiet trade-off

I’m not making a case that wealth is a burden — that would be absurd from where I sit. But I think there’s a mechanism that nobody talks about, a trade-off hiding inside the thing most people spend their lives pursuing. When everything is affordable, nothing is an achievement. The word priceless flips: not “so valuable that no price suffices,” but “so accessible that price is irrelevant.”

The richest people I know can buy anything. What none of them can buy back is the feeling of finally.