I was watching a YouTube video when its title caught my attention.

“Things chosen without compromise make you happy just by using them.”

I immediately recognized the feeling.

There are things I own that I enjoy every time I use them. Not because they are new. That excitement disappeared a long time ago. I simply like using them.

Our Jura E8 coffee machine is one of them.

When we bought it, I deliberately chose the more premium model. I knew myself well enough to suspect that if I bought one of the cheaper alternatives, I would probably keep wondering whether I should have bought the E8 instead.

So I didn’t compromise.

Years later, my wife and I still enjoy the coffee it makes every day.

That seemed to confirm the idea in the video title.

But the more I thought about it, the less straightforward it became.

Because I don’t normally believe in buying the best.

Sometimes I Don’t Buy Anything

A couple of years ago, I wrote about my habit of putting things I wanted on Amazon into “Save for Later.”

It started as a way to resist impulse buying.

Instead of buying something immediately, I would move it out of my shopping cart and leave it there.

Sometimes I eventually bought it.

Quite often, I didn’t.

After enough time had passed, things I had been convinced I wanted somehow stopped being interesting. My Save for Later list occasionally became more like a Save to Never Buy list.

Waiting helped me separate the excitement of discovering something from the value of actually owning it.

I still do something similar today.

Sometimes I wait until the price comes down far enough that what I’m getting feels worth what I’m paying.

Sometimes I wait so long that I discover I don’t want it anymore.

That doesn’t sound much like someone who refuses to compromise.

Neither does something else I’ve written about before.

Sometimes good enough really is enough.

If something already does what I need, replacing it simply because something better exists doesn’t necessarily improve my life.

So why did buying the expensive coffee machine feel different?

I Already Knew What I Wanted

Perhaps the answer started years before we bought the Jura.

Coffee gradually became part of my life after meeting my wife.

For a while we used Nespresso. Later, after moving to Japan, we discovered drip coffee. I enjoyed making it manually with a V60. There was something satisfying about slowly pouring the water and waiting for the coffee to filter through.

We even created a little coffee space on our engawa overlooking the garden.

Coffee wasn’t an activity I imagined doing after buying an expensive machine.

We were already doing it.

Over the years, I also became more particular about one specific kind of coffee: the Swiss-style café crème I knew from Switzerland.

By the time we considered buying the Jura, I wasn’t looking at coffee machines and imagining a different version of myself.

I already knew how coffee fitted into our life.

More importantly, I knew what I wanted from the machine.

That distinction now seems important to me.

There is a difference between:

I want this.

and:

I know why I want this.

Good Enough Can Still Be the Right Choice

The more I investigated this, the more I realized that the phrase “without compromise” can be misleading.

We compromise all the time.

And that’s often sensible.

I don’t need the most expensive version of everything I own. I don’t need to replace something that still works because a newer version has better specifications. And I certainly don’t need to spend more money on features that make no meaningful difference to me.

Good enough can be exactly that: good enough.

The problem isn’t compromise itself.

The question is what I’m compromising on.

If I don’t care about the difference, choosing the cheaper or simpler option isn’t really a sacrifice.

But if years of experience have taught me that a particular difference matters to me, buying the cheaper option simply because it is cheaper can produce a different feeling.

Every time I encounter the limitation, I’m reminded of the compromise I made.

Perhaps that’s what I was trying to avoid with the Jura.

Not because the E8 was the most expensive machine I could afford.

Not because premium is automatically better.

But because I already knew which differences mattered to me.

The Best Isn’t Necessarily Better for Me

This led me into some interesting research.

Psychologists have studied people who try to maximize their choices—to find the best possible option.

Surprisingly, trying to find the best doesn’t necessarily make us happier with what we choose.

It can do the opposite.

The more alternatives we compare, the easier it becomes to wonder whether another choice might have been better. Even after buying something, we can continue reading reviews, checking alternatives and mentally reopening a decision we’ve already made.

That isn’t what I want.

I’m not particularly interested in owning the objectively best coffee machine.

I’m interested in having a machine that makes the coffee my wife and I enjoy, in the way we want it, every day.

Something can be better without being better for me.

The reverse is also true.

Something can be perfectly good without being good enough for me.

The difficult part is knowing the difference.

Buying Something Isn’t the Same as Using It

There was another part of that YouTube title that I initially overlooked.

It wasn’t only about choosing without compromise.

It said those things make you happy just by using them.

Perhaps using is actually the more important word.

The excitement of buying our Jura disappeared long ago.

It’s no longer a new coffee machine.

It’s just our coffee machine.

But the coffee hasn’t stopped tasting good because the machine is no longer new.

We still use it every day.

That made me think differently about some of the possessions I value most.

A camera isn’t particularly valuable to me sitting on a shelf. Its value appears when I take photographs with it.

A drone isn’t valuable because I can say I own it. Its value comes from flying it, learning with it and seeing familiar places differently.

Even our engawa isn’t really valuable because of the wood and construction. Its value is sitting there, looking into the garden, perhaps with a cup of coffee.

The object isn’t always the experience.

Sometimes it simply makes the experience possible.

That may also explain why some expensive things turn out to be disappointing.

We sometimes buy an object hoping it will create the life we associate with it.

Buy the camera and become a photographer.

Buy the exercise equipment and start exercising.

Buy the beautiful notebook and become someone who writes every day.

The Jura happened in the opposite order.

We already loved drinking coffee together.

The machine came later.

Maybe Waiting Is More Important Than I Thought

That brings me back to my Amazon Save for Later list.

I used to think waiting was mostly a way of controlling impulse buying.

Now I think it does something else.

Waiting gives me time to find out whether I merely want something, or whether I understand why I want it.

Sometimes desire doesn’t survive the wait.

That’s useful information.

But sometimes it does.

And occasionally the waiting makes the reason clearer.

Perhaps that’s when spending more can make sense.

Not because I’ve decided that I deserve the premium version.

Not because expensive things make me happier.

But because I’ve had enough experience to know which differences I will actually notice and value.

What Is Worth Compromising On?

So I don’t think I’ve arrived at a rule for what anyone should buy.

If anything, I’ve become more suspicious of those rules.

Buy the best you can afford.

Good enough is good enough.

Buy once, cry once.

Spend money on experiences, not things.

Buy quality and keep it forever.

Each sounds sensible until it doesn’t.

My own decisions don’t even look consistent from the outside.

Sometimes I wait for a lower price.

Sometimes I don’t buy something at all.

Sometimes I keep using something old even though much better versions exist.

Sometimes good enough really is enough.

And occasionally I deliberately choose the expensive one because I know I would regret choosing anything else.

Maybe those aren’t contradictions.

Maybe price was never the thing connecting those decisions.

Value was.

Not value as a specification on a product page, but value in my actual life.

And perhaps that’s why that sentence in a YouTube title resonated with me.

Things chosen without compromise can make me happy just by using them.

But after thinking about it, I would phrase it differently.

The things I regret least aren’t necessarily the things I spent less on. They’re the things I understood why I was buying.

And sometimes understanding that tells me not to buy anything at all.