[pardoned_turkey]

It's easy to get hung up on specific examples you can't connect with, but our entire lifestyles are centered around preferences, not needs - and I'm sure it's also true for you. All you need is a 3 x 3 x 8 ft sleeping pod, a waste chute, and a dispenser of protein slurry. Almost everything else is there to accommodate the odd whimsical desire.

Do you really need an oven? Most techies don't cook all that often, and it can be cheaper to order take out. More efficient due to the economies of scale, too! Do you really need a smart phone? Do you really need a gaming PC? There's always some other, more barebones way of achieving the same result.

We tend to have a lot of tolerance for what we think enriches or streamlines our lives, but little patience for the same in others. It's also true for politics, where we're always eager to regulate other professions or lifestyles, but not our own.

[lukas099]

A lot of people are misunderstanding my point. It's not that intangibles don't matter or that people shouldn't spend money on their preferences.

Trust me; I spent $2,000 on a bicycle recently. Not a sports bike or mountain bike or anything. Just a bike for getting around town. Am I under some illusion that I needed to spend 2k on a transportation bike? Of course not. But it's something that I use every single day and derive great joy from using, so I prioritize having a nice one. So I am no stranger to spending money on optional things.

I also enjoy mountain biking, but I only really do it when I'm with my dad which is like 2 times a year. So instead of buying a mountain bike, I rent them. And I rent nice ones (nicer than I would buy, man those things get expensive).

My point is that there is a bias toward ownership of certain conventional things that don't get used very often, and are easy to obtain temporarily. (And of course every example I used had people responding, "I have that and use it all the time!", which is also missing the point.)

[calf]

It's not obvious that buying the frequent item and renting the infrequent item is the reasonable thing to for all situations and contexts.

I don't see a complete argument where doing so is strictly more rational than doing the polar opposite, i.e. hypothetically, renting the frequent item and vice versa.

I also think the frequent vs infrequent products are not equivalent in the first place. A dining room is just not the same as a restaurant setting, so a rational trade-off must account for that inequivalence. So far, you have assumed that a home dining room party and a restaurant room party are equivalent social experiences. They probably aren't.