- Intentional Dollar
- Posts
- Exploring inflated needs, work, and rebuilding
Exploring inflated needs, work, and rebuilding
Logan
June 05, 2025
In partnership with
Exploring inflated needs, work, and rebuilding
Happy Thursday! Thanks for reading Intentional Dollar — where we look at old money ideas through a new perspective.
What’s inside?
One idea to experiment with
Two quotes from others
Three questions to dig deeper
Four lines of poetry for the point
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.
Quick, hard-hitting business news.
Morning Brew was built on a simple idea: business news doesn’t have to be boring.
Today, it’s the fastest-growing newsletter in the country with over 4.2 million readers—thanks to a format that makes staying informed both easy and enjoyable.
Each morning, Morning Brew delivers the day’s biggest stories—from Wall Street to Silicon Valley and beyond—in bite-sized reads packed with facts, not fluff, and just enough wit to keep things interesting.
Try the newsletter for free and see why busy professionals are ditching jargon-heavy, traditional business media for a smarter, faster way to stay in the loop.
One idea to experiment with:
Inflated Needs:
A hundred years ago, two hundred years ago—our needs looked drastically different. A frame-by-frame comparison of the average household then versus now would reveal a stark contrast.
Back then, a home likely featured a bed, a few pieces of furniture, no indoor bathroom, and totaled 700-800 square feet. Today, the average home is over 2,000 square feet. We have lavish, robotic beds, bespoke bathrooms of tile and granite, gigantic TV walls, culinary excellence in our kitchens, machines that make 80 variations of coffee, six types of couches and chairs to lounge on, plus a million other creature comforts.
There’s no doubt that these innovations have advanced the quality of our lives. We no longer burn candles on the way to our midnight outhouse visit. We press two buttons and our clothing is both washed and dried. With extreme efficiency we convert stored nutrition into caloric intake. When we’re dirty, we turn a dial and control the temperature at which we are cleaned. Our lives are better.
But somewhere along this march, we’ve lost sight of necessity. Our needs have become inflated.
The paradox of choice, endless options, the curated visibility of millions of peoples lives have all warped our ability to distinguish our basic needs from our wants.
Our walls are bigger—so we need the larger TV.
Our garages are larger—so we need the extra car.
Our cabinets are emptier—so we need the newest small appliance.
Utility has folded under the weight of optionality. Inundated by choice, we choose excess. Multiples. Variations. Just like the coffee mug example last week.
In continuation with last weeks theme, look around your home:
What do you need?
What is clearly excess?
What do you want to keep—and why?
The common pattern is a year of accumulation, followed by a single day of spring cleaning. We clear out space, only to make room for next year’s purchases. But what if we broke that cycle? What if we regularly evaluated our lives with the lens of historical necessity?
Imagine someone in the 1800s. They’ve just stoked the fire and hauled wood they chopped themselves. They walk into the kitchen, open the cabinet, and select one of thirty mugs for their morning coffee.
It’s laughable. Because through that contrast, we see the absurdity clearly.
But in today’s world, that absurdity is normalized. Invisible. Routine.
So what if you exiled normalcy?
our needs have inflated
Two quotes on work:
There’s an internal and external view of the work we do. As David Senra highlights, “The public praises people for what they practice in private.” The public doesn’t see the internal work and mental landscape, only the results.
“I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”
“The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.”
Three questions on rebuilding:
What systems do I need to break and rebuild instead of allocating more time and resources to fixing and patching?
What went wrong in the original that I’m now trying to patch over?
What’s the cost of continuing to try the fix/patch compared to the break/rebuild?
Which question stuck with you? Questions like these are spotlights for the mind. Reply to this email and let me know which one shined light on a previously dark cave.
Four lines of poetry for the point:
A home today features more space
Conflated wants and needs, an acquisition race
Inflationary trends
Now and then contrast will erase
Contact Me:
Content ideas, questions? Reply to this email or reach out to me at [email protected]
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. These weekly posts represent my simple thoughts, a few quotes, and some questions — for educational purposes only.
Smarter Investing Starts with Smarter News
The Daily Upside helps 1M+ investors cut through the noise with expert insights. Get clear, concise, actually useful financial news. Smarter investing starts in your inbox—subscribe free.
Reply