Experimental consumerism

Quality: how well a product performs when the owner uses it. Experience: how well a set of products perform for the owner at the same time.

Most consumers maximize quality/price or just minimize price. This makes sense since money is finite and there is comfort in frugality. However, why follow this approach for things that you deeply care about?

Time is important to me. So I've started optimizing experiences that give me more time. In doing so, my purchasing has become experimental. I've followed roughly these five steps to optimize experiences:

Identify its constraints.
Define the experience.
Measure a baseline.
Buy the candidate products and test them in combinations.
Keep the product set that maximizes the experience.
Return or sell everything else.

Consider my experience sleeping. Constraints: I can only fall asleep listening to podcasts. Sound and light wake me up. Sound and light wake up my partner. I sleep on my stomach with my ear on the pillow. Define the experience: My sleep, measured by sleep efficiency. The time in bed I spend awake is my loss function. It depends on the set of products I sleep with, and the goal is to find the set that minimizes it.

\text{loss function}

{}=\nobreak \text{time to fall asleep} + \text{time awake before alarm}

\text{sleep efficiency}

{}=\nobreak 1 - \dfrac{\text{loss function}}{\text{time in bed}}

\text{quality of a product}

{}=\nobreak \text{sleep efficiency with it alone}

\text{experience of a set}

{}=\nobreak \text{sleep efficiency with the whole set}

Measure a baseline: I measured with my Whoop, a voice memo of what woke me, and a morning note to confirm. On average, I took 26 minutes to fall asleep and lay awake another 35 between then and my alarm.

\text{time in bed}

{}=\nobreak 8 \text{ h} = 480 \text{ min}

\text{loss function}

{}=\nobreak 26 + 35 = 61 \text{ min}

\text{sleep efficiency}

{}=\nobreak 1 - \dfrac{61}{480} \approx 87\%

Noise cost 29, light 16, ear discomfort 6, the podcast 3, and 7 were no product’s fault. The split by cause is my best guess, so treat it as rough and the total as solid. Run experiments: Each set I tried was a hypothesis, tested against the baseline of 26 + 35 = 61 minutes lost.

AirPods + eye mask: 24 + 20 = 44 minutes lost. Podcast and noise cancelling in one device, but ear discomfort kept me awake.
Loop earplugs + podcast on my phone speaker + eye mask: 10 + 6 = 16 minutes lost. The earplugs are flat enough to sleep on and block the sound that wakes me. With the phone close to my head and the volume up, the podcast still gets through them.
Manta sleep mask alone: 17 + 16 = 33 minutes lost, so its quality is $1 - 33/480 \approx 93\%$ . One device for sound, light and the podcast, but very uncomfortable for stomach sleeping.
Sleep earbuds + eye mask: 15 + 20 = 35 minutes lost. Built for sleeping on your ear, very uncomfortable and poor noise cancellation.

Keep the product set that maximizes the experience. B won, but it broke a constraint: my partner could hear the podcast. The fix was a second pair of Loop earplugs to prevent her from hearing my podcast. With the phone by my head, the podcast gets through my earplugs but not hers. Return or resell everything else. I returned or resold everything else I bought except my Loop earplugs and my best eye mask. Results: The loss function fell from 61 minutes to 16, so sleep efficiency is $1 - 16/480 \approx 97\%$ (was 87%). Over a year, that’s $45 \text{ min} \times 365 \approx 274 \text{ h}$ more sleep, about 11 days. Counterintuitively, the best experience had the cheapest products. All this said, I’m not going to run trials on socks. Most purchases don’t deserve an experiment, and I don’t have the time to give them one. But for the experiences that impact my time, I’m starting to experimentally purchase. Otherwise I’m surrounding myself with expensive objects and hoping.