July 19, 2026/632 words/3 min read

I Bought Almost Nothing in 2025 and Still Paid for Plenty

Why a year without many packages still cost me so much.

I bought very little last year. Records and books still came into the house, and there's enough nonsense in my desk drawers to make the title questionable, but almost nothing arrived in a box. I'd stopped browsing shops to kill ten quiet minutes, and leaving something alone for a few days was usually enough for the urge to pass.

By December there wasn't much in the apartment that hadn't been there in January. I found that really satisfying! Then I looked at how much money I'd spent. The same small charges turned up every month, all recognisable and mostly explainable. I used to track every expense down to the invoice, but stopped when it became a chore that never changed my spending habits. Without it, the charges renewed on different days, sometimes in euros and sometimes not, and no single bill ever made the total obvious.

The AI ones were the worst offenders. For most of the year I paid for Claude and Cursor at the same time. Claude handled the bigger jobs and helped me think, while Cursor lived in the editor and made the fiddly parts more enjoyable. I used both often enough that cancelling either felt like a bad idea.

Every few weeks I'd open my subscriptions list to clean it up. Then I'd remember the thing Claude had helped me finish two nights earlier, or how annoying the editor felt without decent completion, and close the page again. At least an ignored streaming service is easy to cancel. Claude only needed one good evening to earn another stay of execution, and nearly every project gave it one.

Objects, on the other hand, were much easier to walk away from. At one point I nearly bought a new bass guitar. I haven't touched a guitar in five years! Getting anywhere with it would take hours of practice I don't have, and talent was never going to carry me. That didn't stop me from reading reviews as if the thing came bundled with a free evening every week.

The Audioengine speaker in the living room was another temptation. It's eight years old, which makes it seem like a candidate for replacement, until I mention it still works perfectly! It sounds as it did when it was new, without a hint of wear. The newer one would have been newer. That was more or less the entire case for buying it.

The Apple Watch Ultra was probably the silliest. I already own a perfectly good, slightly cheaper last-gen watch. The Ultra is amazing, but it's built for someone who spends weekends swimming and hiking, which isn't really me. My lizard brain thought buying it would turn me into that person anyway.

Luckily for me, none of these ideas survived the week. Once the excitement wore off, I could see the imaginary version of myself each purchase was meant for, and the thing got a lot easier to leave in the shop. The subscriptions never had to survive that test. Most started as a free trial or a small, harmless monthly charge, and once they were part of how I worked, cancelling felt like giving up a piece of convenience.

Money spent going out or travelling bothered me far less. I remember where it went because I was there. I used the software too, but I couldn't tell you what half of it did for me in February.

I've kept it up this year, by the way! Looking around the apartment feels better than it used to. The place isn't filling up, so maybe I'm getting more careful with money. My banking app disagrees.

I've since cancelled a few subscriptions, though I kept plenty, mostly LLMs. I use them constantly and like having them around. Now I check the list more often.