Originally Posted by
swiego 
I suppose I will be the voice of dissention here. I agree that things happen and one mustn’t lose too much sleep when something happens. That said, I have no problem with the philosophy of saving your nicer things for special times in order to mitigate the possible damage one might face when shit does, indeed, happen. I don’t drink my finest, most expensive wines when I simply want a buzz; I save them for when I have friends and family over whom I care about. I don’t take my most expensive camera lenses with me whenever I walk out the door; I take them when I think I am going somewhere that merits both the inconvenience and the risk of carrying them along. I don't expect my fiance to wear her most expensive jewelry each time we go out the door. And, I don’t always wear my finest shoes for something like a commute if I know that they’re going to be put through the ringer.
Practically speaking, I do not have a subway commute but I do sometimes drive a roadster with custom machined aluminum pedals with pretty sharp edges that love to scrape leather off shoes. I mostly am in my office, but sometimes I am touring a factory or construction site walking on wet mud. It’s comforting to know that my fine shoes can handle this sort of stress, but just as I don’t want to drive the roadster when there are four inches of snow on the ground (even though I could take the “cars are meant to be driven” approach and dress it up with winter tires and 250lbs in the trunk), I’m completely comfortable swapping to something I care less about destroying by accident.
I suppose the root difference is that I [apparently] am much, much less wealthy than most of the audience here. Like most of this country in the first few centuries of its formation, I can afford some nice things but I cannot afford to mistreat them. As my predecessors saved their fine china for special guests, and their Sunday finest for, well, Sunday, I WANT to treat my finer items as precious. I suspect that many people here have a strong modern consumer attitude toward luxury items: they are swimming in them, buying them on a monthly or even weekly basis, and have stocked up so many shoes that they frankly do not care so much if one of them gets damaged. I don't recall my reasonably well-to-do grandparents having anywhere near the amount of "stuff" that we do today. I am sure they only had a couple of pairs of shoes: one for daily use and one for important occasions. As someone going through a phase in his life where he feels he has TOO MANY things and wants to pare down to that simpler, more old-fashioned life with fewer, more precious items, I am learning in the process that I need to make more situational use of these precious items a higher priority in order for them to last longer and be in good condition and ready to go when I need them.
I suppose it's different when you have four pairs of $500+ shoes at any given time; a good, severe scratch on one wouldn't make you worry at all about what to wear for a more formal event that same night...
It’s funny how a group of people who follow classical / traditional looks and styles so thoroughly seem to have such a modern sensibility when it comes to disposability and consumerism.
(Then again I may be misreading things in a fundamental way here... for this group, $1,000 shoes may indeed be considered "commuter and daily workhorse" shoes... like someone buying a $120K sedan as a daily driver... in which case none of the above applies.)
It's just stuff, it's not going to rule my life - I buy that stuff to make my life better.
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