Product recommendations

Things I recommend you buy and use

I'm embracing my role as a lifestyle influencer for people who base their whole belief system on blogs. A lot of bloggers I read have written general product recommendation posts. It’s time to write mine. This is a list of products that have made my life better and that I often tell other people to buy. I’ll circle back and add to this as I find more stuff I like.

I'm vegan, so a lot of these will be specifically product recs for vegans.

I’ve tried to mostly list relatively cheap stuff. I have a few expensive items but I’ve only selected things that I think actually scale in quality with cost, actually add to my quality of life to the point that they’re worth the money, and aren’t just a signal that you’re wealthy.

Clothes

I dress to signal that I’m a dynamic but replaceable cog in the great transient rootless cosmopolitan urban capitalist machine. Clean minimalism with basic colors that can be paired with any of the other colors in my wardrobe + always white shoes. I won't wear anything flashy except on special occasions. I want my clothes to signal that I'm basically competent and not trying to draw attention to myself; I'm here to listen to your idea for an AI task management app. I want people around me to feel like they’re in a relaxing mall, like this song. Everything I wear is vegan (no leather or wool). If you would also like this look:

• Uniqlo Supima cotton crew neck T-shirts

  • Reliably great, especially for the price.

• A nice OCBD

  • Cheap: JCrew Factory.

  • Mid range: Spier and Mackay.

  • Expensive: Asket.

• L.L.Bean Men's Organic Cotton Waffle Sweater, Rollneck Crew

  • My favorite sweater. A compliment machine. I don't buy wool sweaters because they’re not vegan, and this is imo the best cotton option at a reasonable price.

• Truth Vegan men's belt

  • Many vegan belts are poorly made and start to show signs of wear pretty quickly. This belt has lasted me for 5 years and still looks brand new. It's more expensive but you end up saving a lot of money because you don’t have to replace it.

• Bonobos Chinos

  • The best men's pants I've found. I have a more "athletic build" (kind of chubby) and the athletic fit on these fit me much better than any other chinos I've tried.

• White Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars

  • One of the best looking pairs of vegan shoes.

• Timex Weekender

  • I was once sitting in a circle where someone said that he looked like a fuck-up. We all went around talking about whether each person looked like a fuck-up. When it came to me, people said I definitely didn't look like a fuck-up because I was wearing a watch. Which watch was I wearing? The Timex Weekender. It's a (relatively) very cheap and good looking option for wearing a watch to signal basic competence. I like the look a lot. Make sure to get one that fits the size of your wrist well. I don't like how smart watches look and I'm not interested in having another screen to look at.

• A Harrington jacket

  • It's hard to find minimalist jackets that don't look dated, Harringtons are my favorites. I think bombers are fun but feel like a throwback to the 2010s. Harringtons feel more adult. Unfortunately my favorite brand for Harringtons (the Orvis windbreaker) isn’t being made anymore and I'm not sure where else to find one that's both not too expensive and looks really good.

• The Everlane bomber jacket

  • If you do like the bomber look, the Everlane bomber is imo the best looking in its price range. It has a great weight and feel to it as well. Fun to wear in the fall.

• Lifting shoes

  • If you lift weights, you absolutely want to be sure that your feet do not slip around and are being given enough support while you deadlift or squat. This is one of the goofier gym investments I’ve made that I’m pretty sure has actually paid off a ton.

If you’re a guy trying to be more stylish, it also just helps a ton to have at least a little muscle mass to fill out a shirt. Here is how I get muscles.

Electronics

Computer

Apps

• Alfred

  • Hotkeys will save you.

• Claude

  • I use Claude every day when I’m trying to learn stuff. If you haven’t played around with an LLM much yet, you should definitely at least try. Claude’s the best one as of writing.

• Kiwix

  • Download all of Wikipedia. Good for situations where you're stuck without wifi.

• Obsidian

  • I'm in the cult. I take notes for everything now and it's made me much better at learning. I use it as a flashcard app too with the flashcard plugin. Do not neglect spaced repetition. Explore the Obsidian subreddit for advice on how to use it.

Hardware/desk stuff

I believe it's good to splurge a little on the place you'll spend 8 hours/day.

• The Logitech MX Master 3S mouse

  • The most comfortable mouse in the whole world I love this thing.

• An external monitor (don't know which brands are especially good)

  • I took way too long to try out an external monitor. Makes working much more pleasant. I tried using two monitors for a bit but decided that having just one large monitor worked better for me.

• A big desk pad

  • These are cheap and nice.

• I don't have many thoughts on which keyboard's best, but for ergonomic keyboards my friends swear by this one.

• Laptop stand for travel

  • When I'm traveling I take my mouse and keyboard with me and prop my laptop on a computer stand. Makes it much more comfortable to work a lot from anywhere. I use this one.

• A little orb lamp for my desk

  • I like orbs.

Other Electronics

• Kobo Libra Color

  • It's great to be able to read a lot without having to look at a screen. I used a Kindle for about 7 years but switched to a Kobo Libra Color because it’s much easier to upload a lot of different types of documents to it and I’ve really loved it. It might be my favorite object that I own. Ereaders have helped me do a lot more focused reading. They’re a huge life improvement for me. The ereader and eink subreddits have opinions on good ereaders.

• Sony WH-1000XM4 Wireless Noise Canceling Headphones

  • Expensive, but unbelievable quality of life improvement if you listen to a lot of audio throughout the day. Very comfortable to wear for very long periods of time. Cancels noise really well and makes flights much better. Super light. Great sound quality. Might not be the very best option but works great for me. See here for more people who like them. Makes me happy every time I pick them up to put them on. I suspect the very best headphones in this price range are made by Sennheiser.

• A travel battery

  • Makes travel so much easier.

• Tribit Bluetooth Speaker

  • The best cheap bluetooth speaker I’ve used.

• A TV

  • When I was a kid big TVs were very expensive status symbols. It took me a while to notice that TVs have become incredibly cheap given their size. You can get a 50 inch TV for $210 on Amazon as of this writing. I really like watching movies, and getting to sit back and watch them on a TV as opposed to hunched over my computer feels really luxurious relative to how cheap it is to get one.

Kitchen

Items

• Instant Pot

  • Makes life easier.

• Vitamix blender

  • Expensive, but I bought mine in 2017 and I've had zero issues with it after 7 years of use. Makes it easy to make post-workout smoothies among other things.

Food

• Celsius

  • Gang.

• Creatine

  • Buy the cheapest powdered version you can. Makes your muscles big.

• Edamame & Mung Bean Fettuccine from Explore Cuisine

  • Insane amount of protein in pasta that tastes pretty okay.

• Lao Gan Ma chili crisp

  • Makes things taste good.

• MSG

  • Gang.

• Nutritional yeast

  • Gang.

• Soy Curls

  • Texture of chicken and absorbs any flavor you cook them in. Very high fiber too.

• Sun Warrior vegan protein powder

  • The least bad tasting of the vegan protein powders I've tried. Especially like their maple french toast flavor.

Other

• Stannous fluoride toothpaste (Example)

  • Toothpaste with stannous fluoride works better than other types of toothpaste but that isn’t super well known. Read more here. An essential part of being a cog in the rootless cosmopolitan capitalist machine is consuming more fluoride.

• A cheap used car (I drive a 2015 Toyota Corolla)

  • I think it makes sense to spend $15,000 on a car. I also think it makes sense to spend $100,000 on a car. A car is either a reliable vehicle to get you to where you need to go, or an intense status symbol. What doesn’t make sense to me is buying in the middle of this range. Buying in the middle doesn’t improve your driving experience much (what I need in a car is bluetooth, a backup cam, a seatbelt, and a reliable motor) and what exactly is the signaling value of a $30,000 car over a $10,000 car? “Hey look at me, I’m not just middle class, I’m UPPER middle class.” Is that really so important for you to get across? If you gave me an extra $20,000 to spend on myself to make myself maximally well-off, I can think of a lot of things I’d spend it on before a pure signal to strangers that I’m kind of sort of well-off.

  • Unfortunately, even living in one of the best transit cities in America, a car made my life drastically easier. Sorry to the urbanists. We’ll have automated cars in like 10 years so owning a car won’t be a common thing longterm anyway.