I, too, bought a couch I could afford. It was new, but it was a cheap one. It's blue.

When I bought a couch, I had a budget. What I didn't do was walk into the store and ask myself how this couch is going to pay for the square footage it occupies. It won't. It can't, that's not the point of a couch.

By the logic in the top comment, nobody should own a couch because it doesn't generate money that would offset the cost of the space it occupies. That's my issue with the top comment.

Nowhere in the OP is there a suggestion that they are doing it with the intention of saving (or earning) money. Nobody, no matter what their means, buys a couch because they think it will behoove them financially to do so.

OP made an aquaponics thing because they wanted to. I bought a couch to sit on it. God forbid.

And on that note, buying something cost-optimized to your space is itself a mark of privilege. My first couch was the nearest free one to my home, since I didn't have a car. It was much too big for the space I put it in. But it's what I could afford, which was nothing.

As a small farmer, I will tell you that, without exception, home-farmed food is immeasurably better than the food in grocery stores. Appearance, taste, nutrition are all superior to store-bought equivalents. Cost is the only metric where store bought food wins.

It gives you a sense of control, for one. I could repurpose existing software to do most of the things I program myself on my own time. Ikea is way cheaper than most things you can make yourself, but you end up planning around commodity furniture instead of getting furniture that fits your plan.

It's very fun as a process and it's cool to be surrounded by things you made. We're so disconnected with where things come from (food, clothes, etc) that for me and people I know it's interesting to be involved and see how the process goes even to produce a token amount of whatever it is. I grow my own herbs and cherry tomatoes in homemade cedar planter boxes, sewed my own kindle cover, am sewing replacement covers for my very old patio furniture cushions that I got used, my fiancee knit me some socks and has made sweaters for herself and a few family members, another of our friends sewed an outfit for herself, etc and it really is just fun to do. It also is nice to be a little more self sufficient, not just in a prepper way, but in the sense of not having to get ripped off by some corporation or feeling bad having to buy something new (ie replacing my cushion covers myself instead of buying fully new cushions)

The idea of self sufficiency either from individualism or associated with a sense of "being prepared" is enticing. But growing something yourself is also cool in itself. Watching a plant grow, eating the tomato you grew tastes better than the one you bought.

If seen as a hobby it isn't more pointless than 3d printing dragons.

1. Tomatoes off a vine crush anything in a u.s. supermarket.

2. I eat unwashed basil leaves and other greens growing outside, I eat them by first putting them under my tongue, my seasonal allergies (I am allergic to everything but mold) have plummeted over the last 3 years of this. The folk remedy of farmers market honey did nothing for me.

I did sublingual drops a decade ago and there was moderate improvement but for medical reasons I can't get a prick test again and I haven't been able to find a provider that will just make drops for me based off my original prick test.

It's impossible to find what plants capture the most environmental allergens on leaves or in edible flowers so I just have a collection, I figured that made more sense than licking a swamp cooler.

Anyway, I've gone from taking Allegra most days to only 2 months out of the year.

An inordinate amount of the benefits of specialization is sucked up by middlemen leaches and enshittification is very real in the physical world too.

A lot of "specialization" looks more like enforced helplessness where the world around you seems to be full of mysterious magic outside your one specialty and often your specialty is very many levels of abstraction away from anything obviously useful to an end user (i.e. some brand of navigating office bureaucracy).

Many things aren't actually all that hard to do yourself nor do they take up all that much time or energy. And there are many things which aren't actually possible to distribute to end users so what's possible by yourself is so much more than what's possible to sell.