Why if you’re over fifty, you should only buy the best of anything.

By the time you’ve reached maturity, your days are numbered. You only have so many ahead of you, and it’s natural to want to spend most of those days doing things that interest and please you. By now you have some idea what those are. You spent a great deal of time figuring out the exact nature of your interests, and now it’s time to dig deep, to flesh them out, to really get to know them and yourself.

So you don’t want to have a bunch of stuff, just the things that really interest you. And you don’t want to have crap, you want to have the good stuff.

For example, if you’ve decided that you really want to learn to play a musical instrument, that means you’re going to devote several hours a week to practicing. Maybe even ten hours a week. And let’s be charitable and say that you have a thousand weeks of life ahead of you. Are you going to want to waste that thousand weeks and those ten thousand hours practicing on a cheap piece of crap instrument, one that can’t possibly encourage your progress as much as a finer one would have?

Of course not. Nor are you going to want to paint pictures using cheap paints and lousy brushes, or take pictures with a dime-store camera.

If ever there were a time to honor yourself and go for it, this is it. If necessity demands that you economize, then limit the number of things you do, but don’t employ junk to do them.

Oscar Wilde, the Irish genius who had the misfortune to be a homosexual back when such things were not tolerated, said “There is only one class, First class.”