I don’t really know who Dustin Curtis is, but he blogs a lot, and those blog entries often end up on
Hacker News. Not too long ago, he wrote a blog post titled “The Best,”
in which he explains that he has nice stuff. That in fact, everything he owns is actually the very
best of its kind.

Dustin’s blog post culminates in the triumph of his quest for the perfect set of flatware. Apparently,
this is what the perfect collection of forks, knives, and spoons looks like, which we can assume Dustin Curtis
has in his kitchen drawer at this very moment:

The Best

Those five “instruments” are $50. Fifty dollars for a single fork, knife, and spoon (the smaller items are
a salad fork and tea spoon — and I’m sure it would be strictly bush league to use them for any other
purpose). Is the kitchen drawer that Dustin keeps these vessels in also the very best of its kind? We’re left
to wonder, but presumably so.

Boasting expensive material possessions isn’t really anything new, but Dustin Curtis does it while framing
his pursuit of these things as some admirable combination of special skill and uncompromising hardship.
Stranger still, his thesis is that this is somehow the path to a liberated life. That being able to trust
in the “goodness” of your material possessions will free you. Heaven forbid having to suffer
the uncertainty that a dinner fork could… malfunction, when going for a bite?

But what absolutely blew me away was that the Hacker News readership seemed to agree. Or at least agree
enough to not find it laughable, because it was the number one story on Hacker News for a fair amount of time.

The Worst

So I’d like to respond with an alternate philosophy that I will call “the worst.” The worst stands in
direct contrast to Dustin Curtis, and suggests that one is actually more likely to engender a liberated
life by getting the very worst of everything whenever possible.

The basic premise of the worst is that both ideas and material possessions should be tools that serve us, rather
than things we live in service to. When that relationship with material possessio