Did you ever not-buy something and later wish you’d bought it?
When I was about 12 or 13, I talked myself out of buying a fantastic novelty brooch, a piece of costume jewelry from the early 1950s. It was a tiny, blue enamel plate with a bacon-and-eggs breakfast executed in enamel and rhinestones (the yellow centers of the eggs were yellow rhinestones).
It was wicked cute and quirky but I talked myself out of getting it because at 13, I wasn’t exactly a wearer of brooches. Also, it was like $25, which was biiiiiig money for me at the time. Now, that I’m almost 36, I kick my junior-high self for passing up such a delightfully quirky piece of costume jewelry. It’s the sort of thing that might be a bit too giddy for a schoolgirl, but kind of badass for a grown woman.
While this isn’t quite as kitschy-fab as the original brooch I should have bought some twenty-odd years ago, it is mightily tempting and I may splurge the $2 and hot-glue it to a brooch-back.
The opposite of buyer’s remorse. I’ve had it many times, and its companion, seller’s remorse: I got rid of my Mork suspenders and wish I still had them, but even worse, I traded in my first good solid-body guitar, a Gibson RD-Artist, in 1986 towards a very decent Yamaha archtop, but I only got, I think, $300 in trade, which was $50 less than I’d paid when I got that instrument out of the classifieds. Looking to buy it (or another like it) back a few years ago the cheapest I found was $2500 and that was one with a lot more cosmetic damage than my former axe. Not quite like selling a bunch of Apple stock, but I had an immensely playable guitar with a sweet neck and an off the beaten path body—and I had it cheap because the model was unpopular when new a few years earlier. It was the Edsel of rock & roll.