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The Goods devotes a lot of time to thinking about what it means to spend money: what we choose to buy, what it says about who we are as individuals and as a society, and why it all matters. That’s the focus of our essay series The Best Money I Ever Spent, where people write about the purchases they’ve made, big and small, that affect their lives.
To close out 2020, our staff wanted to take a swing at the notion of spending and value from a different angle, examining the items, experiences, and services that we may well have bought in another timeline, but certainly not in this one. Whether it was a gym pass or a year of preschool, a cheeseburger or a plane ticket to a friend’s funeral, the things we couldn’t buy this year marked how radically different our lives became compared to what we might have imagined and raised the question of how they’ll be on the other side.