I'm curious what purchases you can even justify with this mental model. Is a $50 dinner at a restaurant once a week worth it (60K+ USD over your lifetime)? What about a night at the movies with the family (easily 50K-100K+ total)? The two fancy coffees you mention are themselves multiple thousands worth.

Not the GP but I think you're misapplying the logic. When it comes to food, need to eat it. A $50 dinner's real cost is the delta between it and what your mean cost of dinner.

Buying or subscribing to an optional thing is different. You could live without adding numbers as a service. You could live without a calculator. You could still do arithmetic and even calculate the value of those things based on the time they could save you.

The "need" part of food can be covered by $1/meal. When talking about a night out at an upscale restaurant or bar it is ~100% entertainment.

Where the hell are you finding a $1 "meal"? Like a meal human beings can live on?

It's possible to live on $1/meal ($3/day), even in the US, but it'll be bland and utterly devoid of variety, and it requires a cool, dry, secure place to store your bulk purchases and energy to heat it with, which is an additional cost.

But for the purposes of this conversation, there's a wide middle ground between a $1 bowl of rice and beans and a $50 restaurant steak. For someone in the US, if you're prudent with your grocery shopping and willing to cook at home, a person can eat luxuriously for $10/day.

And that’s about what we do - I love to cook, and grocery shopping is kind of fun, especially when I spot a particularly good-looking steak. I end up spending about 500 EUR/mo on groceries for my family of 3, and at least 100 of that is very elective.

I’ll go out to eat for the sake of socializing, but we rarely go out to eat as a family, because cooking at home is easier, along with being cheaper and frankly better than most restaurant meals that cost well over double what I paid for higher-quality ingredients. I’d rather have a friend come over and make lasagna with her than go out to a restaurant where it’s too loud to talk and the waiter comes over to see “if there’s anything we need” every 15 minutes.

Preferences can be cultivated. A preference for cooking and reading library books is less expensive than one for going to restaurants and the movies and maintaining the range of streaming subscriptions required to have access to all the currently-popular shows. I’ll leave more subjective judgments out of it.

I cook at home a lot. I'm no chef but I've been cooking for decades so I'm not terrible at it. I can and typically do about $10/day per person. It's not what I'd ever describe as luxurious. Good yes, healthy yes, but luxurious no.

But you're not wrong there's a wide gulf between a $50 restaurant meal and a $10 home cooked meal. That gulf shrinks when you account for your time cooking and cleaning.

Which gets back to the original point, the value of a subscription isn't a function of the raw cost of it but the delta between the alternative and the subscription.

A $50 dinner costs more than a home cooked $10 dinner. But if the inconvenience of cooking and cleaning "costs" you $15 worth of effort because your time is worth something then it's only twice as much as the home cooked meal. So the actual additional "cost" of the restaurant meal is $25 because you need to spend $25 of time and materials for dinner anyways.

That calculus changes depending on how you charge yourself for time spent cooking and cleaning. In terms of subscriptions if a subscription costs you $10 a month but you'd spend $5 a month doing that thing by hand a subscription might be worthwhile if it offers $5 or more of convenience of time saving. You need to judge the subscription on the delta between it and doing the thing yourself.

> Is a $50 dinner at a restaurant once a week worth it

The obvious answer is "no". You seem to have something else in mind.

The question is what is a yes? If Netflix is too wasteful and a restaurant visit is too wasteful and a cocktail is too wasteful and a cup of coffee is too wasteful then what exactly are you okay spending on? And if your spending model is "never spend any money under any circumstances" then what even is the point of it?

If you dearly love that 5 (now 6) dollar daily coffee, I’m not going to say you’re wasteful. You’ve just decided that that coffee really is worth $18,000/decade (or perpetual $45k) instead of spending about $2,000/decade (or perpetual $5k - frivolous enough!) on a cappuccino machine plus decent beans and milk like I do.

You probably don’t waste as much as I do on skiing or amateur radio stuff.

If I had an answer to that question for you, I would have responded to it. I didn't. I responded to the question you asked that I did have an answer for.

If I get used to it and would be unhappy if I weren't able to maintain that habit: yes, and that's a small part of why we don't go out to eat on a regular basis - the larger parts being that most restaurant food is remarkably unhealthy, and that I'm a good cook who enjoys both the ingredients shopping and preparation. For the same money and level of hassle (especially now with a 3 year old), we could either have a mediocre restaurant meal, or excellent steak or salmon with fancy vegetables at home.

This is just a way of making the purchase seem bigger than it is. In that 25 years if you took home 50k EUR annually you would earn 1,250,000 EUR. Reducing that to 1,247,000 for 25 years of value feels much less life changing.

You also won't be tied to the this one thing, if it's Netflix today it would be some other form of entertainment later.