This page is a list of some great purchases I’ve made. Until advertising becomes much more efficient, many of the best purchases we make are direct suggestions from friends!
last updated: Jan 11 2026
Other Lists
Many others have made similar lists, so I’ll link them here should you want to browse them:
- Things for Recovering Hoarders Like Me: from Aayush Gupta – household items, travel items, and some fun and software
- Things I recommend you buy and use: from Sam Bowman – kitchen and sleep items (UK)
- Tools / Gear: from Alexey Guzey – computers, software, apps, browser extensions
- Recommended Things: from Andrew Connor – sleep/travel, kitchen, desktop/AV, productivity
- Blueprint items: from Bryan Johnson – contains some simple reasonable choices for skin care (old link was broken, but this still has the items in it)
- My 40-liter backpack travel guide: from Vitalk – focuses on travel/backpacking and uniqlomaxxing
- Tweet responses from a @strangestloop tweet: top suggestions include sleeping masks, matching socks, bidet, airpod pros, air fryer, sous vide
- Tweet responses from a @natfriedman tweet: top suggestions include humidifies, ray-ban metas (from Yenn LeCun..), tonal, mosquito bite eraser, bambulabs printer, flame thrower. strong endorse!
Have additions to this list of lists? Please say hi to me on Twitter!
Separate lists
- 1/8th sleep (separate post): a cheaper homemade version of the eightsleep (no subscription!)
- optimal webcam setup (separate post): if calls are an important part of your life, consider looking good
- supplements (separate post): many supplements, mostly for longevity. ymmv
Additional items
Below are many more items I’ve bought and enjoyed.
Health & Wellness
Reduce hangovers by ~2/3rds via a genetically engineered probiotic that consumes acetaldehyde in your gut
The best blue-light therapy glasses to use upon wake-up (these are the opposite of blue-light filtering glasses prior to bed), great if you have sleep/circadian rhythm issues
All the AGI lab guys love this so it’s probably good. I never did find a consumer monitor for all other particulate matter types (vo2 etc) that was good though
Reduces the chance you get sick if you are attending highly congested events. Nowonder (previously Enovid) is a nitric oxide nasal spray. Amazon link included but the price is over double, I would suggest using the Nowonder link
Gets rid of hiccups. Some people find this really useful (apparently hiccups are painful and bad for some people. this is the only item on this page I haven’t tried myself)
Sleep
This is just a normal blanket. I always throw a few in random rooms guests may lounge in
Personal Care
My preferred daily night moisturizer. Retinol is one of the few skincare products I suggest to ~everyone
Japanese nail clippers which are far superior to any others I’ve tried. Far better clipping results + usage, and never leaves a mess (any leftover waste remains within the clipper).
These are the best socks I have purchased for medium to heavy usage. Worth the price!
Home & Organization
They’re cheap and the best way to separate drink types, I usually use them as ‘guest fridges’
Probably the best $20 and two minutes I’ve spent on anything related to a chair or an office. If you want to glide around smoothly for the rest of your life, these fit in almost all office chairs and require no tools to replace (thank you @GrantSlatton)
Lighting
Clean burn, last a long time, don’t even need a holder for them. Better than LEDs (thank you @DavidSHolz)
Among the best lighting one can purchase for any surface out of line of sight. slightly better than the off-brand stuff but 8x the price. getting hue strips and floor lighting is generally always worth it imo
Tech & Gadgets
Absurdly long, absurdly great value. i can’t believe i used to need multiple monitors!
If you want cameras, Reolink makes no-bullshit (non-cloud) ones which are good. These require ethernet, but they have WiFi options
Kitchen & Tools
Cable Management
Huge improvement if you want cables to be near-invisible in rooms. some say you can never overdo cable management
The rotating outlet is so nice. white cables + white walls = invisible
Fun Stuff
Other categories
There’s many categories of items I haven’t included here: software, apps, browser extensions, electrical engineering hardware, 3d printing, collectables, anime merch, etc. I may make separate posts for some categories but I thought it’d be better to post something rather than nothing for now.
If you found this post helpful you may also enjoy my short personal finance post. I need one more Robinhood Gold(card) referral please $5 thank you!
Parting tips
A few tips for thinking about this kind of stuff which may seem super obvious but I found useful:
- Any time you have a problem, search for a solution. This sounds obvious, but it took me a long time to do for many obscure problems like “how do I stop sunlight from entering from under my door at 6AM in an aesthetic way”. With how good genAI is, there’s no excuse to not do this anymore. There are custom items for almost any problem now, and if there aren’t, it’s easy to have them made. Having items custom-printed, custom-welded, custom-cut, etc, is surprisingly cheap regardless of the medium.
- Almost everything is really cheap. Sometimes I would hang onto an inferior version of an item I happened to already have rather than throw it out and buy a new one. Most of my Amazon purchases are $5-25, and I’ve never regretted buying a better version of something, especially if it’s related to my main workflows or sleep. It felt weird for me to get rid of my ‘like-new’ monitors and desks, but after I replaced them with better versions I wished I had done it years ago. If you buy from not-Amazon you can save even more!
- Be pro-active about modifying your environment. The extent you can drastically improve your environment for little effort and money always surprises me if you find and make the right choices. If you have a bad landlord ymmv, but drilling more holes, moving around doors, and so on, has always been worth it for me.
- Actually put effort into organization and aesthetics. This may be controversial among some readers, but so be it – this is a post by me for others similar to me, and I under-did cable organization, wall art, closet organizers, etc, for a long time. Maybe one day I’ll do an interior design post!
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