This is a phrase I’ve heard, experienced, dreaded, been affected by, and occasionally benefited from over the years.

• The best time to buy a house was in your grandparents’ time.
• The best time to buy a used car was before Covid.
• The best time to buy a console was before tarriffs.
• The best time to buy a graphics card was before crypto.
• The best time to buy crypto was when a programmer paid for two Papa John’s pizzas with 10,000 bitcoin.
• The best time to buy stocks was when they were at an all-time low.
• The best time to buy Pokémon cards was when people didn’t think they were cool.
• The best time to buy physical media was before people realised how little of their digital stuff they actually owned.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but it’s also a dangerous way to live.

Most people can’t buy every house, car, console, game, stock, card, record, DVD, gadget, and random bit of tech just in case the future decides to make it worth 10, 100, or 1,000 times more.

If everything becomes a missed opportunity, then nothing is allowed to just be a thing anymore. It all becomes a market.

Then fun becomes “potential”, taking… well, all the fun out of it.

Until someone perfects a time machine, I think a better way to live is to focus on what we need, what’s available, and what we consider reasonable.

Some things will keep going up, some will crash, and most of us will only know which was which afterwards.

And if the past got the now-super-valuable thing at the cheapest price, it just means the past got the bargain and we just got the price tag.

Which is quite rude, to be honest, but inevitable.