One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice. There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale. But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.
I really don’t think everything is this way. I buy a shirt, I put it on. Not much to invest there.
But some things are definitely this way as anyone who has brought Ikea furniture home can tell you.
If shirts were single-use items, I would agree. But I would say you pay every time you wash and iron it, and put it back to wear again.
I think everything is this way for sure. Certain things take up less space (mental or physical) but everything you own does take some sort of ongoing effort to maintain.
In the example of a shirt, there’s washing it, but there’s also simply storing it. In most cases, the effort and space a shirt takes is far outweighed by the benefit, but if you don’t wear a particular shirt then it becomes a burden simply to keep it stored. This is most noticeably felt when moving to a new house.