The reasoning consists, usually, of taking some expenditure under consideration, dividing the initially investment over the expected life time, posting a per day cost and then comparing that to both added comfort, performance and expected productivity, moral and monetary correlations.

For the most part this is an improvement over an average consumer's purchasing rational paradigm.

But often it's actually as bad or worse.

I think this may be an outgrowth of the rise, which seems to correlate with the rise of computational analysis. Quantification is king.

Too often, however, it's horribly abused.

Often we seem to disregard some portion of the non-, or not easily, quantifiable.

This leads to all sorts of what we could at times call extra-code-icular 'premature-optimizations' or, as they were once called - 'fails.'

For example that "buns" component. In any given circumstance there are a massive swath of other factors I've rarely seen cited but need consideration. Throw in some non-/difficult to quantify factors of both risk and opportunity loss and then try to imagine potential impacts on that extrapolated low looking number, because there's always risk and always opportunity cost.

Take the spiffy chair and consider the potential that for some reason or other you in one of your pivots or planned or unplanned contingencies find the need to travel or base operations for a time out of a different location.

How's that chair equation working out now that you've got to transport it to another location? How comfy is it as you're coding on the other side of the continent from your home office because either a co-founder or an investor or a client or some other previously unknowable factor has popped up?

I'm not speaking as some great guru but a poor sap who's realized how many times I've upsold myself for functionality or opportunity that I've never come close to even breaking even on.

I know that quantitative analysis is a seductive siren. But realize that for all the beauty and power and reach of our linear equations we, to give old Rummy a shout out, "don't know what we don't know, and that realization should play into all of your analytics.

Your numbers will fail if they are all you lean on. Think outside the quantifiable and learn to respect the gut and differentiate it from an over active desire to analyze yourself away from it and common sense.

Just because we're well reasoned folk doesn't make us impervious to marketing tricks' least of all the ones we play on ourselves landing on our own ptosis