15 Items That Are Just Status Symbols

Expensive watches have always seemed like a waste of money, but now that the time greets us (along with wallpaper of a busty model on top of a sports car) whenever we unlock our phones, owning a watch seems ridiculous. If you ever talk to guys who own watches, they are quick to explain that a watch is "just convenient." Yeah, the three seconds it takes to get your phone out of your pocket to check the time really adds up. After a year of looking at your watch instead of your phone, you'll have saved enough time to watch a YouTube video, just make sure there are no ads in front of it. If there ever was a time when a woman thought, "Oh my God, look at that timepiece. So precise. I'm going to fuck that guy." (which there almost definitely weren't) those days are long gone.

A good knife block or a pricey set of pans is great for someone who actually cooks meals. Many of us put the cart before the horse, going all Pampered Chef on our kitchen before we become good enough chefs to deserve pampering. Though the lengths of our culinary mastery may extend only so far as the frozen burrito and the PBJ, we still insist on having all kinds of tools we'll never actually use. It might be a good idea to take your culinary life one knife at a time until you can actually tell the difference between the knives in your block. Don't worry, pretty much any knife will cut your PBJ and a burrito can be heated up in any size pan.

Mark Twain called golf "a good walk spoiled." Golf is also the main attraction of many private clubs. Well, actually the main attraction is being around rich people who share the same ancestry you do, but the major attraction they can publicize is golf. The closest I've ever come to seeing what a private club is like was my time working as a greenskeeper (read: lawn mower and weed puller) at a local country club just after college and just before I resolved never to return to my hometown for an extended period of time barring catastrophic injury or financial ruin. Even from the weeds, these private clubs seem awful. If you have to join just to get that dream job, that's one thing, but if you want to pay exorbitant fees to smoke cigars with old people and throw around phrases like "post-racial America," your cash is probably better invested in some time with a therapist.

There are dozens of ways to waste money on automotive upgrades, but leather interior is one of the only ones that makes the driving experience worse. Rather than comfort, you get that sweaty stuck-to-you-seat sensation every time you get in your car on a warm day. Rather than that standard durable seat material that can handle almost anything, you get an upholstery that shows its age more readily than a townie at a high school kegger. Waste your money on making the outside of your car look good. Once she's in your car, you've kind of already won.

You don't need pens and pencils anymore unless you're doing something you don't want evidence of like scribbling your number down for a waitress or penning a ransom note (though any ransom note expert knows you have to cut letters out of magazines, but I digress). Even though pencils only exist for the SATS and pens only exists for banks and real estate agents to give away, every so often you still see a guy with a gold-plated pen who thinks anyone will give a shit. Who did this ever impress? This is probably the weakest conspicuous consumption there ever was, unless some guy has a diamond encrusted calculator and a platinum ruler tucked away somewhere that we don't know about.

Over the last few years we've seen a backlash against engagement rings (one of the best take downs that doesn't involve watching atrocities perpetrated on child miners comes to us courtesy of College Humor). But, at least with engagement rings, you've bought something for someone else. You've made a foolish purchase as an expression of love, or at least, as an expression of heavy, heavy lust. Buying jewelry for yourself combines the wastefulness inherent in the jewelry buying process with the egotism of a self-centered purchase. Also, if you want to be robbed that badly, just carry a comically large sack with a dollar sign written on it; it will attract approximately as many thieves as the ice around your neck.

Just when you were pretty sure that cufflinks are all but extinct outside of Men's Wearhouse, you see some dude rocking the cufflinks and rocking them hard. Usually when you see cufflinks (you know, on Greek real estate agents, Italian insurance agents and the like), you are seeing the worst attempt at conspicuous consumption this side of fancy pens. If you're one of the seven people in the world still wearing cufflinks, just don't spend too much money on them. Speaking as a guy writing about cufflinks who had to think long and hard about the last time he saw someone wearing cufflinks, people don't notice them as much as you think they will.

Whenever you go to the airport, you see someone with expensive matching luggage. Who are these people impressing? Has anyone among us looked at luggage cycling around the baggage claim and thought anything other than "Not mine. Not mine. I wonder if that one has drugs in it?" We aren't sure who these boutique luggage owners are trying to impress, but it might be smart to spend your money on something that goes on the plane rather than under it if you're trying to leverage your wealth into a membership in the mile-high club. (That is a club no one mind's joining). If the most interesting thing you can find to talk about during a delayed flight is luggage, the odds that your high-end suitcase is going to get you back to a lady's hotel room are pretty slim.

If you ask anyone who owns a pool, they'll tell you that their friends swim in it more than they do. Unless pool owners make a conscious effort to get in those morning laps, the swimming pool quickly becomes more trouble than its worth. Of course, if you're a wealthy, attractive divorcee, a swimming pool is a great investment because then you get to have no-strings-attached sex with the pool boy. For the rest of us, a swimming pool is just an excuse for our deadbeat friends to hang out at our house and soil our last clean towels.

Things you only do when you are drunk or tired aren't usually sound investments. Just ask any girl I've ever slept with. The same person who will buy cheaper lunch meat or cereal at the grocery store or try to make it a few more days without dishing out laundry quarters will often gladly spends $50 on a cab ride to save themselves an hour on public transit. Don't get me wrong, public transit is the absolute worse, but even if your time is worth $50 an hour, there are better places to put that cash than in the hands of a cabbie who won't take you to Brooklyn.

It's unbelievable that we spend so much money on something that we lose and break so often. No, I'm not talking about phones. You really don't have much of a choice there unless you want to stand idly by while your friends beat Candy Crush and right swipe Tinder babes without you. Not going to happen. I'm talking about sunglasses. It's no wonder that there are so many counterfeits out there. They only discernable difference between the glasses of the rich and famous and gas station knock-offs is the lightly scrawled Ray-Ban on the lens. And odds are your cousin knows a guy who can get that done for you real cheap as long as you pay in cash and don't ask any questions. The best way to avoid the pain of stepping on, losing, or dropping your sunglasses in the toilet during a drunken night of debauchery is to never buy expensive sunglasses in the first place.

Whenever it rains or (as it did perpetually last winter) snows in New York City, the yuppie population looks like they have fully prepped for the journey from Everest base camp. Thick performance fleeces, complicated rain jackets, and backpacks with straps on straps on straps help these stalwarts get from their advertising job over to the happy hour six blocks away. This is another one of those instances where the well-heeled put the cart before the horse. Before they go and rough it (read: camp or hike at a state park with wi-fi), they insist on maxing out their credit card so that roughing it won't be too rough. As a result, they end up wearing their pricey all-weather gear out to that first blustery outdoor brunch of the season, because damn it, if you bought something you might as well use it, even if that something is incredibly impractical. Step away from the North Face: There are other ways to put your double-income-no-kids-status on display.

What do you do at a pricey night-club-y gym that you can't do at Planet Fitness or even a municipal fitness center? The only acceptable answer to this question is "stand the smell of the locker room." Speaking as a man who once walked in on another man bathing in a gym sink (yes, literally bathing), I know that of which I speak. If it's a better workout you seek, a more expensive gym membership probably isn't going to make you more fit. A bench press is a bench press is a bench press and laziness is laziness is laziness. If you can afford the king's ransom a personal trainer costs, that's a different story, but you can easily find one of those for cheap on Craig's List, as long as you're comfortable with the possibility that they might murder you.