Doesn’t have to be a thing you bought. Just some thing you didn’t have but then once you did it expanded your scope of actions.
The first obvious example that comes to mind is a car. Plenty of drawbacks to prevalence of cars, but being able to go where I want when I want, and far away, is very transformative.
I’m interested in other examples of things that aren’t just useful, but that open new possibilities.
A decent GPU (rx 570). Could play any game I wanted without going through desperate measures to get it to run at minimal settings, could do more with game dev and 3d modeling, etc…
These days, integrated graphics are honestly pretty decent though. Hell, I’m pretty sure the steam deck’s apu is more powerful than my machine in a few ways.