When do you buy from IKEA and when do you buy from a designer showroom? Do you care about the wattage of a toaster as much as you care about the MHz of your notebook?

Living organisms have two very distinct roles.

One is to survive. That, we have in common with pretty much all inhabitants of this world.

The second one is to dream. Think ahead. Construct a fictive, ideal, future model of the world in your mind. One might argue that this is unique to humankind.

A job to be done is a well-defined set of conditions which if satisfied computes true. A dream to be dreamed is a fuzzy representation of a future world, which we strive for. For it to compute true not all conditions have to be met, but we want to make sure that all conditions are possibly true.

Certainties vs Possibilities

Does this overly simplified representation of our daily motives apply everywhere? It occurred to me in the context of e-commerce. Which products do fulfill a job, and which do enable the possibilities of a dream?

How do we cater to these two models?