Let’s look at how I do things, maybe with a slightly less important decision. How about the time I had to pick where to eat dinner in Seattle when I was on tour in the spring of 2014?
First I texted four friends who travel and eat out a lot and whose judgment on food I really trust. While I waited for recommendations from them, I checked the website Eater for its “Heat Map,” which includes new, tasty restaurants in the city. I also checked the “Eater 38,” which is the site’s list of the thirty-eight essential Seattle restaurants and standbys. Then I checked reviews on Yelp to see what the consensus was on there. I also checked an online guide to Seattle in GQ magazine. I narrowed down my search after consulting all these recommendations and then went on the restaurant websites to check out the menus.
At this point I filtered all these options down by tastiness, distance, and what my tum-tum told me it wanted to eat.
Finally, after much deliberation, I made my selection: Il Corvo. A delicious Italian place that sounded amazing. Fresh-made pasta. They only did three different types a day. I was very excited.
Unfortunately, it was closed. It only served lunch.
By now I had run out of time because I had a show to do, so I ended up making a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich on the bus.*
This kind of rigor goes into a lot of my decision making. Whether it’s where I’m eating, where I’m traveling, or, god forbid, something I’m buying, I feel compelled to do a lot of research to make sure I’m getting the best.
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At certain times, though, this “I need the best” mentality can be debilitating. I wish I could just eat somewhere that looks good and be happy with my choice. But I can’t. The problem is that I know somewhere there is a perfect meal for me and I have to do however much research I can to find it.
That’s the thing about the Internet: It doesn’t simply help us find the best thing out there; it has helped to produce the idea that there is a best thing and, if we search hard enough, we can find it. And in turn there are a whole bunch of inferior things that we’d be foolish to choose.
Here’s a quick list of things I can think of that I’ve spent at least five to ten minutes researching:
? Electric citrus juicer (Waiting on this one to arrive in the mail. Hope I didn’t fuck it up. Don’t want too much pulp in my juice!)
? Taxidermy (I started off looking for a deer or bear, but I ended up finding a beautiful penguin in Paris. His name is Winston.)
? Which prestigious TV drama to binge-watch next (The Americans, House of Cards, or Orphan Black? The answer: I watched all of them while telling my publisher I was writing this book.)
? Bag for my laptop
? Protective case for my laptop
? Internet-blocking program so I can stop using my laptop so much
? Museums (Gotta peep the exhibits online before I commit to driving all the way out there, right?)
? Coasters (If you dig deep, you can find some dope coasters with dinosaurs on them!)
? Vanilla ice cream (Had to step it up from Breyers, and there’s a lot of debate in the ice cream fan community—there are fierce debates on those message boards.)
It’s not just me, though. I may take things to extremes sometimes, but we live in a culture that tells us we want and deserve the best, and now we have the technology to get it. Think about the overwhelming popularity of websites that are dedicated to our pursuit of the best things available. Yelp for restaurants. TripAdvisor for travel. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic for movies.
A few decades ago, if I wanted to research vanilla ice cream, what would I have even done? Cold-approach chubby guys and then slowly steer the convo toward ice cream to get their take? No, thanks.
Nowadays the Internet is my chubby friend. It is the whole world’s chubby friend.
THE “BEST” ROMANTIC PARTNER?
If this mentality has so pervaded our decision making, then it stands to reason that it is also affecting our search for a romantic partner, especially if it’s going to be long-term. In a sense, it already has. Remember: We are no longer the generation of the “good enough” marriage. We are now looking for our soul mates. And even after we find our soul mates, if we start feeling unhappy, we get divorced.
If you are looking for your soul mate, now is the time to do it. Consider the rich social infrastructure of bars, nightclubs, and restaurants in cities. Add to that the massive online dating industry. Then throw in the fact that people now get married later in life than ever before and spend their twenties in “early adulthood,” which is basically dedicated to exploring romantic options and having experiences that previous generations couldn’t have imagined.