Don’t give me a menu, tell me what delicious cuisine you’ve decided to serve me.
Photo by Raquel Martínez on Unsplash
I’m immediately aware that Jeff Bezos is nodding at my headline in silent approval. So I should clarify, choice is probably necessary, but I’m tired so much of it.
I’ll take you back to a place when you were a kid, and we all agreed that choice sucked. If someone got you a £20 gift card from game, you’d despair that they hadn’t just bought you the bumper box of Yu Gi Oh cards instead. The excitement of being given what I can only describe as discriminative shop credit is far less awesome than ripping open something you can enjoy immediately.
I believe choice has become more apparent with age as more and more things are now our responsibility. Grocery shopping was my first thought. Forgive me for this, but if I went around and picked up Amazon Cheese, Bread and Milk from a supermarket every two weeks, I would secretly be glad about saving that half an hour of perusing.
Streaming sites. Can you really say you have an absolute ball sifting through a library off shoddy films and television shows? You know what you end up watching isn’t going to be top-shelf stuff, you’re paying £5-6 a month for the privilege. Just tell me it’s film night and wheel a television in front of me and my other conforming friends. Like they did in the last week of school.
If choice was wiped from our history and we were unaware the concept existed? Put me in that simulator because I’d be grinning all the way through. If I select a film and it’s bad, I feel like a moron for picking a bad film. If I research it and make sure it’s a good film, I don’t get that much-needed quality variance that the premium stuff needs to stand out.
I went to university in 2017 until this summer, it’s a period of time I’ve referenced a lot because it’s when I did the most learning, as well as picked up most of my crabbiness. University was the red pill of choice, realising that you have a choice in what to buy, when and how often you go out drinking, and how you eat. Too much choice made me forget my limits, and suddenly I was binging pretty much everything.
Do you remember the absolute joy when you were a kid of someone walking through the front door with a hot bag of food? Now the process of ordering a takeaway is a mix of excitement and guilt, less of the latter, please. I want all my assets stripped of me and dumped in a trust fund for some authoritative figure to tell me when I may have fun. Woah. Maybe I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole there. I highly recommend you folks remember this article right up until this last paragraph.
Thanks.