Jack Wellborn

On a recent episode of Reconcilable Differences, Merlin Mann and John Siracusa pondered what makes a person, group or generation become fixated on optimizing certain, if not most, aspects of the products and food they consume. Here’s Merlin reciting the original idea for the topic:

I just feel like people who are younger than I by a generation seem much more careful and canny about not having all the things, but the things that they do have become like this ongoing quest to find the best. Even if it’s not the most costly or expensive, they want the best of this that is available to them and they care a lot about the object, but they also care a lot about the decision making process in showing that work as part of the acquisition of their product.

As Merlin admitted, this is quite a broad topic and while I can’t speak for everyone or even my generation (I don’t even know which generation I’m technically in anymore), I can speak to my own experience.

As someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s, I have repeatedly found myself wondering about some product or food that I didn’t really enjoy, but had long been consuming simply because it had presented as something I should enjoy since childhood. Take orange juice from frozen concentrate as an example. We may still call it orange juice and it may still technically be orange juice, but whatever makes orange juice satisfying has long since been winnowed away out of necessity of mass production and/or to maximize profit.¹ Also there is a keen sense that consuming watered down goods (both literal and figurative) means missing out on the real thing.

Many of the items that I have chosen to optimize in my life tend to have three steps:

1. Identifying when the status quo is actually unsatisfying or not even real (e.g. this orange juice from concentrate I have been drinking my whole life really isn’t that tasty.)
2. Having the motive, means and opportunity to explore other options (e.g. better orange juice is available and can be acquired at a higher cost I can afford.)
3. Being significantly rewarded by this exploration (holy cow, real fresh squeezed orange juice is truly amazing!)

While I do appreciate fresh squeezed orange juice, the best example of something I’ve personally optimized is coffee. I’ve been drinking coffee regularly since my first job after college, which provided either Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts from a drip. Like most coffee available, this coffee was only really enjoyable to me when served with cream and/or sugar. This enjoyment significantly diminished once I resolved to cut out the extra calories and take my coffee black. Still, it was good enough and I probably could have lived with that level of coffee if hadn’t been for my next job where making coffee involved selecting from twelve or so varieties of proto-Keurig-but-much-cheaper-pouches. It worked by sliding a pouch into a machine, navigating through some impossible number of options given what was being made, and then waiting for the nominal beverage of choice to be spit out the bottom. The resulting drink, while technically made from coffee (I checked), was hardly drinkable and was most definitely fake.

At first, I tried to adjust to what was ostensibly a nice perk that many coworkers genuinely seemed to enjoy². I worked through each of the different coffee flavored pouches trying to find one I might like, but each each concoction came out tasting vaguely like plastic. After some number of weeks drinking possibly toxic excretions from pouches of dubious origin, I started exploring my options.

One benefit of the new job was that it facilitated my move from a small town in Connecticut to New York City so my newfound search coffee went immediately beyond the national brands I was familiar with to more boutique options. After many months of trying different coffees from different roasters, I eventually settled on what I drink today — recently roasted medium coffee that I make with an Aeropress and served black. I deeply enjoy my coffee. Here’s the thing though, the payoff for me didn’t wait until I had found my perfection. The payoff came each time I found something better, because every improvement wasn’t just a little better, but was significantly better than what came previously, which was already many magnitudes better than the toxic pouches I had rejected.

I found the status quo subpar, had the motive, means, and opportunity to explore better options, and was repeatedly deeply rewarded for doing so.

The only other aspect to this theory that’s worth mentioning is being somewhat motivated by fighting some external or internal expectation I should be happy with the subpar or fake something, and that I should settle because everyone else happy enough with the status quo. In this sense, finding something better is not only rewarding, but oddly rebellious in some minute and privileged way.

Like I said at the top, I can’t speak for anyone other than my own experiences and I’ll add here that honestly there aren’t many aspects of my life I invest much time into optimizing (maybe I’m not a millennial?). That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if many around my own age and younger experience the same reward whenever they manage to replace a subpar or fake something the’ve been living with their whole life with something real that they truly enjoy. It also wouldn’t surprise if, like me here, they like telling the to story of their small journey to something better.