The Time-saving Gift of the Analog
Sunday. Rushing out the door to the grocery store with my six year old, a trip to be avoided at all costs, but it wasn’t an option since we had people coming for dinner in a few hours and needed to get the goods for the pumpkin pie now or never.
We also, it occurred to me as I stood there with keys in hand and imploring my son to “focus. Socks and shoes. Please focus,” needed to serve some food that wasn’t plain noodles with olive oil and salt. I had promised “pasta,” but it had fully escaped me until then that their palates might well be more sophisticated than an energetic, particular, six year old’s.
As the socks were rounding the toes and heading toward the arches and heels, I panicked over what sort of pasta dish I could serve. I had no go-to’s, and the unending expanse of the Internet’s recipe offerings seemed daunting in the seconds available to assemble an appropriate shopping list. An Internet search would yield such a rich trove of options, but it would take minutes upon minutes to determine the right dish.
And then I remembered that I owned a few cookbooks.
Fearing a delay on my part could lead to distraction on my son’s part and push back our departure significantly, I hastily paged through the few cookbooks I had that weren’t intended for little mouths. Happily, The Beekman 1802 Heirloom Cookbook sat on my shelf from my time in the Berkshires. I was delighted to discover it featured a pasta dish with many items I already had on hand. I wrote down the ones we’d need to shop for — bacon, onion and rosemary, as well as Brussel sprouts in lieu of cabbage— and off we went.
It was a bit of an object lesson of the power of the analog. For all of the time-saving touts of the digital age, it is often hardly that. We are presented with too much information, entertainment, and products, and thus we must sort through them all. It is a cognitive dissonance that while this plethora of options creates a degree of “more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically,” as Barry Schwartz wrote in The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. What’s more, there must be a finitism to it all. Disruptive products and services are more often interruptive; giving us too much of one thing has to take away from somewhere else. And in the case of information, that often means time.
There is a conspicuous lot of information on the Web. There are 2.75 million pasta recipes online, according to Google. Two million blog posts are published in a single day. Amazon alone offers at least 200 million products for sale at any given time and there are at least 35,000 movies to choose from on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and HBO. That is way too much.
This isn’t just a value judgment; excessive choice taxes the brain. When we are presented with something on which to make a decision, the prefrontal cortex revs up the area that deals with higher-level reasoning. But we don’t look at a set of things and make a single decision from among them; our brains take in each item and determine where it falls on a scale of risk versus reward, then we go on to the next and do the same again. Do that 10–20 times, the number of links on a typical Google search results screen, and your brain is whirring at a clipped pace. Do that 40 times to choose from the “Trending” shows and movies presented on Netflix’s main screen, and you have one hard-working prefrontal cortex. Layer in your current emotional state, and things get a bit more complex; if you’re depressed, none of the choices activate the “reward” notion, and on and on you go in search of that good feeling.
“Time spent” is my ideal code for making a selection. The restaurants that offer a small menu are my preference; give me fewer decisions to make so that I can pick my head up and enjoy the moment. I once spent what seemed to me to be an inordinate amount of time waiting for a friend to read through every item on the menu at Maryann’s in Chelsea in the late Nineties. I suddenly blurted out, “It’s not your last meal!” (To which a friend later noted, “How could you have been so sure?”)
The Internet sometimes gives us fewer choices, its algorithms sorting through our history of decisions to present us with the information, entertainment and items for purchase it thinks we might like. But not often. Or, not without also giving us a glance at the other (typically closely related) options, off to the side or lower down on the page. And off we go down that rabbit hole, not to be seen again for a period of time.
Give me a book shelf, a clothing rack, a movie theater with only so many screens. In our era of endless choice, we can find ourselves disappointed if these spaces fail to turn up just the right book, top or film. But what a high bar we set! And technology sets it for us. Let’s try turning away from our phones and getting some perspective.
The dinner turned out great. Our friends Mary and Ty arrived at the appointed hour, just as the pumpkin pie was cooling and all ingredients for the main dish were prepped and ready to be whipped up and served. They brought a stunning flower arrangement that reminded us all of Christmas. My son put on holiday music beginning with the Chipmunks’ versions, giving in eventually to requests for some more standard voices. The dish was delicious and plenty. The evening was capped by a unique, inspired dance performance by my son to Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” and “Beat It.”
I now have the first item on my list of main-course go-to’s and a discerning appreciation for the power of recipe books. I am prepared and ready for anything. Anyone free to come Sunday for dinner?
