We Should Mess Around And Find Out More
I can’t imagine it is best to have the internet to tell us what we like and where to go. We should go find out ourselves.
July 8th, 2010. At 5 AM, we started our 14-hour trek to Rhode Island. 18 hours later, we hadn’t reached our destination. I was tired. Everybody was tired. Spending that much time in a seven-passenger minivan will make everyone go crazy.
We reached Rhode Island, but we were lost. We unsuccessfully tried to configure our coordinates through paper maps. GPS hadn’t experienced mass adoption, or at least my family hadn’t joined the craze complicating things further. It was pitch black, the roads were bare with road signs that were hard to see, and we were navigating foreign territory.
A 5 PM stop at Applebee’s in New Jersey during the heart of rush hour was partly to thank for our delay. We were struggling and pulled off to a gas station to find help. My parents were outside the vehicle asking a stranger for directions to our campground – our lodging for the week.
My sister and I sat in the backseat of the rented minivan and listened to the radio. I stayed up later than expected and heard “The Decision”. LeBron James was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers and announcing his next team. At 9:28 PM, LeBron James announced, “this fall I'm going to take my talents to South Beach and join the Miami Heat.” I couldn’t believe it! Another super team was formed.
Once the hype died down, reality set in. I was tired, sore, ready to crawl into bed, and sleep this day away. After what felt like an eternity, the stranger helped us configure our location to provide to my Uncle. The day was saved. My Uncle met us, and we followed him to the campground, hallelujah.
In 2024, this would never happen. Enter Waze, Google Maps, Apple Maps, or your favorite navigation app to save the day.
We no longer wander, linger in places, and meaningfully interact with our surroundings because everything is optimized. Waze erases worry and the idea that we might get lost driving somewhere? Well, that is gone. How well do we get to know a place? The friction of figuring things out and being forced to interact with people is gone. Instead, Waze will take us down unpaved, pothole-infested one-lane roads, across a church parking lot during a procession, and on the dirt back roads where kids play to save us five minutes.
We no longer ask strangers where the closest gas station is or which way is the beach? Walking around and getting lost forcing us to talk to people has disappeared. We don’t take time. We don’t fail and learn things. We don’t mess around and find out. The art of immersing ourselves in a new area has withered away.
I went to LA some weeks ago. My sister and her boyfriend were gracious hosts. The question of the trip was where I want to eat – an important question. I visited LA before, and I knew one place that must happen. Nick’s has the best dessert that has blessed my taste buds, butter cake. Other than that, I had no idea. Naturally, I deferred to Yelp. Being in a big city, I was smothered with options paralyzing me. Yelp made the process harder.
Yelp takes away the friction of trying a new restaurant. The chance of falling flat on our faces and maybe going to a bad restaurant is zero. You can be told where to go, when to go, what to order, who to get as your server and bartender, and what to avoid. You can minimize the risk of anything going wrong to zero. In this, we lose the novelty and surprise of selecting a restaurant that seems interesting or is recommended by a friend. We miss messing around and finding out for ourselves.
I tried to avoid Yelp and defer to their recommendations, which kept things interesting. One is a vegetarian, and the other is a vegan. As someone who is neither, it was an interesting experience! The best food was not from crowd-sourced reviews but recommended by the people I knew.
Humans are irrational, and the mathematical star model of Yelp doesn’t capture that complexity. Humans need risk and surprise, Yelp and TripAdvisor kill both of those. Humans need to get out, interact with the world, and feel the hum of a city. They need to eat and maybe have it be terrible. To go and get a drink that maybe doesn’t taste so good.
My friends and I went to Nice, France two summers ago. It was a part of a larger trip but scheduling it, we planned two things: we bought tickets to a music festival and made reservations to Le Plongeoir, a Mediterranean restaurant atop rocks with views of the harbor and sea. It was Tiktok recommended. It had 4.3 stars on Google reviews, 4.0 on TripAdvisor, and 3.8 on Yelp. It passed the smell test. The views and the vibes were there.
A bread basket greeted us at our table. They got frustrated with us when we asked for more bread — six guys will inhale the first bread basket in a minute, the food wasn’t anything spectacular, the views – while nice – made for a cold dinner as the wind blew in from the sea, and the prices were unreasonable. We failed by defaulting to TikTok. It stripped away the novelty and convinced us we would consume the best food ever. Not to mention, a price for everything exists. If you can pay to have your business appear more favorably on Yelp, some will do it!
We don’t enjoy a place where we automate our experiences to optimize for the shortest time or outsource our recommendations. It’s muscling life versus surrendering to it. Life can’t be brute forced. You can have all the strategies and plans you want, but we only control so much. How about we go to a movie and judge it on our own? Forget if it had an aggregate score of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Waze, Yelp, and all these optimization, time-saving apps strip us of the opportunity to surrender to life and sink into our surroundings. They take away the ability to mess around and find out for ourselves.
It’s not only Waze, Yelp, or Rotten Tomatoes – it is all the technologies that optimize time. What do we do with this extra time they give us? What do we get to do that is so much more riveting? It places us on autopilot and allows us to arrive home and scroll TikTok for an extra 15 minutes or watch the latest Joe Rogan episode that we tune out for the 67th time?
Life has a purpose, and who knows what that is. I know life is a quest to find that very purpose. I find it hard to believe we find the answers optimizing every second. I can’t imagine it is best to have the internet and apps tell us which path to take or things to like. We should figure out these things ourselves!
The rollercoaster ride of life can’t be escaped. We can’t slow the passage of time. We should allow ourselves to be restless and bored, to be less preoccupied with saving seconds, and to look honestly within ourselves, not the internet, and find what we like. Stop trying to optimize every second of life and escape the bad. Experience a restaurant because it looks interesting or sit in traffic and jam to music because it is, unfortunately, life! I hate traffic as much as you do, but it is never going away!
Remember this: Time will never stop moving. What matters is if we get to do something meaningful with our time. If we get to touch grass, find things we resonate with, and experience life while not having always be optimized and outsourced. It is not to optimize our days, like the same things as everyone else, and convince ourselves we have more time.
We look for treasure in the wrong place. Life is priceless. Make each day count. Find things you like. Fail along the way. It makes those things we do like so much sweeter. Interacting with the beautiful things, people, and views around us is worth more than saving three minutes on our commute or going to a restaurant we may not like.
-Scantron
Appreciate you for taking the time.