The other corollary to the cost vs enjoyment thing: simply finding out about the existence of something which is of greater cost and lower quality compared to a thing I have seems to increase my enjoyment of my competitor to it.
This suggests that time spent researching “better” things might yield a free increase in enjoyment from what I already have.
For instance, simply finding out about the existence of a subscription service for hilariously expensive fake-chicken nuggets (they say they’re developed like software, as if that’s an improvement over having predictability in food products?) causes me to feel like I’ve succeeded every time I cook the affordable but still delicious fake-chicken nuggets that I get from my local grocery store.
This is adjacent to (or possibly opposite of?) a problem which I’ve nicknamed the Wirecutter Effect: I spent quite a bit of my life trusting reputable review sites to tell me what the “best” of a particular item would be, because the pile of research required to compare all the options myself seemed prohibitively difficult and seemed to require information that could be gathered by directly observing each candidate product but not by reading about them. So I find myself owning and using quite a few things which Wirecutter calls the “best”, which are not actually the “best” for me because of ways in which my needs differ from the needs of Wirecutter’s target audience.
A couple glaring examples: the “best mop” for mopping floors isn’t actually that great for me, because I tend to put off mopping till the bits of stuff stuck to the floor start annoying me, and the recommended microfiber mop isn’t well suited for scrubbing hard at things which won’t just soak off. The “best electric mattress warmer” has separate controls for variable temperatures on both sides of the bed, but I only ever use it to set the whole bed to max heat for awhile before turning it off when I turn in, and the complex electronics have made it far harder to troubleshoot and repair when it spontaneously quit heating at all.
Edit: Later additions to the Wirecutter Effect list:
The “best sateen sheets” do not accommodate as deep a mattress as the “budget pick” ordinary cotton sheets, and the “budget pick” have little labels helpfully sewn in at the head and foot to tell you what orientation the sheet goes onto the bed, which the “best” option doesn’t possess.
I don’t have any blog posts at all yet; I’m still calibrating what ideas I’d like to make that investment in, while using shortform as a notebook for scribbling at.
Curiously, the brand which makes them does not appear to boast about making them anywhere in its web presence, although they have an entire separate site dedicated to their dinosaur-shaped meat paste concoctions.
The other corollary to the cost vs enjoyment thing: simply finding out about the existence of something which is of greater cost and lower quality compared to a thing I have seems to increase my enjoyment of my competitor to it.
This suggests that time spent researching “better” things might yield a free increase in enjoyment from what I already have.
For instance, simply finding out about the existence of a subscription service for hilariously expensive fake-chicken nuggets (they say they’re developed like software, as if that’s an improvement over having predictability in food products?) causes me to feel like I’ve succeeded every time I cook the affordable but still delicious fake-chicken nuggets that I get from my local grocery store.
This is adjacent to (or possibly opposite of?) a problem which I’ve nicknamed the Wirecutter Effect: I spent quite a bit of my life trusting reputable review sites to tell me what the “best” of a particular item would be, because the pile of research required to compare all the options myself seemed prohibitively difficult and seemed to require information that could be gathered by directly observing each candidate product but not by reading about them. So I find myself owning and using quite a few things which Wirecutter calls the “best”, which are not actually the “best” for me because of ways in which my needs differ from the needs of Wirecutter’s target audience.
A couple glaring examples: the “best mop” for mopping floors isn’t actually that great for me, because I tend to put off mopping till the bits of stuff stuck to the floor start annoying me, and the recommended microfiber mop isn’t well suited for scrubbing hard at things which won’t just soak off. The “best electric mattress warmer” has separate controls for variable temperatures on both sides of the bed, but I only ever use it to set the whole bed to max heat for awhile before turning it off when I turn in, and the complex electronics have made it far harder to troubleshoot and repair when it spontaneously quit heating at all.
Edit: Later additions to the Wirecutter Effect list:
The “best sateen sheets” do not accommodate as deep a mattress as the “budget pick” ordinary cotton sheets, and the “budget pick” have little labels helpfully sewn in at the head and foot to tell you what orientation the sheet goes onto the bed, which the “best” option doesn’t possess.
I checked, and you don’t currently have a blog post where you reveal what these secret (fake) chick nuggets are.
I don’t have any blog posts at all yet; I’m still calibrating what ideas I’d like to make that investment in, while using shortform as a notebook for scribbling at.
But since you’re interested, my victory over the affront of snacks pretending to be electric cars bears the rather undignified name “Yummy meatless plant-based protein nuggets”. The box looks like this, although I found them in in the kids’ foods section of a WinCo Foods rather than an Aldi: https://www.reddit.com/r/aldi/comments/hf74fk/vegan_nuggets_at_my_local_aldi_2_weeks_ago_havent/
Curiously, the brand which makes them does not appear to boast about making them anywhere in its web presence, although they have an entire separate site dedicated to their dinosaur-shaped meat paste concoctions.