Do you all ever wonder about this "five star" or "best" mindset?
(Still trying to figure out what to post on this site; sorry if this is a bit abstract.)
I'm not sure what to call this culture, but it's the culture that dictates everything must be 4-5 stars or its nothing. There is a "best" dropship identical item on Amazon. There is a "best" hole in the wall restaurant. There is a "best" takeout place near you. There is a "best" way to do things.
It's not about "laying flat." Laying flat, as far as I understand it, is purely about not caring about the "best" professional life. What I think about is about how algorithms of "best" dictate what we watch, do, and consume, yet they are tied to false perceptions of what "best" can bring us and sometimes plainly false reviews. For example, you can have the "best" meal, but your actual best meal is the ramen place you went to when it was raining and the original restaurant you tried to go to was packed. It's completely unplanned and not thoroughly algorithm'd (though not calculation-free); it is the organic best that found us. Something about the sense of discovery can really just blow you away and surprise you.
I remember reading an article years ago about the joy and randomness of someone curating a collection of CDs, the way you could thumb through and look at the covers, and the whole "discovery" of it.
I remember reading an essay on the side of a Chipotle bag written by Aziz Ansari probably almost 10 years ago. I went and found it for you and copy/pasted below:
“Two Minutes About My Toothbrush” by Aziz Ansari
Why do we always want the best? I had to get a toothbrush the other day. Before I left my house, I searched “best toothbrush.” It seemed like the sensible thing to do.
As I typed in the search box, the auto-fill completed the thought immediately. I wasn’t alone in my toothbrush purchase insecurity. A flurry of articles came up with conflicting opinions and, for a moment, I felt stupid.
Every toothbrush I bought on a hunch has been fine. I’ve never been disappointed in a toothbrush. Why waste my time trying to find the best? Have you ever run into someone with no teeth and asked, “What happened?” And they replied, “Bought the wrong toothbrush. Should have done more research.”
Then again, I do use a toothbrush quite a bit. If you can get the best, why not? I mentioned the dilemma to a friend. She said her dentist had given her a great toothbrush called Timbul. She claimed it was “amazing” and it “changed the game.”
A game-changing toothbrush!
I went on Amazon and found it. There were 192 reviews. First review. 5 stars. “Great brushes.” From a guy delightfully named Skip Smiley.
Could I trust him? I clicked to see his other reviews.
I soon began to question Mr. Smiley’s integrity. Dude was giving 5 stars to everything:
A diving snorkel: “Love it.”
The book, I, Alex Cross: “Great book.”
An ink cartridge: “Just fine.” “Just fine” but still five stars? Huh? More research had to be done.
But then I thought about Skip Smiley. Maybe he figured it out. Maybe you just make confident decisions and feel great about them. Did Skip fret about which diving snorkel to buy? Doubtful. Instead of stressing out about other options and possibilities, he was swimming with his snorkel, making the best of life.
I decided to buy the toothbrush. And you know what?
It’s a great toothbrush.
On another note, I think there are a lot of things that could come to mind for people when faced with your question. The first thing I thought of is perfectionism, something I've struggled with as a toxic trait in my life, and still do to this day.
I was also reminded of a bit of practical knowledge given to me by Adam Savage through his YouTube channel. He tells beginner makers to buy the shittiest, cheapest version of a tool they can find as their first purchase, and then to use it for awhile until they see the way they'd like it to be improved. Then go buy the nicest one that does all the things you wish your shitty one could do! (If you can't improve it yourself, that is). I always liked that, because before hearing that, I often felt buying the shitty version of something was a waste of time, often leading me to purchase a more expensive version I was not yet equipped with the knowledge to properly use.
I'm just meandering at this point, but I think I'll close by saying that pondering this stuff is interesting, but at the same time I get mentally hung up, and trick myself into thinking "this is the right way to think about something" and try to reduce these experiences into right or wrong, black or white, and it makes me a little bit crazy sometimes.
I like this post though. I think I've had "the best meal of my life" many many times, and that makes them all equal, not better than the previous "best." Never really thought of it that way until now, so I guess I have this post to thank for that.
/ramble
Let me preface this by saying I agree with you, your premise, and in general with the mindset that "the best" isn't needed most of the times.
But there are some times where I feel that searching for "the best" of something isn't necessarily because I want or even need "the best" in that category, it's because I'm searching for something that I don't want to spend too much time researching and just want to find that thing other people have decent to good experiences with and doesn't break down easily.
Take my hairdryer for example. I don't need the best of the best, I just need a dryer that's functional, doesn't break too quickly, and has a couple of options for temperature and power.
Looking for "the best" meant that I was shown a list of different dryers that were all reviewed highly (which in of itself I don't care a lot about, most of the votes are bought anyway), at different price ranges, and it gave me a sort of comparison list of features so I could cherry pick the one I wanted that I know people seem to have at least alright to good experiences with. I don't need to distinguish myself over a hairdryer, I just need something that's worth buying and with all the knock-off refined-Chinesium crap on the market it's good to have a semblance of quality.
This changes when I look for an expensive item, I do want the best. Not necessarily the best of the best in all categories, but the best that my money can buy. Note that this doesn't mean "most expensive" by default.
And conversely it changes again when like in your example it's akin to a cheaper tool, where I buy it cheap and when it breaks or gets used a lot will get an upgrade.
Ultimately there's different ways of approaching this as well as different reasons why one would look for the best.
I hate to admit it but I think about that Chipotle bag more than anyone should.
Thank you for providing the essay. It's gonna be useful when explaining to people why they don't need to overspend on many things they buy (especially, oh especially, any hardware ever).
That essay really did capture it a lot better than I did! Because how many bad toothbrushes did I have? Do I need perfection? Maybe we should all be easily pleased? I enjoyed it a lot, so thank you for digging it up.
I do the same. I am a bit of a perfectionist myself so I worry-- oh no, a bad foundation will hurt what I do later. But there is no perfect or predictable way to get to where you want to be. The perfect way for another may not be your perfect.
I'm of the opinion that there is no such thing as "best" of anything unless you are using an extremely limited set of criteria. Life is complicated, no matter how much we try to simplify things. Focusing on just experiencing the best of things is not a recipe for happiness. Without a sense of scale, we cannot comprehend the magnitude of the feelings we get from them, and like you mentioned, life is subjective. As most people age they find that they get the most joy out of simple pleasures that don't require a lot of resources.
I agree with this perspective a lot. "Best" and the "limited criteria" implies that we seek an experience that matches our own expectations of what we want. It isn't terrible to live life that way, but it bothers me that when I personally do so, I may be robbing myself of an organic experience.
I took a long trip a while ago, just trying to see if I'd like to live somewhere new. It wasn't my first long trip overseas, but Digital Nomad culture has made things really strange. I'm not sure how to describe it-- perhaps "Globalist Millennial?" I feel like every major city has these restaurants and concepts that look the same and present the same (coffee shops are especially like this). It highlights this strangeness of realizing how thoroughly your tourism dictates the culture. In any case, I took a look at the presentation of these Digital Nomad-friendly places and I subconsciously thought, "they must be very good." And of course, there were good reviews too. I'm pretty sure I got exactly what I expected, which was ironically not what I wanted.
Personally, the things I find scrutinizing heavily this way are those that are expensive — think big ticket electronics or appliance purchases — and has to do primarily with a strong desire for quality, smoothness, and general justification for the cost. Finding rough edges on the thing that just burned a hole in your wallet is never a pleasant feeling.
For the smaller or less expensive things I'm less concerned. As long as it isn't dangerous or inexcusably cheap, selecting the "best" option isn't as important and I'm more likely to select on other factors.
I think it's a sort of "all or nothing thinking," a form of cognitive distortion. Life is complex and nuanced, "best" and "worst" are subjective.
I think this is a really succinct and nice way to summarize most that can be said about this topic.
Malcolm Gladwell's presentation on choice, happiness, and spaghetti sauce never ceases to be relevant. All of our algorithms are looking for the best thing when they should be looking for the best things.
Specifically WRT online markets like Amazon, Ebay, etc., the sentiment here is quite understandable. Consumers have burnt a lot of money at the hands of shady suppliers and scam artists (and still pretty much do everyday despite these rating systems). The world has slowly and gradually turned into a more cynical place exactly because of these shady people, that's why everyone insists I want nothing but the best. One star lower and they start having nightmares of that shadiness.
But on the flip side, maybe those shady people always existed even in the 1980s? Is it just because social media is now exposing them that we are feeling more cynical than before? However, those who lived the life in that era will tell you that people trusted other people way more back then than they do today.
Brief thoughts:
Part of this is because best is just shorthand for "actually fucking works, isn't over priced, and isn't going to be broken next year". There's SO much crap being sold in every single field that some sort of research is almost mandatory.
Bad rating incentives- If you have a system that lets you do anything more than "good" and "bad", well it basically devolves into exactly that anyways. Between being able to just vomit out automated reviews to tying reviews to incentives (better give my uber driver 5 stars despite being dangerous because it could affect their income...), there's a self fullfilling loop that leads to this kind of rating all over the place.
Clickbait. Everything is ALWAYS the most extreme and hyperbolic, and this extends to reviews. It's not "good enough for a budget choice". It's "THE BEST OPTION AT ALL PRICE RANGES AND ALSO..." blah blah blah.
This is an example of the psychology of maximizers vs. satisficers. Maximizers are convinced that there's a measurably "best" solution to any problem which is worth spending significant time and resources pursuing, even for something as low-risk as a single dinner, toothbrush, or tool. They're avoiding the unmeasurable costs of being wrong. [And I say this as someone for whom being a maximizer probably deserves its own DSM category.]
Satisficers do a much better job of simply choosing something that meets minimal requirements, without FOMO regrets afterward. They're more satisfied with what Thing X permits them to accomplish than the acquisition of Thing X itself. And yes, it's an inclination that can tend towards a chabuduo attitude.
There's probably an optimum (there's that maximizer mindset at work again) middle path between the two extremes, but I'll cling to "best" choices until I get exhausted with the whole endeavor.
I'm also very much a maximizer, to the point where I've just avoided buying something because I wasn't sure I was getting the "best". In more recent years, I've (finally) learned that buying nothing is almost always worse than buying something (with the context that I was already looking to buy these things for a specific reason).
"Good enough" is a term I've been painfully pushing myself to accept, but it gets easier every time I "settle" and find out that my world has not ended.
After nearly a year of on and off research, I finally bought a food processor using the minimal criteria. It's a brand I've never heard of, I haven't seen it come up in any of the dozens of comparison articles I've read, but it spins, cuts food, and has a disc slicer - the three "criteria" that I've for some reason tried to maximize. It was literally just the cheapest one on Amazon that had a rating over 4 stars with more than 500 reviews.
If I get really good at satisficing, I could probably just plug my criteria into the Amazon filters and buy the first result. I'll probably still scroll through the first several results though, just to make sure.
Part of my difficulty is that one of my maximization criteria is avoidance of waste in consumption - the waste of replacing something that wasn't made well enough, and the waste of my time shopping for it again.
We went back and forth over getting this coffee maker, even though the previous version of it lasted 15 years. There had to be something better this time... except there really wasn't, without spending a great deal more. [Which brings up the Boots Theory of why affordable things are often crap.]
Given a specific budget number, I'll still shop the heck out of a thing to make sure it's the absolute best for the price.
I'm like this as well. I absolutely hate buying something that will break quickly, especially because I live in a household that doesn't. We have gone through a lot of coffee machines in the past decade.
"Best" to me is such a nebulous term.
By review metrics, Nintendo makes the "best" games, but you know what? I don't really care for them much at all. Often, I feel like the "best" thing is the thing with all the edges filed down to the point that there's no friction to the thing, there's no effort to get to know it, to understand it, to meet it on its own ground. Honestly, my favorite things are generally those considered to be a "7/10", because those things often have glaring flaws, but often high highs; peaks and troughs, compared to the "best" thing which is completely even keel.
I do believe much of this "best" culture thing comes from the fact that we're so time limited and there's always a new thing around the corner. We have so little time to sit and grapple with a thing before the zeitgeist moves on that we feel the need to ensure we have the absolute "best" experience, because otherwise we're wasting that limited bit of time we have.
Maybe I'm just half-drunk rambling here, but I have a friend who was obsessed with the "best" thing and always making sure he made the "correct" choices. This would drive me absolutely nuts, because it felt like he'd neglect many "very good" options or even flawed but interesting options (whether that was movies, music, games or food) because some abstract rating told him that "x" was the pinnacle of its given thing.
There are also different diminishing margins of return for different product types.
I recently just bought the Helix Midnight Luxe mattress: people in forums said it's one of the best mattresses for side/back-combination, medium-weight sleepers like me. Honestly it's made my life way, way better. A 'best' or 'great' mattress is 10x better than an 'okay' one, and an 'okay' one is 10x better than a 'bad' one.
Other stuff like, say, socks, don't really scale that hard. The 'best' socks will probably be 1.2x better than an 'okay' one.
I think people like this kind of abstract question so don’t apologize.
I don’t think I’ve ever been exposed to the term laying flat. I like to think that this is generally how I approach things – I’m not sure how much of that is me wanting it to be true versus it actually being true though. I’m not sure that I have heard the idea of five star culture articulated either, though I do see the usefulness in labeling this kind of behavior. My intuition tells me that it comes, at least in part, from blogging and Internet culture. Trendsetters and people who want to be trendsetters have a much easier time peddling their ideas – and obviously in some part, it’s human nature to enjoy being the authority on a cultural thing, or a particular topic.
It seems like a healthy thing to be able to do would be to take these “best” proclamations, and treat them as basic recommendations to be validated with your own personal experience. Delegating part of your decision-making process for, some even as simple as where, to eat food, I find to be a positive (or even attractive) personality trait.
But if you’re trying to say with your original post is that you’re annoyed by the existence of the five star culture, then I’m not sure I can relate, or I don’t have the same kind of experiences you do.
I think I'm annoyed by my own perpetuation of five star culture. Like many people here I do think about what I buy, and I think I often optimize for the wrong things via overthinking. For an item that has a low chance of being bad, what is the practical difference between 3 stars or 5? (Thank you again for sharing that essay, @BashCrandiboot!)
I appreciate your mention of the trendsetters. I think "best" culture is in my head a lot in part because I live in a city so everything on mainstream social media is about being new or the best. "This is a new X, it has the best y." For a given city, social media will probably produce thousands of these assertions an hour. But this pressure to be the best is relentless-- people work really hard to just make a good business and break even, yet it may never look like it's "the best." And I feel strangely about how living your life as a "safe" consumer can easily mean just going to the same few places all the time, as dictated by an algorithm, in part manipulated a business's eagerness to solicit reviews.
What is "best" is very context and personality sensitive to the point where, absent some narrow set of criteria (price per unit, some objective measurement of quality, etc), it's not really useful to talk about, in my opinion. I try not to worry too much about what is "best" and more in terms of quality per dollar spent and the context in which I'm going to use the item. I buy good quality tools, because I use my tools frequently, for example. They may not be "the best", but I'm just a DIYer not a contractor, so good enough is good enough.
Case and point, my stepfather and I have vastly different ideas of what the "best" car is. He grew up extremely poor and worked hard to get where he is. To him, the "best" car is a BMW or an Audi or some other expensive vehicle, because in his mind it means he's "made it". Whereas my "best" car is the RAV4 I drive because it best (for lack of a better qualifier) suits my needs, I don't place much value on keeping up with the Joneses or looking fancy.
I find the OP's comment about items on Amazon being 4-5 stars or they're nothing to be interesting, actually. That may actually be the one area where I do care about "best". Because of how bimodal star ratings tend to be in practice (the majority are either 1 or 5 with relatively little in the middle) and how Amazon is notorious for fake reviews, an item with 3-ish sticks out to me because it can imply one of two things: inconsistent quality, or so many bad reviews that the fake positive ones can't offset them.
This is what makes me wonder why services bother with star ratings. Most people will give it 5 or 1 stars with very few in between. I suppose it's useful to represent the average?
It's funny, I actually prefer 4 stars for similar reasons-- I think that 5 stars means it has to be fake. Nothing is perfect!
I have a major pet peeve for the star rating system actually. I think most useful measures should either be on a scale of 4 (no middle) or should have a question like "Would you recommend this?" I have heard that ride share drivers are dropped if they get below 4 stars. It seems harsh, but my own rating habits are "5/5 stars if you get me there alive and roughly on time; that's what I paid for."
I’m not a fan of stars either, simply because they tend to be vague in meaning. Four stars kind of work because it’s more clear; it’s either bad, underwhelming, good, or fantastic.
Western society is not based in mindfulness. We are socially trained, or even obliged to rank and judge, and now we have platforms of our choice to express our preferences and live the "best" life possible. You can also reconsider what media you take in, because not so much is about that, from my POV, your own CD collection example being an example.
I’m not sure I understand the premise. People have wanted the “best” of things for probably recorded human history. You don’t think people asked for recommendations on the best restaurants before the internet? It’s about scarcity of time. If I’m visiting an area, I want to go to the best whatever if that’s my only opportunity. If you’re a local, even in the age of the internet, it is no longer scarce, and people do branch out and try different things.
I struggle with the "best" mindset you're talking about. My partner and I are very different. Her life revolves around careful planning and mine is more of a laissez faire approach. She has a calendar set a month in advance to renew her car registration. It's not uncommon for me to get a late fine. She has mapped all of the "best" restaurants and food within them for our up coming trip. I prefer to chat with friends or wait staff after we arrive and find out the places they like.
I think the problem with engaging with folks who enjoy the "best" method is that they have data points to why you should be doing the thing they are suggesting. "Look, it's got over 500 5 star reviews" is often considered a compelling argument when I'd like to dine elsewhere. Frankly, I don't care. The majority of those reviews are left by the average customer, and quite frankly places that appeal to the average don't usually have high quality. It also feels like they become a self fulfilling cycle. I read it was a 5 star place, I enjoyed myself, I give it 5 stars. Repeat ad nauseam.
The other issue is that a well known 5 star reputation can often degrade the quality of the place itself. Alton Brown summed up this feeling by saying he would never order wings in Buffalo or cheesesteaks in Philly. Anecdotally I had my local taqueria, which had always been a sleeply place outside of the Friday/Saturday dinner/drunchies hours, ruined when it got placed 9th in the US wide "best burrito" bracket. The prices all went up, it was always packed, and the quality suffered because they were churning out so many. I was so glad La Taqueria took top spot because I was my least favorite burrito anyway (I'm not here for soup in a tortilla). Needless to say, the thing that makes something a 5 star place can be lost once "best" is achieved. So I'm really wary of it.
I believe poking about, chatting with people who live locally, and having some shit meals too is a less stressful, often more pleasant experience. Plus, sometimes the terrible meals make for great stories.
The question is do you like it or do you want to impress other people?
One attitude is that if you like a music album or a meal or a TV show you don’t have anybody to please but yourself. On the other hand some people have to be seen in the “best” car, some academic department has to be in the “best” building to attract students, profs, donors, etc.
I recently bought one of the “best” lenses for my camera (at the price that I won’t be eating out for lunch for at least a year) not because I wanted the best but because I couldn’t take the photos I wanted with the gear I had (I tried.)