Only optimize for pandemics
I am generally against what Jia Tolentino has called “optimization culture”. I do not wear the best underwear; I do not own the best desk lamp; I have never, ever owned the best mattress. I do not seek the best in general, really, because 1) what does that even mean, and 2) there will always come along a better thing. In general I seek quality, durability, craft. Sometimes that is “the best.” It is usually not.
I threw all of that out the window when the pandemic hit. You are cleaning everything or you are not. Your antiseptic is maximized or it is not. Your mask is performant or it is not. The stakes have never been higher; the budget is effectively infinite.
The first week of lockdown, I screencapped a press conference with the director of the CDC, zoomed in on her mask, figured out what brand it was, and bought 500 of them. This was, of course, not enough. Three weeks later, I then managed to get a literal respirator mask, the kind that you use in major woodworking or power washing projects; and I outfitted it with a pair of filters that filter literally 100% of pathogens, intended for actual workers at the actual CDC to work with actual pathogens. They last 10,000 hours, are an inch thick, and clamp onto a respirator that is (selfishly, incorrectly) one-way. The air smells suspiciously neutral inside of them. Your olfactory finds itself grasping for sense, as if it found itself in an anechoic chamber. I wore this thing grocery shopping for a year. It is the endpoint of optimization, a way of banhammering all of it, of not caring what the world thinks of you while doing so.
Simply enough does not matter when you are dealing with an unknown, overpowering enemy. I have only had to reckon with such a thing a few times in my life, and I hope to never have to reckon with it again. It is exhausting, overcompensatory, and almost certainly completely unnecessary.
I ended up fine. I lived my life, as baffling & horrible as it was. And I know the pandemic is not “over,” but for me it has sort of settled into a frisson of background noise, a series of social graces we follow, a new accessory on our faces. We have gotten used to the dull howl, even we as we recognize that none of it is okay and we’re powerless to change anything.
Within all of this has come a shift in my relationship to what comprises “the best.” Why did I seek the best that time? Why did I become okay in relaxing my standards? (I’m typing this in a bar in mid-April 2022, and while I have a mask on, it is, uh, not a full-face respirator.) In what other places do I seek “the best,” but not realize it? And are there any circumstances under which this is probably not a good thing? What can I do about it?
I’ve come to realize that I have three rules:
- Buy the best technology that you possibly can at the time. There are still no gods but specs. It’s expensive, but it lasts.
- Buy the best tools you can for home repair. This is generally not expensive. When it comes to drills or crowbars, it’s a small bump in price for a massive bump in quality. You don’t need to care about aesthetics, only whether your tools work well.
- If you use it once a day, you get license to blow as much as you need to feel some amount of pleasure in using it. You’re using it as many as 25,000 times in your lifetime. The thing is worth investing in. Note that a high budget is not the same as finding “the best,” but rather that you should invest in enjoyment.
The goal is twofold. First, don’t waste money. Second, don’t overthink it. Get the thing, use it until it breaks.