Beach Blanket Bingo

To choose or not to choose?

I just spent a great deal of time looking for a microfiber beach towel, required for a trip I’m taking in July. Quick-dry beach towels form a mature category, as a marketer might say, with options in the millions. In the zillions. My finger hovered over a run-of-the-mill blue-and-white striped one, and then this wicked emotion reared up in me, saying I am not a blue-and-white beach towel kind of person, that I wanted something more surprising and unusual, and there went my afternoon. What kind of beach towel person am I, I wondered. Do I even know? I’d never examined the subject before. Am I a kitschy palm-frond towel person? Am I a weird faux-Persian carpet towel person? (You can print literally anything on microfiber, I have discovered.)

The tyranny of choice is real: I started feeling slightly nauseated by the pages upon pages of towels on offer, made dizzy by trying to figure out which was me, which was the coolest, best design. If I had been in a store, faced with, say, four towel options, it would have been a fifteen second compare-and-contrast and the choice would have been made. But faced with so many possibilities I grew anxious, wanting to figure out which of these $15 investments would be closest to my soul. When I was thoroughly overwhelmed I just clicked on something that looked acceptable, and was reversible, which meant I had two chances to feel satisfied. Really, it was a horrible experience. Lo and behold, the towel arrived and it’s great. But the process of finding it was not.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I don’t think the human brain is designed to sort through infinity. It’s too much. Endless choice is like no choice; it feels suffocating rather than liberating. You have so many more opportunities to be wrong. Some years ago, my friend Sally got a tiny peace-symbol necklace, which I loved. She directed me to look for one online. Do you have any idea of how many peace-symbol necklaces there are online? Big, medium, small, gold, silver, with pavé diamonds, with rubies—don’t get me started because I won’t stop. All of them were exactly what I wanted until I saw the next one, and then that was the one I wanted, or maybe not at all what I wanted, and then the next and the next. I looked for a few days, obsessed with finding one and yet numbed by the options. And guess what? I never bought one. I felt slightly sickened by the smorgasbord, the mountain of sweets souring as it grew.

My first book, Saturday Night, looked at that night of the week in an array of different communities around the country. As part of my research, I read up on why we even have a calendar at all, why we humans feel compelled to chop time up into digestible units rather than allowing it to unspool day after day. When you think about it, it’s a strange thing that we do it, and yet it’s foundational to human civilization. I began to understand that time as a linear continuum would drive us crazy. We need some shape to experience, some parameters to dice the weird phenomenon of being alive into bite-sized pieces that repeat. I’m always amazed when I have had a bad week and at the end of it I think, well, thank goodness that’s over! As if the end of the week was a real boundary, and that badness would be contained within it and a fresh, spanking week would begin with a promise of goodness, glossy and new. That delineation keeps us sane.

A certain amount of choice is delicious. I would have been irritable if I had been presented with four boring beach towels and had to buy one. But an infinity of beach towels? Too much.

SHOW NOTES

—I’ve just arrived at an artist residency on the island of Crete, in Greece, and have barely any phone service and zero WiFi, so I’m composing this on my phone and hoping for the best. To thank you for bearing with me, here’s a picture of my view:

Let’s hope I can get work done even though I’m being tempted by the sirens to abandon ship.

—I loved the book “Eastbound” by Maylis de Kerangal

—I probably won’t be able to provide the link here because of my Internet situation, but google Lululemon Barrel Leg pants and you will find perhaps the perfect travel pants. The photo on their website is curiously awful and make the pants look dumpy but they aren’t. I brought two pairs on this trip and I do not feel dumpy.

—I’m doing this residency and another in September in hopes of finishing my book this fall. All encouragement welcome.

—I live for Pilot Precision V5 pens.

—I’m mourning the fact that Onitsuka Tiger seems to have retreated from the US market. My Mexico 66 sneakers are my favorites! I did find them online but I loved their LA store, which also had a bunch of strange and wonderful clothing.

—Watched the debate.

—Wondering about the future of civilization.

—I posted this on Instagram but it bears repeating. Just remember this is Steve Bannon’s attitude towards women, as he told David Brooks in a recent interview:

—Thanks for reading! I am as always very grateful!