You can have an opinion. It sounds like work, but it’s really not. An opinion is not the definitive view or judgement regarding a thing; it’s you staring at that desk and saying, “You know, I like the look and the feel of those brass handles. I also like the drawers that squeak just a bit when you open them. It speaks to the character of the whole desk.”
It’s not that I want a Stow Davis desk, it’s that I want to find that desk. I want to go to seven different antique shops and spend a weekend developing an opinion about the state of antique desks. I want to find someone who knows the entire history of Stow Davis desks and won’t fucking shut up about them.
Half the fun of having an opinion is the quest to find one, but the everything problem remains. You don’t have the time to have an opinion about everything...
But then he makes this totally ridiculous leap:
...but someone has the time.
So what? What good is it if it's someone else's opinion? Why would you want someone else to feed you their opinion on shaving cream, even if they've got a really objectively great opinion? It's not as if it actually makes any goddamn difference what shaving cream you buy, unless you believe it does. Ditto for desks, and so on.
I have an opinion on lots of stuff like that, but it's because I'm an opinionated little fuck. I don't think it's really a state to aspire to. Rands, on the other hand, apparently values being this complicated, networked, shopping consuming machine, and to what end? I don't understand.
P.S. Rands, you could, you know, try different brands of shaving cream until you find one you dig, like a normal person.
Er... nothing makes any difference. We die, and then everything we have done gets washed away by Alzheimer's, worms, and the rain. However, if we care about things—other people, for instance, but shaving cream's as good a thing to care about as any—then we can spend our lives happier for the choices we have made. Rands wants people to give him reasons to care about more things, so he can make more choices and therefore define himself more clearly. He's not asking for someone to pick the best shaving cream, and then just say "here, use this one, it has 10^23 utilons subjective to your experiential context"—he's asking for reasons to care about liking particular shaving creams at all. It turns out the best way to solicit those reasons—the dimensional parameters that define the space of shaving cream quality, so to speak—is to get someone to sell you a few particular creams, and explain why their "earning five stars on the Bugnatti face-feel scale" or "resisting incursive facial bacteria" facts are important. Those lessons learned, you can then pick your own shaving cream, "like a normal person"—but you'll know why, not just how, to choose.
The best analogy I can think of is to music. Have you ever met someone who just didn't care about music, at all? Didn't you feel like something was missing from their lives? Do you think you could get them to care about music by showing them a bunch of music-theoretical math and physics? Or would you just say "this is my favorite band; they do X and Y really well", and expect them to explore outward from there, now listening for other bands' Xs and Ys, and eventually forming their own opinions of what makes a good band?
Now, for "music", replace with every single possible other interesting thing in this world.
I appreciate what you're saying, and if you interpret Rands' post as some rational, utilitarian statement of preference in which he claims to actually care about learning the particular distinguishing virtues of shaving cream, and desks, and presumably a thousand other consumer goods, then I suppose I can't tell him he's wrong about his strategy.
Rather, I'd choose to be even more presumptuous, and tell him he's wrong about what he wants. I think that few people are genuinely destined to love careful research into what kind of socks you prefer at the moment and which coat hangers are the most durable. It's an awfully crowded and indistinct way of defining yourself. To the extent that people like doing those kinds of things, I think that they are easy escapes which tend to take the place of more ultimately fulfilling endeavors (I'm guilty of this.) I think that it's a dumb waste of time to find ways to spend even more effort on such tasks, providing marginal benefit, and yielding what I wager is only a brief satisfaction.
You can have an opinion. It sounds like work, but it’s really not. An opinion is not the definitive view or judgement regarding a thing; it’s you staring at that desk and saying, “You know, I like the look and the feel of those brass handles. I also like the drawers that squeak just a bit when you open them. It speaks to the character of the whole desk.”
It’s not that I want a Stow Davis desk, it’s that I want to find that desk. I want to go to seven different antique shops and spend a weekend developing an opinion about the state of antique desks. I want to find someone who knows the entire history of Stow Davis desks and won’t fucking shut up about them.
Half the fun of having an opinion is the quest to find one, but the everything problem remains. You don’t have the time to have an opinion about everything...
But then he makes this totally ridiculous leap:
...but someone has the time.
So what? What good is it if it's someone else's opinion? Why would you want someone else to feed you their opinion on shaving cream, even if they've got a really objectively great opinion? It's not as if it actually makes any goddamn difference what shaving cream you buy, unless you believe it does. Ditto for desks, and so on.
I have an opinion on lots of stuff like that, but it's because I'm an opinionated little fuck. I don't think it's really a state to aspire to. Rands, on the other hand, apparently values being this complicated, networked, shopping consuming machine, and to what end? I don't understand.
P.S. Rands, you could, you know, try different brands of shaving cream until you find one you dig, like a normal person.