The Crazymaking Quest for the Best
November 4, 2026
Writing first for an alt newsweekly, then a city magazine, I worked on (I finally counted) seventeen “Best of” lists. Every year, the same relentless push to tackle a category of existence, drive around, sample, ask, research, compare, make an agonizing choice, then find a clever way to sum it up.
In year eighteen, I begged off. Simply could not face that process again. The template grows too familiar, as does the niggling worry that thousands of readers are blindly taking my word for it. People love must-do’s and must-see’s—and never seem to realize that the coolest stuff is so different, so rare and quirky, it never makes the list.
Knowing all this, you would think I would take a different tack in my personal life. But, no. I graduated from Oprah’s list to Wirecutter, and I borrowed advice from a friend’s Consumer Reports subscription, and before every decision to buy, I did the research, pestering salespeople and handy DIY-ers and shopaholic pals.
It took AI, with its omniscient, instantaneous, custom-tailored Best curation, to cure me.
The free, fast, complete recommendations now available are too pat, too mechanical, too glib. I miss spending half an hour at the cosmetics counter while an elegant woman (older than I but not showing it) helped me deliberate on the exact degree of matte or gloss finish, or choose a foundation that did not draw an orange line along my jaw. I also miss Helen, who had sold lingerie for years and was impossible to embarrass. She knew all the tricks for hiding lines and straps and bulges, and she could dig through a sale rack and emerge with a French lace bra in just the right size, 70 percent off.
Helen had her own biases, but they were consistent. “Yes, yes, I know you think the band should be tighter,” I would say, begging for comfort instead, and she would grin and find me a softer band. She taught me to appreciate Chantelle, to hunt for three-part seamed, “cut-and-sew” cups, to pick straps that would not slip off my shoulder.
AI can do all that too; I recently tested it. But every time I ask the same question, the bot offers me a different set of recommendations. Where are they coming from? Why are they not consistent? Why does it pretend each time that the current list is the absolute best-of? It is hard not to suspect whatever corporate shill it has just eaten. Besides, AI has not seen my breasts. We have not joked and commiserated about the trials and tribulations of double-D, gravity, and abrasive lace. There is no comfort in a bot’s excellently thorough, articulate, ever-flattering advice.
Now that I have no friends left in retail, the prospect of the online hunt for exactly what I want every time I need something is daunting. I am tired of hype, tired of influencers too obviously aimed straight at my demographic, tired of risk-and-return. What would happen, I wonder, if I put “good enough” in the search bar instead of “best”?
What would happen to my life, if I stopped trying to make it perfect? That old nursery rhyme haunts me, Goldilocks burning her tongue and glugging up her tummy with all that too hot, too cold oatmeal until finally she reached the baby bear’s porridge, and it was just right.
This is perfectionism. And I am tired of it.
The new term seems to be maximizing, “maxxing” if you are cool, and it is applicable to anything. I suppose I have been maxxing consumption? One consequence, I read, is chronic anxiety—which seems too strong until I remember how these decisions gnaw at me, how I keep searching compulsively, refining and asking better questions and finding new keywords to address every variable. The next consequence is “decision fatigue.” The third is the inevitable anticlimax, because nothing, not even the best of all possible choices, is ever as great as you expect it to be.
And if the best does not satisfy, you are left wondering what would. A hollow, nervous place, an existential limbo in which you just might be someone who can never rest content.
How can I learn to settle? Can the new slow cooker just cook slow and not also be sleek with a retractable cord and the best price of the year? Does a bra have to support and project and hide and smooth and be pretty and soft and stay up? Because the manufacturers all seem to choose one or two of these lovely qualities and sacrifice the rest.
I am so tired of being disappointed by the offerings of those ravenous only for profit. Find the craft version, hand-designed and handmade by an individual? Yes, but Etsy has let itself be ruined, all gussied up with cheap temptations like Meg at the ball in Little Women.
There are too many choices out there, tempting the addict. There is too much information, much of it subjective or manufactured for a retailer’s agenda. The process is too efficient, which lets us keep at it, looking just one more time, so easy, why not, to see if maybe there is something even better…. Meanwhile, my life is going on without me, galloping away while I lie in the brambles. That is the opportunity cost.
Good-enough is what parents have learned to be. Good-enough is what psychologists call “satisficing”—finding what will meet your basic needs, then moving on with your life. The minute I resign myself, though, a sick pang of worry interrupts. What if the straps of the good-enough bra wind up around my elbows? What if I have to buy six good-enough slow cookers in order to get one that actually functions?
I have lost confidence in the system itself. That, I realize now, is the root of this dilemma. My perfectionism is a sorry attempt to wield a little control over the chaos of late-stage capitalism, the flood of goods from unregulated unsafe sweat-shopped markets, the valuing of quantity over quality, the abandonment of real materials and fine workmanship as too pricey to be worth the bother. If good enough really were good enough, maybe I could relax.
Or maybe I am just making excuses, because I have found my stride on this new treadmill of researched consumption and learned its tricks?
All I know is, I miss Helen.
