So, when accounting for the totality of human experience, it is the variety-seekers—not the same-lunchers—who are the unusual ones....The article is about eating, but Ray's observation (and Pinsker's) is more general and broadly philosophical. I think it's a big, important topic: sameness and variety. Do we want to travel or stay home (and when we travel do we want to go back to one familiar place)? Do we want monogamy or a variety of partners? Do we love days that follow the regular pattern or do we long for exciting surprises? Do we want to watch a television show with familiar characters in familiar places (like the old sitcom "Friends" or a long-running soap opera) or do we want to launch into some new movie with actors we've never seen before and need to figure who these characters are even supposed to be and whether the place where they're having their strange problems even follows the physical rules of Planet Earth?
The daily rituals of office life are characterized by their monotony and roteness, and bringing a different lunch each day is a sunny, inspired attempt to combat all the repetition. I do genuinely appreciate the optimism of those attempts. But in my mind, eating the same thing for lunch each day represents a sober reckoning with the fundamental sameness of office life. It seems like an honest admission that life will have some drudgery in it—so accept that and find joy elsewhere instead of forcing a little bit of novelty into a Tupperware and dragging it along on your commute.
Are these questions — to paraphrase Ray — first world problems? Well, what if they are? We're here now: Let's talk about them.
ADDED: Related:
Venture capitalist and entrepreneur Craig Cooper... says his body automatically goes to sleep every night at 10:24 p.m., he’s an exercise rat who never works out in an actual gym, and he takes 22-minute naps in the afternoon to boost his productivity....
He eats five cans of sardines every day to maintain his health and energy. “Sardines are the No. 1 superfood for guys,” said Cooper, who co-hosts CNBC’s reality pitch series “Adventure Capitalists. ” “They’re a powerhouse of nutrition, so I’m kind of an evangelist for sardines amongst everyone I meet.”
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77 comments:
I like to make this very same comment every day.
Why does it have to be either one or the other? These people that want to make rules to put everything in neat little boxes bore me.
Maybe sometimes you appreciate your routine and sometimes it chafes. Maybe sometimes you want the meatloaf your Mom made every Friday when you were growing up and sometimes you want 40 clove garlic chicken.
People go to the beach to leave their problems at home only to find that when they arrive that their problems are there waiting for them. In other words, people fill their time with meaningless activities because they are afraid to sit alone quietly with their minds.
I eat the same thing every day and enjoy it. I even do the same thing every day.
Slow changes happen; I bike to the store during Rush now because he's no longer worth waiting on for an amusing quip. If you miss a segment in the store it's no problem. Sometimes I listen to Rush on the bike and sometimes listen to high speed morse code, from a new radio/mp3 player.
Scott Adams was good at 10:00 until he started having guests on, which maybe coincided with running out of valid insights and going into geek fantasy.
Armstrong and Getty syndicated into the East Coast and no longer run as a West Coast show, which took a lot of the fun away. No elite bashing.
So life is adjustments.
The life of quiet desperation is one where you can never say what you mean, not one that's the same every day.
There is a way around this.
I was constantly warned when I was a kid that I had to find a good job and stick with it for life, or I was doomed.
I'd estimate that I had several hundred jobs over the course of my life as a freelancer and contractor. The apocalypse that I was warned would befall me did not happen. Instead, I was quite prosperous.
My work life wasn't boring and repetitive. If it showed signs of devolving into boredom and repetition, I moved on.
I do practice a number of religious rituals that are repetitive daily practices... prayer, yoga, playing for and attending services. Here, repetition is a blessing that bestows peace of mind and clarity.
Had this convo yesterday. Jobs' daily clothes being the same allows for more important thoughts than childish fashion attempts to impress dolts and empower fascist ghouls.
The whole "I will get love by showing the universe how original my creativity is by buying someone else's design and draping it over my body" doesn't appeal to everyone and for good reason.
Can we imagine how empty our worlds would be if say Althouse chose to become a clothing designer and not a fine blogger?
Among the "public figures whose monotonous diets have been revealed in interviews," you can add Ina Garten, denizen of the Food Network and purveyor of the Barefoot Contessa lifestyle brand. She reportedly has oatmeal every morning for breakfast.
It is my own little pet belief that these kinds of routines appeal to people who are prone to anxiety and who tend to get flustered and unable to make decisions when faced with too many choices.
Some people — me, for instance — eat the same thing for lunch nearly every day because it works for me as fuel for a few hours.
Food choices might not be the best proxy for big picture questions.
@Guildofcannonballs:
Had this convo yesterday. Jobs' daily clothes being the same allows for more important thoughts than childish fashion attempts to impress dolts and empower fascist ghouls.
Eh. Jobs' and Zuckerberg's uniforms seem more like personal branding gimmicks than practical solutions to the problem of having "more important thoughts," which itself seems like an extremely pretentious and self-serious construction.
For those who think of fashion and aesthetics as mere frivolities, I would recommend Virginia Postrel's great book The Substance of Style.
There is a godaddy commercial now with a 70 year old borad saying "age is just a number" and everyday is new and totally different and old gals can dramatically take off their glasses and act BOLD and CONFIDENT and AVANT GUARD and ... young. If lying to yourself floats your boat just try not to bring others on board before the inevitable Titanic moment.
Human beings need novelty and routine. CS Lewis addressed this in, I believe, The Screwtape Letters. God provides novelty within routine. Think about the changing seasons. Spring to, Summer, to Fall, to Winter, to Spring. Constant change, yet always the same.
People go to the beach to leave their problems at home
Actually, no. I go to the beach because the ocean is awesome and I like to deep sea fish. I suppose you would call that a meaningless activity, but I'm not a monk. I sit around and think plenty, but its not all I do. And most people aren't "afraid" to sit around to sit alone quietly with their minds. They're just not that philosophical.
Youtube
EVERYTHING WILL BE OK - by DON HERTZFELDT at 2:20
@Ron Winkleheimer:
Human beings need novelty and routine.
Agree completely. And I think the rural/urban or cosmopolitan/provincial dichotomy is useful, since urban cosmopolitans tend to value newness and novelty while rural provincials tend to favor sameness and routine. I think both are important to a society, but in America our urban cosmopolitans are driven by a deep contempt for the provincial set and seem to want to either destroy them or remake them in their image. The provincial, on the other hand, mostly want to be left alone.
p.s. Is anyone else getting an inordinate amount "Whoops, that's an error" messages on Blogger while trying to post comments?
I see bought fashion as 99% conspicuous consumption which is no more impressive than buying a corvette or a Bunny Lebowski piece of candy.
My jealousy is reserved for Laslo's wit not Satan's Sadist de Spaded Sade's amazing wealth and 14 fancy espresso machines with attendant servants.
I remember Ben Stein talking about Masters in LA spending $1000 on lunch at a table next to his and only conversing about shoes. For an hour. He thought it trite. I concur.
Probably just sour grapes.
I prefer to have the same amount of difference every day.
Whoops, that's an error
But some things never change!
I often dread when things are different in the day, especially when I have to be the center of attention at work. Usually things turn out fine though.
I’ll never learn.
Yeah, I get cravings for sardines sometimes. I never deny them.
I like circles. Jobs had time to brand himself as a guy so smart and efficient he has to wear the same stuff everyday because he wore the same stuff everyday which gave him time to think of how to properly brand himself.
Fulfilled people don't need their daily novelty delivered to them. Instead they quietly find it in unexpected places.
Some people think they yearn to eat whatever AOC puts in their bowl everyday.
And I'm not talking about her going back to waiting tables.
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
"When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear."
. - Henry David Thoreau Walden
I couldn’t stand eating the same thing everyday but then I’m not as brilliant and innovative as dr Oliver Sacks who famously did. He needed routines to free him fron dealing with the mundane.
@Guildofcannonballs:
I like circles. Jobs had time to brand himself as a guy so smart and efficient he has to wear the same stuff everyday because he wore the same stuff everyday which gave him time to think of how to properly brand himself.
According to Walter Isaacson's biography, the turtlenecks began with a desire Jobs had for Apple employees to wear uniforms, an idea he got after seeing the practice at Sony. The idea was completely rejected by Apple employees, and it eventually turned into Jobs own personal uniform.
Pickled herring..Swedish energy food
I’m suddenly reminded of a Drago and Chuck.
This is somewhat a dilemma that we fight most every day. I am a man of ritual. I find something that works, and use it most days, turning off worrying about the rest of my life. And that includes diet. Currently, that means a salad at night, with either chicken or tuna on it. Some nights I do a Wendy’s salad with their chili instead of salad dressing. And then fill in during the day with either peanuts or popcorn. When my partner has the energy, she makes our salads that contain lettuce and a bunch of different types of canned beans, plus the chicken or fish for protein. Ten years ago, I was doing Subway almost every day for a late lunch. My partner, whose first husband was an executive chef, has a much finer palate. He really spoiled her. She needs a lot more variety in her food, but it doesn’t always work out well for her. She has a lot of weird food allergies and sensitivities. So, we go somewhere, and they have changed things a bit since the last time we were in, and she gets an upset stomach. Within the last month or so, that has happened to her at both In-n-Out Burgers, probably with their grilled onions, and Ruby Tuesday’s with their salads. Then a week of getting her stomach back under control. But I am the one who gets out and about every day, running all over W PHX this time of year, and all over the county when we are up in MT. And have a number of projects going on. When I was still seriously working, my mind was on work, and food was a distraction, or rather I ate so that it wasn’t one. Even now, I find that reading good blogs or a good book in more interesting than food, which I consume out of necessity.
Same breakfast everyday, to keep from having to make that decision first thing in the morning. often the similar kind of lunch date today, though the details of the lunch May differ. But I try to make dinners not repeat themselves more often than every couple of months.
Crap, I was hoping talking into my phone would be easier than the phone keyboard. Sigh.
It's a mix for me. I travel often, but mostly to places I have been before. DC, Tokyo, the handful of hotels I use in New York, relatives' houses, etc. Here in Tokyo, I usually go see the same places over and over. I did a half-day trip down to Kamakura today, for example, but mostly I visited temples I have visited many times: Hasedera, Meigetsuin, and Enkakuji. But I also stopped by the Literature Museum, which I had never done before, so I do branch out a bit, from time to time. And I think that's nice. Walking between the museum and Hasedera, I passed by a shrine I hadn't seen before (Amanawa) and saw some cherry blossoms in full bloom (Tamanawa-zakura), which was an unexpected pleasure since I had thought I would miss the cherry blossom season this year.
Speaking of food and foodies, you might be interested in this San Francisco Chronicle article:
In San Francisco, a young, queer woman of color wants to redefine food criticism
That has to be the most demeaning, most patronizing newspaper head ever, and the article isn't much better.
As with children bringing bag lunches to school, so with adults -- it's variation within routine that pleases. "Today I have pretzel sticks" or "Today I have goldfish." Something too new - slipping in a lobster claw or a mango or a few crunchy snails - would only confuse the child.
@Lurker21:
That has to be the most demeaning, most patronizing newspaper head ever, and the article isn't much better.
Total clickbait for me. I was interested in how she planned to "redefine food criticism." The answer was not very encouraging: "By writing about restaurants that tell a story about race, gender, class or social justice. By following a strict ethical code, even though her appearance won't be a secret. By eliminating the star system in favor of a more nuanced analysis."
Oy.
Re: J. Farmer:
Yeah, sounds like a recipe for promoting mediocrity. That said, we'll always have the Michelin guide. And Yelp. At least until Yelp starts disappearing critical reviews of ideologically useful restaurants, I suppose.
Ron, I thought of C.S. Lewis too.
As the devil Screwtape says, ‘Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty.’
"Newness or difference from the norm is a very urban, almost postmodern, quest. It is recent. It is class-based."
Where do these totally FOS people come from? People have like variety since forever, it is not a new phenomenon. And progressives for over a hundred years have worshipped at an altar of perpetual newness and change.
Balfegor:
Yeah, sounds like a recipe for promoting mediocrity. That said, we'll always have the Michelin guide. And Yelp. At least until Yelp starts disappearing critical reviews of ideologically useful restaurants, I suppose.
Generally I ma not a fan of using guidebooks or review sites for determining one's dining options. I get why people do it, especially in big cities where the dining options can feel overwhelming. But I prefer to ask around and get recommendations from people in the neighborhood as to where's good to eat. It's a bit of a cliche but effective nonetheless.
It is bullsh.....
@Mark:
Where do these totally FOS people come from? People have like variety since forever, it is not a new phenomenon. And progressives for over a hundred years have worshipped at an altar of perpetual newness and change.
Remember they are speaking specifically within the context of food, not simply newness in general. And it is a relatively new phenomenon as historically people have not had access to such a huge cornucopia of food choices and variety. Think of the connotation that the phrase "meat and potatoes" has.
Is it me or is urban living causing some serious mental health issues?
Is it me or is urban living causing some serious mental health issues?
The human equivalent of industrial poultry.
here's an interesting video on what medieval peasants ate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVcey0Ng-w
Apparently the food was actually pretty good.
As you get older, i prefer the comfort of the familiar to the shock of the new. I go with the old reliables in food, clothing and music. Shoes have gotten better. I'll spring for the latest innovation in athletic footwear, but Levi jeans and Champion sweatshirts have perfected the form. Why would anyone want to wear anything different, except for funerals. You want a more formal look when you're buried......Blueberries, yogurt, and a couple of chocolate squares mixed together make the perfect breakfast. It's a very rare phenomenon in nature where things that taste good and that are good for you are in perfect alignment. It's something worth celebrating.
@Seeing Red:
Is it me or is urban living causing some serious mental health issues?
That is one of the foundational insights of Freudianism. See his Civilization and Its Discontents.
The key word is variety. For any possible human behavior, there will be some who are attracted to it, and some who are repelled by it. Evolution decides who is right.
Eating the same thing every day is a bit too repetitive.
Rotating three or four favorites as the mood strikes seems much more reasonable.
Searching for new things every day of the month seems expensive and unrewarding.
How many of the new things will be duds?
Is it me or is urban living causing some serious mental health issues?
Cities are humanity's Pandora's box. Civilization as we know it requires cities in order to concentrate the wealth and resources required for specialization. However cities at their base are at best symbiotes and often parasites on the surrounding rural areas. The struggle between the rural and the urban has been going on literally for all of history. For most of history cities have been very unhealthy places to live, and only continued to exist because of the constant influx of new people from rural areas. Today however this is no longer true, and this has allowed the cities to grow much more powerful and for their pathologies to become much more mature.
He eats five cans of sardines every day to maintain his health and energy. “Sardines are the No. 1 superfood for guys,” said Cooper
He's a gay fish.
I have observed that after my stroke, I, who never watched reruns, was always the first to try a new restaurant, and never re-read books, started seeking out the familiar. These days I'm becoming more easily bored with the usual and find that a good thing. This speaks more to me personally, than to some universal truth, I think.
I usually prefer mahogany over a variety of partners. But I'm into furniture.
Usually most people eat the same 1/2 dozen things for breakfast and never get upset about it. Variety only appears to be necessity at Dinner. We never have the same dinner meal two days in a row, and we never discussed it. It just seems natural to mix it up.
My only problem with my wife is our disagreement over breakfast. She likes to eat rice with something left over from dinner. I guess East Asians aren't into bacon and eggs. Who knew?
"Newness or difference from the norm is a very urban, almost postmodern, quest. It is recent. It is class-based."
That is quite true. When the old upper class went to restaurants the cuisine was either a more expensive version of the local favorites or else it was French - different enough from the usual, but something people got used to in time. The idea of going out to different restaurants and sampling all kinds of national cuisines appears to be a new one. Italian and Chinese cooking probably provided the opening, but now in even the smaller cities you can find restaurants serving food from all over the world.
Urban upper middle class enthusiasm for foreign restaurants is tied to support for mass immigration. When our recent debates about immigration were beginning, the availability of Thai or Vietnamese or Indonesian or Ethiopian cooking was regarded as a serious argument for lax immigration laws. I wonder if the connection between a style of restaurant-going and a political style was there in the beginning: if it wasn't Greenwich Village rebels a century ago who stumbled on pizza or spaghetti and passed on the word to the rest of the country.
Breakfast at around noon:
Meat choices: sausage, bacon, pork chops, ham, smoked sausage, country ham, steak, hamburger
Eggs: omelette, fried, scrambled, hard boiled
In order of likelihood.
Choose one from meat and one from eggs.
Fin.
32 varieties of breakfast for me.
I just came across the quote below and thought it was apropos to the topic of sameness, newness and novelty
Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time … At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that’s what makes it so boring.
Edward J Gorey
As a kid, I was always a big fan of breakfast for dinner.
That we can choose what to eat, in the modern world, is a luxury, as noted. I come from a culture of sameness, on the whole, as described by Freedman, that of a staple (rice) and a "relish", which in the Filipino version of English is called a "viand", as the language needed expansion to suit an alien concept. In other words, meals are rice plus something to go with rice. Until very recently, changing only in my own lifetime, this was true for rich and poor alike.
Poverty meant, on one level, having a poor viand. Meatless native vegetables cooked in various ways, or canned fish which was the protein viand of the poor. Worse though, very bad indeed, was having no rice. True hardship was living on camote, or sweet potato.
The even moderately off as well as the wealthy mainly ate at home or had a home-made meal brought in by ones wife or servant, basically the same as the Indian tiffin-system. Restaurants and even food-stands were unusual, for the entertainment of the posh or the sustenance of those without a local household, which were mainly immigrants, and very importantly Chinese. Indeed, this expansion of food-preparation outside the home is connected with the loss of a household, as that was a cultural universal. Rich and poor had mothers and aunts and wives, or servants, all cooking at home. This too changed in my lifetime.
There is a world of difference between OCD doing the same thing every day and having a comfortable routine.
The obsessive sameness person has difficulty when things change, can't handle it. A comfortable routine person can have disruptions in the routine and perhaps not care for the change much, but will just roll with the changes.
Might even appreciate the changes and make that a part of the new routine.
Breakfast at our house is whatever we have, whatever we want to eat. IF we feel like eating or not. Yesterday we had oatmeal with nuts and fruit. Today I had leftover pepperoni pizza and hubby decided on a ham and tomato sandwich.
@Gahrie:
Cities are humanity's Pandora's box.
Agree with everything you wrote in that comment. Demographers believe that, beginning about a decade ago, the urban population has surpassed the rural population for the first time in human history.
The Chinese were critical in bringing in the idea of restaurants for the masses, in SE Asia. They also pioneered the concept of street food, which was alien to the native peasantry. They did this, I think, because the Chinese urban workers were disproportionately single men with no households, no social support. They therefore created a commercial system to accomodate this life. Successful Chinese acquired households, but the system remained, to be adopted by the native urbanizing classes.
Its no accident that Filipino street food has Chinese origins. The Chinese were the urban model. They created, in that part of Asia, the urban mode of life.
Brinner is my favorite meal.
Cities are still demographic sinks. Urban people aren't killed off by disease anymore, but they do not reproduce anywhere near replacement. Some cities are extremes of this. San Francisco, for one, is a sort of human fly-trap.
5 cans of sardines every day? That a recipe for GOUT.
Ouch!
I like kippers.
I've been married to one woman for 38+ years, we've been together for more than 40 years.
I've worked at the same company for the past 23 years, worked at the previous one for 10 years.
I've lived in this house for 20 years.
I eat some form of egg dish every morning for breakfast.
I have a caesar salad w/chicken nearly every day for lunch, the other days I have a cobb salad.
Supper / Dinner is my wild food time!
On my own time I prefer not to travel too far from home.
I prepare myself for my work day with the same routine of cleaning and prepping in the same order of activities every day.
I think I'm in the category of folk that this fellow finds uninteresting and non-adventurous. I'm totes okay with that. Fu*k him.
BTW, I just got through with a Ben Hogan Bio, and he liked to have the same grilled chicken/Mayo club sandwich for lunch every single day.
Some people are like that. Had a friend who ate 2 Maple bars and a milk shake every school lunch in HS. Yuck!
Do we want to watch a television show with familiar characters in familiar places (like the old sitcom "Friends" or a long-running soap opera) or do we want to launch into some new movie with actors we've never seen before ... ?
Most of the time it's the latter. It's not quite the same thing, though. Friends is already finished and in the can, and you or I may have seen all the episodes. A soap opera, if it's still on the air, can put its characters through new adventures (even if they are the same old adventures with a few changes), so you might find something new in the familiar. Same thing if there's a lost Friends episode out there somewhere.
Most stuff doesn't bear rewatching. I'd make an exception for some excellent HBO series, but if I know how something is going to end and can remember scenes and lines I'm usually not interested in watching the movie or show again.
Lit professors always praised rereading and talked about how one always discovers something new on each reading. There's probably some truth in that, but it's also something that they have to say to keep their interest in their job and their self-respect.
My dad, who was a Navy recruiter for Great Lakes, saw a group of fresh recruits every week for years. At lunch time, he'd pull out his sandwich and invariably exclaim, "Not peanut-butter and jelly again!" only to hear some new recruit eventually ask, "Mr K, why don't you get your wife to make you a ham-sandwich or something different?" Whereupon, my dad would admonish him, "Now, listen, leave my wife out of this. I make my own sandwiches."
Later, I crashed my church camp at Camp Willow Bay, WI with a buddy. Lacking money to pay for food, we packed enough peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to give us each 3 sandwiches a day for a week. My buddy gave up after 3 days, but I was able to stick it out, and it's still my favorite sandwich, some 60 years later.
Its no accident that Filipino street food has Chinese origins.
I still have my "I eat Balut" hat.
True hardship was living on camote, or sweet potato.
In Okinawa, even if you like sweet potatoes, you don't want to be seen eating sweet potatoes. There is a stigma related to eating them because they are a food associated with being poor.
Ann: if you are interested this routine vs. newness conflict plays out in an entertaining way in a series called "Forever" with Fred Arimsten and Maya Rudolph. Amazon Prime.
I work in downtown Minneapolis where there are scores of great restaurants. I eat lunch somewhere different everyday. Today was Greek chicken kabobs from Trieste. Tomorrow I'm thinking porketta Romano from Serrento Cucina. Wednesday, maybe Japanese hibachi. To not take advantage of these options would be foolish and boring. It's why I work downtown.
I have a running debate with myself about choosing the same thing every time I go to a given restaurant. I'm disappointed with myself when I order the usual. But I hate to order something new that isn't as good as my usual, as I'll feel I wasted a restaurant visit. And a restaurant visit is a terrible thing to waste.
It's a quandary I'll mull to my dying day, I'm sure. But I will enjoy myself along the way.
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