Julie.
“Uh, fine, thanks.”
“Nothing bad has happened to you this morning?”
She shakes her head.
A couple of hours later, I catch the digital clock in our bedroom change from minute 13 to 14. So what? I don’t need to stop and stare at the clock until it changes from 14 to 15 so that the 13 is washed out of my mind.
By the end of the day, I’m on a high. Why didn’t I do this twenty years ago? Think of the time I could have saved.
I wake up the next morning, ready for another day of freedom. An hour into the day, I spill coffee all over my MacBook keyboard. Yeah, well, it happens. A few minutes later, Julie asks me if I’ve seen her earring. She’s lost it somewhere. She looks upset—even more than lost-earring upset. Well, she says, a client of hers had just called and shouted some unreasonable demands. “She’s a bulldozer,” she says.
Then I get an angry e-mail about an essay I wrote. I’d committed a big mistake—I hadn’t made it clear that I disguised the identities of everyone in the essay—and it made me look like an insensitive tool.
I knew this would happen. What kind of an idiot am I to tempt fate? This experiment is over.
THE MERE EXPOSURE EFFECT
It’s a couple of days later. Maybe I’ve overreacted a bit. I’m sticking with my swallowing in pairs, but perhaps there’s other irrational behavior I can fix. Like my toothpaste preference.
I’ve brushed with Crest pretty much every day for the past thirty years. (The exception: one night last year, I brushed my teeth with Preparation H. The reasons were several: a poorly lit hotel bathroom, lack of sleep, a couple of Rolling Rocks, and two identically sized tubes in my Dopp kit.)
Why Crest? I can’t say for sure. No pro/con list was ever drawn up. Some friend of mine at Camp Powhatan in Maine used Crest. He was cool and had seemingly good dental hygiene. I started using Crest—and never stopped.
It’s scary once you start to scrutinize it. Probably 90 percent of our life decisions are powered by the twin engines of inertia and laziness.
Psychologists call it the Mere Exposure Effect. The basic idea is, I like Crest because I’m accustomed to Crest.
That’s not good enough. I need a fully rational toothpaste. I need, first, to expand my dental hygiene horizons. I go to the drugstore and buy a sample platter of forty tubes of toothpaste. (The cashier doesn’t even bat an eye; I guess when your customers buy bungee cords and vats of K-Y Jelly in preparation for a Friday night, this isn’t a big deal.)
I go home and spend eighty minutes brushing. Pepsodent Smooth Mint. Colgate Luminous Crystal Clean Mint. Aquafresh Extreme Clean Whitening Mint Experience. I never realized how much I hate mint. What a tongue-stinging, foul taste. It brings back bad memories of the green goo that goes with lamb chops. What kind of stranglehold do the mint growers have on toothpaste makers? Bite me, mint lobby. The occasional cinnamon paste tastes a bit better, I guess.
But toothpaste No. 27—this is a revelation. Tom’s apricot toothpaste. It’s fresh and clean-tasting, but not heavy-handed, and with just a hint of licorice. It’s like something you’d eat at Chez Panisse. I might actually look forward to toothbrushing.
So that’s a winner in taste. But what about the other factors? Whitening. Cavity-fighting power. Price. The dispenser. The ethics of the manufacturer.
I could spend days researching and testing this decision. I feel like Buridan’s ass. This is a donkey in a philosophical parable: He’s hungry and thirsty and standing equidistant between a bucket of water and a bucket of food. He dies deciding.
The Internet has dozens of articles on comparative toothpaste studies. I consult Consumersearch.com, which aggregates reviews from other consumer sites. “Colgate leads the pack,” it reports. “Experts recommend Colgate Total most often.” Okay. So maybe Colgate Total will be my pick.
But here’s another key sentence:
“Uh, fine, thanks.”
“Nothing bad has happened to you this morning?”
She shakes her head.
A couple of hours later, I catch the digital clock in our bedroom change from minute 13 to 14. So what? I don’t need to stop and stare at the clock until it changes from 14 to 15 so that the 13 is washed out of my mind.
By the end of the day, I’m on a high. Why didn’t I do this twenty years ago? Think of the time I could have saved.
I wake up the next morning, ready for another day of freedom. An hour into the day, I spill coffee all over my MacBook keyboard. Yeah, well, it happens. A few minutes later, Julie asks me if I’ve seen her earring. She’s lost it somewhere. She looks upset—even more than lost-earring upset. Well, she says, a client of hers had just called and shouted some unreasonable demands. “She’s a bulldozer,” she says.
Then I get an angry e-mail about an essay I wrote. I’d committed a big mistake—I hadn’t made it clear that I disguised the identities of everyone in the essay—and it made me look like an insensitive tool.
I knew this would happen. What kind of an idiot am I to tempt fate? This experiment is over.
THE MERE EXPOSURE EFFECT
It’s a couple of days later. Maybe I’ve overreacted a bit. I’m sticking with my swallowing in pairs, but perhaps there’s other irrational behavior I can fix. Like my toothpaste preference.
I’ve brushed with Crest pretty much every day for the past thirty years. (The exception: one night last year, I brushed my teeth with Preparation H. The reasons were several: a poorly lit hotel bathroom, lack of sleep, a couple of Rolling Rocks, and two identically sized tubes in my Dopp kit.)
Why Crest? I can’t say for sure. No pro/con list was ever drawn up. Some friend of mine at Camp Powhatan in Maine used Crest. He was cool and had seemingly good dental hygiene. I started using Crest—and never stopped.
It’s scary once you start to scrutinize it. Probably 90 percent of our life decisions are powered by the twin engines of inertia and laziness.
Psychologists call it the Mere Exposure Effect. The basic idea is, I like Crest because I’m accustomed to Crest.
That’s not good enough. I need a fully rational toothpaste. I need, first, to expand my dental hygiene horizons. I go to the drugstore and buy a sample platter of forty tubes of toothpaste. (The cashier doesn’t even bat an eye; I guess when your customers buy bungee cords and vats of K-Y Jelly in preparation for a Friday night, this isn’t a big deal.)
I go home and spend eighty minutes brushing. Pepsodent Smooth Mint. Colgate Luminous Crystal Clean Mint. Aquafresh Extreme Clean Whitening Mint Experience. I never realized how much I hate mint. What a tongue-stinging, foul taste. It brings back bad memories of the green goo that goes with lamb chops. What kind of stranglehold do the mint growers have on toothpaste makers? Bite me, mint lobby. The occasional cinnamon paste tastes a bit better, I guess.
But toothpaste No. 27—this is a revelation. Tom’s apricot toothpaste. It’s fresh and clean-tasting, but not heavy-handed, and with just a hint of licorice. It’s like something you’d eat at Chez Panisse. I might actually look forward to toothbrushing.
So that’s a winner in taste. But what about the other factors? Whitening. Cavity-fighting power. Price. The dispenser. The ethics of the manufacturer.
I could spend days researching and testing this decision. I feel like Buridan’s ass. This is a donkey in a philosophical parable: He’s hungry and thirsty and standing equidistant between a bucket of water and a bucket of food. He dies deciding.
The Internet has dozens of articles on comparative toothpaste studies. I consult Consumersearch.com, which aggregates reviews from other consumer sites. “Colgate leads the pack,” it reports. “Experts recommend Colgate Total most often.” Okay. So maybe Colgate Total will be my pick.
But here’s another key sentence:
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