James is staring at his phone with the kind of glazed intensity usually reserved for staring at a car wreck or a 41-page tax document. It is 11:01 PM on a Tuesday. The blue light is carving deep, weary canyons into his face, and his right thumb is twitching from a repetitive motion that has no end in sight.

He is currently on page 11 of a “New Arrivals” section on a Korean grocery website. He came here for a bag of chips. Specifically, he came here because he saw a TikTok of someone eating something that sounded like a crisp autumn leaf and looked like a golden pillow.

But the website doesn’t just have that one chip. It has 901 products in the snack category alone. By the time he hits the 181st item, the dopamine is gone. The curiosity that fueled his initial click has been replaced by a low-grade, vibrating anxiety.

He filters for “sweet and salty,” and the list narrows to a still-impossible 301 options. He scrolls. He sees honey butter, corn silk, roasted onion, squid ink, and something that roughly translates to “grandma’s secret comfort.” He wants to be adventurous, but the sheer volume of choices has turned the adventure into an inventory audit.

He closes the tab. He walks to the kitchen and eats the same stale tortilla chips he has been buying for 21 years.

The Era of the Infinite Catalog

I’ve been there. We all have. I spent most of yesterday afternoon trying to assemble a minimalist bookshelf that arrived with 31 screws but only 21 pre-drilled holes. It’s the same psychological violence.

You are promised a result-a beautiful piece of furniture, a delicious snack-but you are given a puzzle with missing instructions and far too many redundant pieces. We live in the era of the Infinite Catalog, a digital landscape where “more” is treated as an objective good, and “curation” is seen as a limitation of freedom.

“

If I give a director all 801 thuds, they’ll fire me. My job is to give them the three thuds that actually matter. If I don’t curate, I’m just making noise.

— Blake M.-C., Foley Artist

Blake M.-C. knows this better than anyone. Blake is a foley artist, the kind of person who spends 11 hours a day in a dark room trying to find the exact sound a leather jacket makes when it brushes against a velvet curtain. Blake told me once that the hardest part of the job isn’t making the sound; it’s picking one.

“I have a library of 801 different ‘thuds,'” Blake said, tossing a heavy beanbag onto a wooden floor. “I have to find the one that feels like the truth of the scene.”

The Cold Mercy of the Search Bar

E-commerce has become a noise machine. It has confused abundance with hospitality. When you walk into a traditional market stall in Seoul, the vendor doesn’t point to a warehouse and say, “Good luck, there are 701 types of ramen in there, let me know if you need a spreadsheet.”

No, they look at you, see you’re a beginner, and they hand you one specific red package. They tell you it’s spicy, but not “ruin your life” spicy. They provide a human bridge between the unknown and the first bite.

The American grocery website, by contrast, offers the cold mercy of a 4.1-star average rating and a search bar that requires you to already know what you’re looking for. It’s a paradox: to find something new, you have to know its name. But if you’re a beginner, you don’t have the vocabulary. You’re just a person with a hungry thumb and a fading attention span.

The grocery industry treats a long catalog as a feature, a badge of logistical prowess. They brag about having 11,001 SKUs. But for the person who just wants to know what “good” tastes like, that catalog is a wall. Nobody walking into a Korean snack aisle for the first time wants 401 options. They want 7.

They want a sentence under each one that sounds like it was written by a person who actually ate the thing, rather than a bot that scraped the back of the packaging for keywords.

I am a hypocrite, of course. I criticize this abundance while my own closet is currently straining under the weight of 41 different pairs of shoes I rarely wear, because I’m terrified of picking the wrong one for any given day. We are all hoarders of potential.

We keep the tabs open because closing them feels like a missed opportunity, yet we never actually make the purchase. We’ve turned shopping into a research project, and research is the enemy of appetite.

The First Bite

Think about the “first bite.” It’s supposed to be an event. It’s the moment of discovery. But when you’ve had to filter through 201 different variants of the same product, that first bite isn’t a discovery-it’s a relief.

You aren’t tasting the flavor; you’re tasting the end of the decision-making process. The joy is smothered by the labor required to get there. The problem is that e-commerce platforms have optimized for the “expert” and the “obsessive.”

If you are a connoisseur of obscure dried seafood, a 901-item catalog is a playground. But most of us are not experts. Most of us are James, sitting on a couch at 11:11 PM, just wanting a moment of novelty in an otherwise predictable week.

The Beginner’s Seven

We need a return to the shortlist. We need the “Beginner’s Seven.” There is a profound power in being told: “Don’t worry about the other 394 things. Start here.” It’s why people still flock to Reddit threads from three years ago to find out what to buy.

They aren’t looking for the most data; they are looking for a consensus of taste. They are looking for a human to say, “I tried this, and it didn’t suck.”

It’s why, when James finally gave up on the 401-page digital menu and just looked for korean snacks for beginners, he actually felt his pulse slow down.

The screen stopped being a threat. It became a suggestion. There is a specific kind of relief that comes when someone who knows more than you do steps in and says, “Let me help you narrow this down.” It’s not a restriction of your freedom; it’s a restoration of your time.

I remember trying to buy a specific type of microphone for a project last year. I spent 51 hours reading reviews. I looked at frequency response curves. I looked at 31 different YouTube comparisons.

By the time I bought the microphone, I didn’t even want to record anything anymore. I was sick of the sound of my own indecision. I had optimized the soul out of the project before I even started.

This is the hidden cost of the infinite catalog. It’s not just abandoned carts; it’s abandoned curiosity. When the barrier to entry is a mountain of choice, most people will just stay in the valley. We are losing the chance to fall in love with new things because we are too exhausted by the process of finding them.

Hospitality vs Data

The grocery stores of the future-at least the ones that won’t make us want to throw our phones into a river-will be the ones that understand curation is an act of love. It’s the “yes, and” approach to hospitality. Yes, the variety exists, and here is exactly where you should put your foot first.

“We traded the merchant’s wink for a search bar and wondered why the food started tasting like data.”

I think back to that bookshelf I was building. Eventually, I gave up on the instructions. I went to the hardware store, bought 11 screws that actually fit, and just winged it. It’s not perfect.

It leans slightly to the left, maybe 1 degree, but it’s a bookshelf. It exists in the real world, whereas the “perfect” version only existed in a state of frustrated potential on my living room floor.

A Gift, Not a Job

The first bite of a new snack should feel like that. It should be a little bit impulsive. It should be slightly un-researched. It should be a leap of faith guided by a steady hand.

If you give a beginner 401 choices, you are giving them a job. If you give them 7, you are giving them a gift. We need to stop pretending that more data equals a better experience.

Data is what you use when you don’t have a story. But a snack is a story. It’s a history of a flavor, a memory of a street corner in a city you’ve never visited, a specific crunch that reminds you of being 11 years old. You can’t filter for that. You can’t sort that by “Price: Low to High.”

Blake M.-C. told me that in foley, the best sound is often the one that people don’t even notice. It’s so right, so perfectly placed, that it just becomes part of the reality. Curation should be the same.

It should disappear. You shouldn’t feel the hand of the curator; you should just feel the joy of the discovery.

James eventually ordered a small, curated box. It arrived on a Friday. He didn’t look at the star ratings. He didn’t check the 21 different ingredient labels for hidden preservatives. He just opened the bag, heard that specific, leaf-crunch sound, and took the first bite.

In that moment, the 901 other products didn’t exist. The 11 minutes of scrolling were forgotten. There was just the salt, the sugar, and the realization that the world is a lot smaller-and a lot tastier-when someone else does the heavy lifting for you.

We don’t need more options. We need more directions.

We need to be allowed to be beginners again, without being forced to become experts just to buy a bag of chips. The tyranny of the catalog is real, but the rebellion is simple: pick the seven, ignore the rest, and just eat.

Your thumb will thank you. Your brain will thank you. And finally, for the first time in 41 minutes, you might actually taste something real.