Dark Roast, Two Cream?

Panic, decision paralysis, and time

I start thinking about my coffee order roughly five to ten minutes before I pull into the Starbucks drive-thru.

This is not an exaggeration. I think, maybe today I’ll try something different, you know, just for fun. Something with a catchy name. I’ll see if I’m inspired by anything when I get up to the menu board.

I tuck into the line of cars, excited to try a delicious new concoction. And then I start to worry about what happens if I try something different and get it wrong, and I picture myself asking clarifying questions into the speaker while a line of cars waits impatiently behind me.

And then I am at the board, and it’s suddenly enormous and completely overwhelming. It just sits there, ominously, staring back at me with what seems like a thousand options that are all vying for my attention and dollars.

I jump in my seat every time that high-pitched voice says all too cheerfully, “Welcome to Starbucks!!!! Can I take your order?”

PANIC. FREEZE.

“Uhhhh... dark roast? Two cream?”

Every. Single. Time. A Tim Hortons order, placed at Starbucks, by someone who just spent the past ten minutes preparing for the moment.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why that happens.

The menu board keeps getting bigger. There are more drinks than there were last year, with more sizes, more milks, more syrups, and don’t forget the seasonal menu on the second screen! And you get about three seconds to take it all in and make your order, because there are ten cars behind you who don’t want to wait and know they have to do the same thing. The menu grows and the clock does not move.

This is what we are getting wrong. We talk about information overload like the trouble is the volume, but it isn’t. Having access to more is mostly a good thing, and I say that as someone who has spent the past twenty years arguing for it. The trouble is there’s a ton of volume, but seemingly less and less time to deal with all of it.

If I wanted your opinion, I’d give it to you.

Here’s me, on any given day:

Hey, man, don’t tell me what to think! I will just do my research and figure out my OWN opinions, thank you very much. Go on the internet. Start Googling. Start collecting information. Oh, wow. This is a lot to go through. This is going to take forever, and I have choir practice tonight.

OK, that’s fine, I will just go looking for someone who can summarize all this for me. Easy peasy.

And now I’m watching my favourite YouTuber, listening to somebody else’s opinion.

Isn’t that the exact thing I set out to avoid?

This loop is not an accident, and it isn’t a personal failing either. It’s what the internet machine produces.

Here’s what happens with three seconds and a hundred options. You stop browsing. You stop discovering. You reach for whatever you can say out loud without embarrassing yourself, and you say that, and you drive away.

All this choice was supposed to make us more interesting and more independent and harder to herd, but mostly it makes us order the same thing we ordered last time. Which is not a preference.

It’s a flinch.

I just did the unthinkable.

Three days ago I deleted Facebook, Threads and LinkedIn off my phone. They’re all still there on my laptop, so I can look at them when I want to, but I have to go sit down and open a computer to do it. Lots of people are talking about friction these days, so I decided to give myself some.

The difference has been significant, and faster than I expected. My head is genuinely quieter, and I’m getting back hours I honestly did not know I was spending. Like, I’m writing a blog post, people. That’s gotta mean something!

I want to be careful here, because it has only been three days, which is nothing. I’m in the honeymoon phase, where a good chunk of what I’m feeling is just the novelty of not doing the thing. Ask me again in March, because I may very well have all three apps back on my phone and no memory of ever having written this.

Notice that I did not reduce the actual information. Facebook has exactly as much happening on it today as it did last week. LinkedIn has not gotten any smaller. I couldn’t shorten the menu, so I lengthened the three seconds.

And then, three days into all that hard-won clarity, I pulled into the drive-thru, heard the voice, and ordered a dark roast with two cream. So what changed?

I don’t have a tidy fix to hand you on this one. The friction works great on the small boards and folds on the big ones. The flinch is harder to remove than the apps.

Part of me longs for a simpler time, and I know exactly how that sounds coming from someone who was one of the first hundred thousand people on Twitter in 2007 and has been writing on the internet since 2006. I was there for all of it. I wanted all of it. I helped talk other people into it. I’m not going to stand here now and pretend I was dragged kicking and screaming into all of this.

But, sitting in the parking lot afterward with my boring coffee, I caught myself thinking that if I ever did want to follow through with changing my order, I’d probably open up an AI chatbot first and work out what to ask for, so I wouldn’t make a fool of myself at the speaker.