The Strategist believes in expertise, and aims to supply its readers with experts for all purchases. While not an insidious desire, its attempt at encyclopedic coverage of products leads to some funny and thought-provoking places.
The Strategist recently published an interview with five chefs of some renown. They were not trying to guide readers on a big purchase, like a food processor or a rice cooker. Instead, they turned their attention to something smaller: the 11 best jarred tomato sauces. I felt vindicated as a long time fan of Rao’s, which topped the list. But why did The Stategist feel the need to analyze, optimize, lifehack and dissect a problem so minor?
I (virtually) attended a talk with Kazuo Ishiguro and Jia Tolentino yesterday, and Tolentino noted that in our modern day capitalist world we often find ourselves trying to squeeze productivity and profit out of every moment in our lives. She said that we’ve even learned to optimize our personality to pursue profits. How right, I thought. I took a personality test in high school to identify the job and major I should pursue, how I should chase after money. Everyone at my school did. Our guidance counselors had mandated it, taking us out of class one day and into the computer lab to take such an exam.
Capitalism has long fetisihized optimization, though until recently it was corporations and not young professionals who did the optimizaing. Capitalism is voracious to disrupt economies and to create new markets where none existed prior. Women didn’t shave until marketers convinced them to. Deoderant likewise. A more recent example is the modern self-care industry, which seeks to convert the act of relaxation, which is neutral towards expenditure, into one wrapped up in purchasing, in “treating.” Capitalism loves to solve problems with products, and sometimes that requires inventing problems.
I think this is The Strategist’s MO with its pasta sauce article. It is an attempt to expand The Strategist’s purview and monetize an aspect of living previously out of their reach. The Strategist largely focuses on expensive purchases. There, consumers legitimately want expert sources to guide them. Should they spend $1000 on a projector, they want to ensure that they get the right one. The problem of finding a good projector, a good baby monitor, a good camera is an important problem with high monetary stakes.
Food presents much lower stakes. A bad jar of pasta is easily replaced. Getting the best possible pasta does little to increase one’s life satisfaction. It’s a problem that I have never dwelt on. I buy whatever is on sale.
The Strategist, of course, would like to profit off of my pasta-oriented decisions. To do this, it needs to introduce marinara optimization as a legitimate problem worthy of expert guidance. This seems to be The Strategist’s means of advertising and monetizing food: The Strategist publishes tahini and olive oil recommendations under its “Recommended By Experts” label. While we know that we have to consult experts when making large purchases, in the case of small weekly purchases The Strategist needs to convince us that expertise will matter, and the way that they do it is by presenting it as a problem that can be objectively solved, that is worth solving.
Upon reading The Strategist’s coverage, I believe readers suffering from the disease of optimization Tolentino diagnosed will suddenly find they have a new symptom: the need to buy the absolute best jar of pasta. With this symptom, The Strategist gets to profit on something they hadn’t before. I doubt that, upon buying the perfect marinara sauce, that our optimizer will be any happier.
I’ve said affiliate marketers really have two sets of eyes. They have the point of view which they present to the world, that of earnest shopaholics who want their readers to buy the best things and live the best life, and their truer point of view, that of a profit-seeking company hoping to make money off of affiliate links. Both view points align here.
If you truly believe that products are the solution to problems, then I think you are apt to look for products to solve problems that do not really exist. I know that when I used shopping to self-soothe, I would buy some rather ridiculous things in hopes of solving some problem which, frankly, didn’t matter. If products lead to better living, then if you want the best life you will need to constantly find better products in all domains. That’s what our belief in constant optimization and our bounty of products necesitates.
Here, we see a lot like a profit-seeking company. While The Strategist is always looking for new markets to enter, we are always on the look out for ways that we can create a better life through products. The Strategist sees profit; we see self-improvement. We both find problems that aren’t there.
For once, I have a solution. I’m a hobbyist in the realm of habit and process improvement. I like to think about problems.
The Eisenhower Matrix is a method that I stand by for prioritizing my problems. It is a grid wherein you take your problems and you organize them by their importance (why you need to do it), and their urgency (how quickly it must be done).
Anything in the bottom left corner, those things which are neither important nor urgent, should be dropped from your schedule. Another way to put it is that you should commit as little time as possible to solving these problems.
A heuristic I have used before is to take any problem that is neither important nor urgent and set a timer for one minute. Whatever solution I have when the timer goes off, I take, because the amount of value I could add to my life by spending more time pondering the problem is negligible.
This is true of purchasing a jar of marinara. You shouldn’t read an article about it because it’s not actually a problem worth optimizing, no matter what The Strategist’s experts would like you to believe.
Expert marinara won’t make you happy. Only subscribing to my newsletter will make you happy.