Can Everyone Just Shut Up for Five Minutes?

Somewhere along the way, every interesting thing became content. A rant about recommendations, algorithms, and forgetting how to notice things for ourselves.

I swear to god, if I see one more “10 Sandals You Need This Summer” article, I’m going to throw my phone into the Columbia River.

Which is funny, because I own a gallery store. My entire job is finding things I think are beautiful and convincing other people they might think so too. So this isn’t one of those “consumerism is ruining society” rants from someone who just discovered minimalism and now owns three beige bowls and a superiority complex. I am, quite literally, in the business of recommending things. Maybe that’s exactly why this bothers me so much.

Somewhere along the way, recommendations stopped feeling like someone leaning across the table saying, “I found this little restaurant and I think you’d love it,” and started feeling like we’re all competing in some bizarre, never-ending pageant for Who Has the Best Taste™. These aren’t just sandals; they’re the sandals. This isn’t just a lamp; it’s the lamp every designer secretly owns. God forbid you buy a coffee mug these days without first learning that it’s “going viral.”

It’s exhausting. Not because people are sharing things they love, I actually wish more people did that, but because sharing has quietly been replaced by performing. The point no longer seems to be, “Here’s something that moved me.” It’s, “Here’s proof that I’m paying attention before everyone else is.” Those are wildly different motivations, and I think you can feel the difference, even if nobody ever says it out loud.

The strange part is that I don’t think this is really about shopping at all. I think shopping is just where the symptoms show up first. Underneath it, something else has shifted. We’ve become so accustomed to having everything filtered, ranked, reviewed, optimized, and explained to us that we’ve started outsourcing the most interesting part of being alive: deciding what we actually think.

At what point did we become people who needed strangers on the internet to tell us how and what to think?

When was the last time you wandered into a bookstore with no list and left with something you’d never heard of? When was the last time you walked into a restaurant because it smelled incredible instead of because someone on TikTok said it was worth ninety minutes in line? When was the last time you discovered a musician by accident instead of because Spotify’s algorithm confidently informed you that, based on your listening history, this person was now your entire personality?

Maybe what I’m missing isn’t better recommendations, maybe I’m missing serendipity. The feeling of bumping into something wonderful before the internet has had a chance to package it, optimize it, monetize it, and explain why everyone else already loved it. (And when that does happen and I have a serendipitous moment, there is a small part of me that thinks, “I immediately have to post about this lest someone else beats me to it. I have to document it first, otherwise someone else will get all the credit. I have to wave my flag high so that everyone understands that I am, indeed, a cool person that is worth listening to.” Which is utterly asinine.)

Because here’s the thing I’ve been turning over in my head lately: be careful what you consume repeatedly. Your brain mistakes familiarity for truth. Not because you’re weak or easily manipulated, but because that’s how we’re wired. Repeated exposure changes what feels normal, what feels possible. It changes what you aspire to, what you dismiss, what you notice, what you stop noticing. Before long, you’re not just inheriting other people’s recommendations, you’re inheriting their expectations.

And that’s the part I can’t stop thinking about. Because if what we repeatedly pay attention to quietly becomes the architecture of our inner world, then maybe the most important thing we curate isn’t our wardrobe or our home. Maybe it’s our attention.

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Sara
Founder & Creative Director, Double Kick