An infinity of everything

I had a day off last week so I decided to take vantage of it and I toured several malls and shops hoping to find the shoes to wear at my best friend’s wedding this upcoming Summer. Spoiler alert: I didn’t find them. However, as my last tentative, I decided to go to a nearby mall where I used to go every Saturday morning with my parents when I was a child for our weekly grocery shopping.

I know it’s common to perceive smaller all those places that felt huge when we were little but that day it struck me even more than usual. We lived in the countryside, in a village with a tiny family-run shop, going to the supermarket once a week was quite a big deal for me, like an adventure. I loved seeing several shops in the gallery, the crowd, the multi-floors parking lots, it all felt big and bright and interesting. But that day, the experience felt exactly the opposite.

The parking lot didn’t feel particularly outstanding to me, rather cramped and small, the supermarket was badly illuminated and didn’t showcase the products very well, the shops in the gallery were very few and boring and several were closed for good. What struck me the most was realizing that it wasn’t because the place had aged badly that felt so underwhelming (well, okay, it didn’t age well in the sense that nobody renovated things around), it was because it looked the same as in the ‘90s and my brain is now trained to experience larger and modern malls and supermarkets.

Back then, when I was little, malls were still that “new thing imported from America” and, while they were part of our lives, they were not as widespread and popular as they are now. It’s incredible to realize what a limited exposure I had to toys and products when I was a child compared to what it’s available now. Back then there wasn’t a neverending stream of items to choose from, they were a finite amount and I lived my life happily not knowing about the existence of so many different options. In general, we weren’t constantly exposed to “new stuff” and, in a way, even if globalization was already much there, life was simpler1. Sure, it took more time to do things but at least we kept our sanity.

Getting back to my car, I pondered on how this “infinity of everything” is actually stealing us our ability to appreciate things, how everything feels boring after such exposure.