Welcome back to In Pursuit of Quality. I'm so thrilled that you've returned for the eighth issue—just in time for the holiday rush.
So, I was a fat kid. That may be hard to believe for anyone who has met me within the past thirty years. Yet it's true! I have pictures to prove it, but you'll need to bribe or blackmail me for them first.
As a former chub, you can imagine how excited I'd get for Thanksgiving dinner. It was never about family time for me; I hardly had one. But I did have friends, and some of them had parents who embraced the holiday with gluttonous gusto. Turkey, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, candied sweet potatoes, creamed green beans, creamed spinach, creamed anything, cranberry sauce, dinner rolls, pumpkin and apple pie, seconds of most things. It was about quantity—and I was down for it.
Manic Consumption.
I'm not the only one drawn to carb-on-carb action. Many Americans treat Thanksgiving as an all-access birthright to comatose overconsumption. It's our free pass to drink and eat whatever the hell we want, consuming upwards of 5,000 calories in a single meal. This may be to avoid dealing with ritualistic family obligations, at least according to New Yorker cartoonists:
Eating symbolic food (often dry; often lagging expectations) is one thing. Yet overconsumption spills from the crowded dinner table to the buzzing internet. Black Friday and Cyber Monday represent the year's most expensive days in terms of spending, with American consumers shelling out over $20 billion in 2022 alone.1 This year's projections are even higher. There's maybe some quality there, but it's mostly about more, more, more.
Intentional Consumption.
This isn't a soapbox lecture, though. I'll eat what I want and spend what I like, and so will you. The point here is all about intention.
For the past several years, I've been trying to make the shift from the thoughtless pursuit of quantity to the intentional pursuit of quality. It's a central theme of my life and of this newsletter.
I take being intentional seriously because I find it easy to be distracted by consumption—from the bloated universe of content to the holiday dinner table. I'm thinner these days, but the big kid within me still has an insatiable appetite.
Seems hard to believe that Thanksgiving is coming for us again this week. I plan on spending mine with an intimate group of people I love most. And I hope the same for you, whether that includes biological family, chosen family, or all of the above.
But I will also set the intention now to focus on quality over quantity across the holiday weekend. I'll eat, and probably with abandon. I'll drink because, well, I make really good cocktails. And no doubt I'll be on the hunt for some Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals that seem too good to pass up.
But I'll set my dial to pursue better, not just more.
That's the call-to-action. Maybe this year's holiday season is a time to slow down and take a pause. A time for thinking before doing. A time for blocking out the noise. A time for considered consumption, not just blind, robotic, pressure-mandated consumption.
The young kid in me hates that I just wrote that! But the big kid is smiling, excited for a truly quality week ahead. I hope you're smiling along with me.
With warmth, respect, and gratitude.
According to calculations from ChatGPT 4, average daily spending pales in comparison at around $186 million, but it's a complicated calculation that’s probably wrong.