THANKS to the internet, life’s pleasures can only be relished after hours of punishing online research. Do the work before these:
Watching a film
Your time is precious. You need to know before watching any film that it will meet your standards so you’re obligated to trawl through Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb and Reddit forums to find a review that matches up with your unfounded preconceptions. Then watch half of it before turning it off because it’s midnight and you’ve got work tomorrow.
Dining out
Every stage of the restaurant process should involves as much research as a PhD. First scour the menu, cross-referencing with Instagram, then do a deep dive into the wine list and dissect the desserts. Even afterwards you’ll be looking up whether the shrimp ceviche was supposed to taste like that. If you spend all night vomiting, the answer is no.
Potential romantic partners
Nobody just rocks up to a first date after sending a few flirtatious messages. On what basis, ‘fancying someone’? Grow up. Cambridge Analytica levels of online data gathering are necessary. Use fake profiles and friends to gather evidence. Then pretend you don’t know any of it on the date itself or you’ll look like a stalker.
Reading a book
Finishing a novel should be a satisfying, solitary experience. Read that last sentence, set the book down and let the author’s carefully-crafted prose marinate in your mind. Instead you’re on Reddit within seconds to see who else found the dream sequence in chapter seven stupid and what the symbolism of the frozen duck pond was.
Going on holiday
Compare flights. Compare destinations. Compare hotels. Spend hours hunched over a laptop being pissed about by algorithms that raise the price the second you’re ready to book. Then when you eventually get there, carry on obsessively comparing the holiday you’re on to all the ones you could have taken until it’s ruined.
