I Always Forget The Milk

As much as we’d like things to be orderly, life is messy. It would be preferable if life was like a recipe with easy steps to follow.

Sadly, life is more like a grocery list, and you forgot to grab the bread in Aisle 5. So you send off your kid to grab it while you finish up in the frozen section.

After ten minutes of waiting for them to come back, you go looking for them. You search every aisle when it dawns on you.

You don’t have children.

And, even worse, you realize you forgot your wallet.

So something more straightforward would be nice.

But even recipes lie to us. They present steps as a matter of fact. But cooking isn’t a perfectly linear process. Certain activities must happen in parallel. All recipes reduce complexity to be more accessible to their target audience. They may skip entire steps, processes, or ingredients.

For instance, most Americans don’t own gochugaru, so it’ll list red pepper flakes instead. Most people don’t own a blowtorch, so a recipe creator won’t advise using one. So we eat our lackluster results from these cherry-picked instructions that don’t reflect what a professional chef might do.

What if our tools and systems were designed to embrace the mess instead of trying to present everything as linear steps?