Bursting the recommendation bubble

I'm burned out on giving and receiving recommendations.

Maybe we all have too many recommendations and we need to start discovering things (by accident) again.

Let me start by saying I’m not writing this from a soapbox. I’m writing it from my computer as a human who is personally burned out on giving and receiving recommendations. But if I see one more newsletter about someone’s favorite white tee, I’m going to lose it. And I’m part of the problem. I’ve recommended restaurants, hotels, trips, clothes, beauty products, wedding guest dresses.

Some things I discovered by accident rather than through a recommendation: the cozy, family-run cash-only restaurant in Brooklyn where I’ve celebrated almost every birthday since moving to New York. My childhood neighbor’s insanely delicious ghormeh sabzi, the dish that got me hooked on Persian food before I even knew what it was. Brooklyn Heights, the first neighborhood I lived in after college, when I naively and incorrectly thought “magical” was a word reserved for Manhattan.

None of it came from a newsletter, Instagram reel or TikTok post. It came from paying attention and getting lucky.

The only time I’m sort of okay with it is when it involves crowdsourcing, like I did for this list of 50 (yes, 50) restaurant recs from New Yorkers and this list of 50 Copenhagen recs.

I’ve been trying to think about when I have the most fun writing, and it’s when I’m not doing it for anyone else. So I guess what I’m trying to say is I want to discover things for myself and cast a wider net if I’m consuming information about what people are into. I no longer just want one person’s opinion on everything, no matter how much I like them, even though that totally goes against half of what I’ve been consuming on Substack.

I think I just miss loving things for the sake of loving them, not for the sake of sharing them with the internet.

I’ve found that I’ve become totally obsessed with anything that’s limited edition because it’s hard for anything to feel unique and original in the internet-focused and influencer-saturated world we’re living in. I want to eat at a restaurant that only takes cash, doesn’t have a sign out front and hasn’t been shared.

Sometimes the recommendation world becomes a popularity contest, one I’ve willingly participated in — solid recommendations read as good taste, and good taste reads as trustworthy. It’s not. We’re often just deciding we like things, and the person you should trust the most is yourself and your own taste.

And if you’re going to recommend something to me, I also want to know what you don’t like because context is everything. It’s something I’m going to commit to doing more often. It’s time for all of us to start talking about what we don’t like, too. Otherwise, we just become walking advertisements. And that’s how it feels right now. Weird, sponsored, too much.

A lot of the time, the magic of a moment lies in the human experience you have for yourself, not the one that someone is telling you to have.

I do have one contradiction: the Rec League app. But even there, I’m mostly just logging things I already love, for an audience of one and anyone else who stumbles upon my lists. It’s not that we should completely stop recommending things to each other, especially if they’re particularly special. It’s just that the recommending shouldn’t be the whole point. It should come second, after we’ve actually done the discovery for ourselves and decided, on our own, what we think.