[alexose]

I think our generation will be remembered for over-optimization more than anything. We keep chasing the best hotel, the best restaurant, the best partner, not realizing that things that give us meaning and happiness are intangible, unique, weird, and usually right in front of us.

[yamtaddle]

I often wonder exactly how much happier I am having a billion excellent choices for entertainment, versus the small set we might have in the '90s.

I doubt it's that much. Is the very-best movie from last year, uncovered by ten or fifteen minutes of targeted searching and reading, likely to be better than whatever I'd have picked up at the video store based on gut feeling and what a few friends had told me? Oh, god yes, of course it is. Am I happier this way, though? I'm less certain about that. Probably a little? But I don't think it's a large effect.

Ditto having "the world's knowledge at your fingertips" (well, ignore that it's far from all of it and that you're probably still better off hitting the books for a lot of things, but it's good at the trivial stuff anyway). Can I answer most silly little "I wonder..." questions in five to ten seconds? Yep. Am I happier this way? I'm not so sure, since before the Internet was available nearly everywhere nearly all the time I rarely even became consciously aware of such trivial thoughts and they were very easy to dismiss when I did.

[ahartmetz]

I don't know, haven't most people learned by now that all these fine-grained ratings essentially mean either "crap" or "not crap, it depends on your preferences"? In a few cases, "crap but you might like it".