A few years ago in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Howard Moskowitz, a fascinating man with a doctorate from Harvard in psychophysics.  Psychophysics, which I have conveniently looked up, is the branch of psychology that studies the impact of stimuli on people; how we react to the physical world.  I think.

 

Howard Moskowitz, as you might imagine, works in marketing.

 

It’s a good story, typical of Gladwell, who finds interesting people and writes interesting things about them.  Moskowitz went into business after college, helping companies create better products and then sell them.  And somewhere along the line he had an epiphany that in many ways has shaped the way all of us shop.  In a psychophysics way, I mean.

 

And here’s what it was: When faced with the challenge of discovering what consumers want in a diet soda or a spaghetti sauce, after multiple tests and focus groups and reams of data, Moskowitz discovered that we want… more choices.

 

This seems intuitive to us, common sense, but it was a revelation 30 years ago.  How do you create the best peanut butter, the one everyone likes and buys?  You can’t.  Instead, you create 58 different kinds, because people like variety, and they’ll gravitate toward a brand that gives them choices.

 

I mean, people get doctorates in this.  

 

(The exception, by the way, seems to be ketchup.  No one knows why, but people seem to want less variety in ketchup, not more.  Sounds like a thesis to me.)

 

The fact that people are different, with different tastes and interests, also seems intuitive, particularly in the Internet age.  

 

I think it would be fun to create a random hobby generator, a piece of computer code that spits out esoteric interests, and see what happens.  I have a pretty good idea, actually; it’ll give us, say, “Jack Russell terrier hula-hoop superman” and we’ll plug that phrase into a search engine.

 

I have not actually done this.  I’m a little nervous about the YouTube videos I’m certain I’d find, poor little animals with capes and so on.  But you get the drift.  

 

There are an endless variety of interests, and an endless variety of Web sites devoted to people who are interested.

 

I’ll be honest: I have some interest envy.  I don’t have fascinating or unusual hobbies.  There’s half a century’s worth of trivia wandering around in what’s left of my brain, all sorts of facts and figures, which I’d be glad to share if you were looking for a quick solution to temporary insomnia, but there are no Web sites about guys like me.  

 

I’m an empty “About Me” field, with no exciting hobbies or passions to set me apart.  I like movies.  I like reading books.  I like a few TV shows.  I like… hey!  Wake up.

 

I don’t even golf.

 

But I do shave.  Oh yes.  And, shaving?  You might be surprised.

 

I started shaving when I was 13, although for a couple of years it was a special occasion sort of thing.  At some point in my mid-teenage years it moved into more of a daily habit, at which point my father, almost certainly at the urging of my mother, gave me a few tips (“Blood is nature’s way of telling you that you’re doing it wrong.”  Who knew?).  

 

And that’s it.  For decades I usually had some sort of facial hair, but in any case, shaving remained a trivial aspect of an uneventful life, a few minutes in the morning doing it and absolutely no minutes in the rest of the day devoted to thinking about it.

 

Except when it comes to buying blades.  Men know what I’m talking about.  Women may also, but no one is returning my calls.

 

Double, triple, quads; we have choices and variety now, and blood is almost unheard of, but prices can drive you crazy.  Blades are expensive, and waiting to buy until a dull moment can get dicey.

 

So I was interested to find out there’s a subculture devoted to the art of shaving.  I can’t remember where I saw the first article, but I read and watched some.  There are people who take shaving seriously.

 

None of this would have been more than a way to kill a few minutes had I not read a story that appealed to my stingy side.  You know those fancy multi-blade cartridges, the ones that go for five bucks a pop?  That you’re supposed to change every three shaves, or at least once a week?

 

Turns out you can sharpen them.  In about 10 seconds.

 

So there’s something to be said for esotericism.  I’ve used the same blade since March, and I’m pretty sure I’d know if the trick wasn’t working.  

 

Just wanted to share that, to wish you all a good Labor Day weekend, and to suggest there’s a great pun in “variety is the spice of life,” but I’ll let you make that decision.