I don’t want to have to worry every time I go shopping about which shower gel it should be today and whether it is better or worse than the old one. The sheer quantity of different articles has always left me with an unsatisfactory feeling.
I looked at a few articles from the search results, read the product reviews and decided on a product on the basis of this. I thought that was enough information. But I was not satisfied with it.
But the search results of the articles varied every time and therefore I had to deal with the articles again and again.
In the meantime, I’m going another way.
I divide the information procurement and the purchase on different portals. In one I inform myself, and in another I buy.
On the one hand, this has the advantage that I don’t have the feeling that the margin of the article leads to the sorting order of my results and I have the possibility to inform myself out of a meta-perspective based on experience values of other people and am less subject to any short-term trends.
What is very useful to me as a source of information are subreddits to the respective topics. People from all over the world get together here who are enthusiastic about the same thing and pass on their experiences and tips. You can also approach the same topic from different angles.
A little example because I’m working on it right now.
I was looking for a soap to replace my hand washing soap. I started in r/minimalism. Here we like to use block soap. In the r/onebag block soap is cut into small pieces but a lot of emphasis is placed on biodegradability. In r/anticonsumption the soap is sometimes mixed together itself. In r/SkincareAddiction there is an individual care product for every aches and pains.
The nice thing for me is that by changing your perspective you can find out what you would like to have, sometimes even far away from what expectations I started my search with.
To consciously deal with the topics while searching for the standard product takes a lot of time but has become an extremely satisfying occupation for me.
This feeling of satisfaction when buying and using. I know exactly why I have decided for this or for it and the new purchase will be in the best case only a click and this for longer time.