written by JOHN MARK MINES | DECISION-MAKING, HOPE, PERSEVERANCE
Not all those who wander are lost.
J.R.R. Tolkien
The Batch-ler
Will you accept this rose?
In the early 2000’s, reality TV dominated primetime entertainment. Contestants battled on CBS’s Survivor, Fox’s American Idol, and NBC’s Fear Factor. In 2003 ABC launched a new series that would outlast the fad: The Bachelor.
This romantic contest gave one man the chance to be a rooster in a hen house. Dating 25 women simultaneously, weekly roses separated the lovers from the losers until just two remained. Only one would win the prize: a marriage proposal.
Or so they thought. On the show’s very first season, bachelor Alex Michel failed to bend the knee. After dating 25 women, he chose Option Z: none of the above. Bummer.
Process of Elimination
Seven billion is an unfathomable number. The world’s population feels infinite, but it’s not. This fact never feels more relevant than in romance.
Filtering collapses options in a hurry, like a real-life game of Guess Who. Constraints like language, geography, age, height, education, and faith, drop the number of potential partners precipitously. Turns out it’s a small world after all.
fi·nite /ˈfīˌnīt/
adjective: having limits or bounds.
Since people don’t pop out of thin air, the number of possible suitors is fixed. Finding a partner forces us to live off the fruit of the labor of others. We become hunter-gatherers, surveying stock that we did not raise or nurture. We become consumers.
Consumers reap what they did not sow. They walk through the aisles of grocery stores, admiring colorful products they didn’t produce. From hunter-gatherers to Costco members, the consumer has a single preoccupation: pick.
In consumer-driven culture, picking is power. The customer is always right. Salespeople roll out the red carpet from car dealerships to open houses. For some, receiving a rose isn’t about love; it’s about livelihood.
Audiences love the consumer. The Bachelor follows the singular male, not the plural females. Roses represent the power of choice, the power to consume. But consumers face a dilemma: what happens when we choose none of the above?
The Brave Little Vacuum Cleaner
Consumers are dependent. They are vulnerable to external forces and circumstances. Another group, though, takes control. They are producers.
“You don’t see ’em on TV or on the front page,” Ice-T says as he narrates the end of the 2010 buddy cop comedy The Other Guys. Like filmmaking, the producers are the ones behind the scenes making the magic happen. But they don’t get the limelight. They are the “day-in, day-outers, the grinders… the other guys.”
To consumers, the world is a magical place. People, products, and progress are taken for granted. The producers aren’t the bachelors or idols or survivors; they’re the other guys.
Hard work is hardly a spectator sport. Movies skip over toil using montages and time lapses. Real life, though, doesn’t come with a fast-forward button. The only way forward is through.
Famine transforms us from consumers into producers. When Sir James Dyson was frustrated with vacuum cleaners, he wasn’t satisfied with none of the above. “So I thought I’d try and design something better,” says Dyson in his first commercial. “And a few thousand prototypes later I had it.”
The commercial is consumer-driven; it glosses over the years Dyson spent in development, never knowing if he’d reach his destination. Yet this is the hallmark of the producer. This wandering in the desert separates the farmer from the hunter-gather. While the consumer picks now, the producer has the power to wait. None of the above isn’t no; it’s not yet.
Hold Out for a Hero
Consumption is ultimately about meeting needs. Purchasing is powerful because it solves a problem. Without this catharsis, the tension persists. Michel started the show a bachelor and ended a bachelor. On the surface, the process was a failure.
Michel’s experience embodies the fear of all consumers: to be found wanting. To be condemned to being empty-handed, or broken-hearted, forever.
From a producer perspective, however, the journey was a great success. After nine thousand unsuccessful experiments to invent a new battery, Thomas Edison was asked why he didn’t have any results. “Results!” he exclaimed, “Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.”
When it comes to love, take a lesson from Edison: don’t be afraid to wait. Unlike batteries or vacuums, Michel can’t prototype a bachelorette. He can only find one… which he did. He’s now married with children. Choosing none of the above didn’t mean giving up; it meant giving it time.
To take control of your life, don’t be afraid to choose none of the above. To be sure, your bachelorette, or Dyson vacuum, may be nine thousand mismatches away. Lots of nones stand between you and the one. Alas, the only way forward is through. From science to romance, the path to catharsis is paved by the power of patience.
