There But For The Grace Of Google...

"All my life, whenever it comes time to make a decision, I make it and forget about it."

~ Harry S. Truman ~

Should I take the bus or the subway? Should we order Chinese or Thai tonight for dinner? Should I in solitude suffer the crushing weight of a miserable job that pays my bills or risk everything by throwing it all away and starting from scratch with no guarantees or safety nets to break my precipitous fall? Life's full of little choices, and every time we commit to one option we're forced to weigh the opportunity costs of not making the opposite decision. You analyze, take accounts, sketch it out, draw conclusions, ponder results, pray to various gods, rub rabbits' feet, and eventually, when all else fails, you Google.

And lately I can't shake the feeling that my Googling is actually deciding way more of my future than I ever anticipated. When I'm just trying to figure out which Italian place has the best gnocchi in the East Village, the effects of search engine optimization don't really give me pause, but this goes well beyond that. As noted in my recent birthday post, my lone wolf days of Sri Lanka have been finally put to rest - I've been taken in by a pack of law interns who like doing shots and making Lawrence v. Texas references.

So the lone lawyer never has to be alone again

Fortuitously, I met these guys because they happened to be in the lobby of my hostel when I arrived in Geneva and I happened to run into them right as they were talking about plans for the evening. And you know why I ended up picking that hostel in particular? When I Googled for hostels in Geneva, it popped up as the first result. Now, barring me taking a joke too far and alienating everyone I recently met, a huge portion of my memories for the next few months will be shaped by that random search result. This goes way deeper than ending up with sub-par pumpkin ravioli thanks to a bad restaurant suggestion - this completely reshapes the face of my Swiss experience.

Odd how the search terms you clickity-clack into a Firefox window might totally define your future, hmm? For some, this kind of I-don't-like-meta-tags-determining-my-fate divination might feel a bit daunting. "But Eric," you proclaim, "it doesn't seem right to me that the interwebs is going to pick out my friends!" Then angrily you stomp off to check your OKCupid account and shake your iphone violently to see where Urbanspoon wants you to eat tonight. As I do all within my power to refrain from telling you that saying interwebs isn't cool anymore, and in fact probably never was, I nod to myself chucklingly as you ass-backwards stumble into raising an interesting issue. All this technology is giving us the power to have unlimited choices while completely eviscerating the need to choose for ourselves at the same time!

After struggling with the notion that Google has totally taken the reigns away from my somewhat capable hands, I choose to reject the premise that my future is defined by some marketing geek's SEO terms. At the end of the day, making a decision doesn't really change just because you have a million options to pick from, and it certainly doesn't change because you only have two options to pick from. Whether Google spat out a random suggestion as number one on a hostel list or some smartphone app figured out that I like red sauce and not leaving my neighborhood, when I pick something and go for it, I'm the one making the decision. More options, less options, it doesn't matter. I pull the trigger. Or click the mouse, as it were.

So I'm telling Google that it deserves a nice pat on the back for pushing me in the right direction, but I opted for the hostel. I promise not to yell at Yelp because my penne arrabiata last night sucked - I chose to walk into that restaurant after all. And if this whole life-changing-gamble I'm working on doesn't pan out, I won't blame anyone but myself.

And if it succeeds, I'm not giving Google any credit.