When my wife and I look for a new place to eat, we’ll search through an app, sort by rating, and read a few reviews. Once we’ve optimized our choices, we’ll pick one and go. Something about this process has always unsettled me, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize why.

In my late 20s, around the mid-2000s, I broke up with my girlfriend of 5 years, and soon after, I decided that I’d like to get out of the country. After some initial research, I decided on Asia, and since I wasn’t sure where to go, I chose five countries and randomly selected one. That ended up being Taiwan.

At the time, I knew next to nothing about Taiwan, except for a bit of history, and I got on the plane with no plans upon arrival. During the flight, I looked at the major cities in my guidebook and wrote down Taipei, Kaohsiung, Taichung, Tainan, and Yilan on slips of paper, and pulled one literally out of my hat. I ended up living in Tainan for over a year. It was great, but most of all it was unexpected, and it’s this which I think is the reason for the unsettled feeling I have when picking a restaurant.

When I look at the photos and reviews, I end up going in with a set of expectations. Whether the restaurant lives up to those or not doesn’t matter as much as that they are there from the outset. I can look at the food I’ll likely eat and the atmosphere I’ll be in, and in my head, I can play out the whole meal.

These days, I can do that with almost everything, from movies to hikes. I can get full-length videos of people hiking a trail that I too could experience if I only got off YouTube and went to do it. Slowly, I feel that the tools which are becoming integral to our lives are taking away the mystery of the day-to-day. Instead of a life of serendipity, it is becoming about curation.

In a way, our lives have always been to some extent about curation, whether it be our morals, political leanings or even our fashion sense. What has changed, is the level at which this is happening. We are moving from the macro to the micro, seeking to ensure that the experiences that link the hours of our day are aspire to the algorithmically optimal.

Perhaps I’m overstating things, or maybe I’m just getting older and shaking my fist at the clouds, yet I can’t help but feel that in turning over every stone and giving it a review out of five, we’re losing something which made life more interesting.