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I have never wanted any product in my entire life more than I wanted the Ronco™ Electric Food Dehydrator.

Across the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s, insomniacs, third-shifters, and kids like me were up watching inventor Ron Popeil pitch his incredible products in late-night infomercials, thirty minute commercials that were just about the only thing on post-midnight television back in the pre-internet age. Every infomercial followed the same basic beats - show a problem in modern life with an overly-dramatic re-enactment of all of the frustration that problem causes. (This usually involved someone spilling something or breaking something and a mother - the most common target audience - looking like she was ready to murder her entire family right there on the spot.) Following the illustration of chaos and aggravation of a life that obviously wasn’t working, someone on the screen would look at the camera and say, “There has to be a better way!”

That’s when our hero, the pitchman, would arrive to tell us - and show us! - how his product would solve our biggest problems and so much more.

Ron Popeil used the demonstrable power of the infomercial to sell the Veg-O-Matic, the Pocket Fisherman, the Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler, Hair in a Can, and the Smokeless Ashtray. He was beyond prolific. As far as I could tell, he was the closest thing we had to a modern Einstein…if only he was mixed with Benjamin Franklin.

Still, for all of Popeil’s incredible inventions that promised to change my life and erase all of my frustrations, none of those products got anywhere close to replicating the pure magic of the Ronco™ Electric Food Dehydrator.

With this incredible machine - the trays are dishwasher safe! - I could make fruit leather, banana chips, apple chips, dried vegetables, and (everyone’s favorite) beef jerky. Are you not impressed? Well, the Ronco™ Electric Food Dehydrator apparently makes yogurt, too! Because any device that reliably makes turkey jerky should naturally be trusted to bacterially ferment fresh milk. And here’s the thing - it’s so simple, children can do it. I know this because they literally brought two pre-teen girls onto the infomercial stage and let them make fruit roll-ups and banana chips.

As the infomercial pressed on, every so often, they would move away from demonstrating the machine to tell you how to buy it. You could send a check to their offices in Beverly Hills (sorry, no C.O.D.s) or call the number on the screen for faster delivery. How much?

Not for $129.95.

Not for $120, $115 or $110.

Not $100 or $90 or $80.

For only $59.92 (who knows why that was the price, but Ron’s cohost kept reminding me not to put a price on my health, so I think we’re not supposed to talk about it), I could start investing in my own health and happiness right now.

And then it got really interesting.

The four most interesting words in English language television (with “You are NOT the Father” obviously being the five most interesting) would be uttered by the inimitable Ron Popeil:

But wait, there’s more.

They said that if I “ordered right now” I’d get the $30 Dial-O-Matic Food Slicer absolutely free. I’d seen the stand-alone infomercial for that one, too. It slices, dices, shreds, juliennes, and makes french fries! And they are literally going to give it to me for free!?!?

I was totally hooked at this point. I was ready to exist on a diet solely consisting of dehydrated apple chips and teriyaki beef jerky. But I didn’t have a credit card. Or a checkbook. So, like every other sleepless kid from Bismarck to Baltimore, I sat on my living room floor (gotta stay close enough to keep the volume low at 2am) and dreamed. I yearned for the Ronco™ Electric Food Dehydrator. Eventually, mercifully, I would drift off to sleep and dream of slicing and dicing, of drying fruits and meats. And maybe even meeting that cute girl (her name was Lauren and she was wearing a sweater with a cow on it, since you asked) that got to make fruit roll-ups on television to help Ron Popeil sell me on the merits of food dehydration.

Those were the days.

We still live in such a world, where food-dehydration fever dreams are not unlike any of our more modern dreams. Whether we ever slow down long enough to recognize it, “But wait, there’s more!” might as well be the phrase that still guides our modern lives.

More money. More stuff. More house. More prestige. More power. More status. More comfort. More luxury. More options. More.

It should give us pause to consider how homogenous our hopes and dreams have become despite the stunning diversity and endless beauty offered by this life. The measures of success and societal aims of nearly every minimally developed culture on earth are the same. No matter what we have, we just want more.

In the United States, coastal elites and flyover folks all want more. California kids and midwestern moms want more. It is no different around the world. The children growing up in luxury in Seoul and Paris want more just like kids growing up in the slums of Soweto and Mumbai. They, too, want more.

It is the modern, mainstream way.

Be more. Get more. Accumulate more. Spend your life on the interminable search for more. Chase bigger. Go faster. Be greater. Rise higher.

The mainstream pursuit of the people of this world is not driven by values or virtues but by consumption deriving from successfully manipulative marketing schemes devised by the corporate kings and queens among us. And somewhere in our souls, those magic words rattle around and attempt to convince us that we are one purchase away from finally finding happiness.

But wait, there’s more.

Here’s the thing, though: more isn’t working.

You know it. I know it. We collectively sense it and yet still feel powerless to avoid the snare of dissatisfaction. In spite of ourselves, we are falling into what Carey Nieuwhof calls the More, Better, Different Trap.

Here’s how it works: you start out wanting a television. You get a television. Then, unsatisfied, you want a bigger television - more screen space for your favorite shows or sports. So you get a bigger television. Eventually, you hear that there are televisions with more pixels or greater resolution or blacker blacks (seriously, what does that even mean?). So you upgrade to a better television. Your viewing experience is better, but not satisfying by any means. Undeterred, you start researching televisions with mood-backlighting or curved screens or the latest experimental technology that will set your television apart from all of your friends’ pedestrian televisions. You bite the bullet and spend big on a truly different, cutting-edge television. And still, pure nirvana eludes you.

So where do you go next in this procession of satisfaction-pursuit? Unfortunately, you’re at the end of the road. You’ve fallen into the More, Better, Different Trap. And the inevitable result is despair. Knowing that no television will ever fulfill you, all that is left is despair.

The More, Better, Different Trap always leads to the same place.

We do this with everything. We seek out better vacations and bigger houses and nicer televisions and faster phones. We chase more money and better technology. We buy into all sorts of different life hacks and nutrition schemes looking for better health and a longer life. We look for more adventurous sex and, when that doesn’t work, we swap out our romantic partners altogether. Where does any of it get us?

More. Better. Different. Despair.

We are left unsatisfied. Unfulfilled. Study after study reveals it. The suicide rate in the United States rose 16% from 2011 to 2022. Anxiety and depression are endemic. The preponderance of fatherlessness continues to tick upwards. Drug overdose deaths set new records every year. We are the wealthiest, most technologically-advanced, most connected people in the history of the world. And the wealthiest, most technologically-advanced, most connected people in the history of the world are also the loneliest, most afflicted, and most addicted.

We have more.

It’s time for us to admit that it’s not working.

And it’s time for us to say it out loud: There has to be a better way.