Your mother's cooking never stood a chance.
Last month I drove 40 minutes across the city to eat at a restaurant I'd seen on TikTok. It had a wait list. I stood in the cold for 25 minutes. The food was fine — good, even. I posted it. I drove home. That same week, a friend asked if I wanted to come over for dinner. She lives 12 minutes away. I said I was busy, and I was not busy. I was on the sofa, watching someone else's mother cook on YouTube.
I don't think I'm a bad person for this. I think I might be a perfectly calibrated one. The algorithm didn't break my priorities. It revealed them.
There's a thing the brain does — I read about it years ago and have never stopped noticing it — where the reward system fires not for pleasure but for novelty. Not for the good thing, but for the new thing. And not even for the new thing itself, really, but for the anticipation of it, the not-yet-knowing. The unknown restaurant, the unseen dish, the place you've only encountered as a 15-second clip with a bass drop: these are neurologically designed to feel more compelling than anything familiar. No matter how good the familiar actually is.
I think about my mother's cooking a lot, actually. She has been feeding me for decades and I have, in recent years, eaten her food with the distracted gratitude of someone who assumes the supply is infinite. Meanwhile I have waited in lines, driven across boroughs, booked reservations three weeks out — all for meals I cannot now remember. The asymmetry is so clean it's almost elegant. Enormous effort for the unknown. Almost none for the known. And the known is where all the love is.
I keep trying to trace where this starts and I keep ending up at the algorithm. Not because the algorithm invented the problem (the brain's novelty bias is old, older than Instagram) but because the algorithm scaled it. It is a novelty engine. It cannot recommend "go see your mother." It can only surface the new and the visually arresting. Every scroll is a small lesson in insufficiency: your life, your people, your Tuesday evening. None of it is enough. There is a better dinner happening somewhere and you are missing it.
There's a name for this. The familiarity discount. The people and places you already have are devalued precisely because you already have them. I notice it in myself with an uncomfortable clarity. My friend's dinner would have been good. She's a good cook. We would have talked about real things. Instead I chose the sofa and the ambient sense that something more interesting existed elsewhere. The FOMO wasn't about missing something extraordinary. It was about the ordinary feeling insufficient. Supermarkets understood this decades ago: put the novelty at eye level, the staple on the bottom shelf. The feed is just a supermarket for experience.
The numbers on how we spend time with the people closest to us are hard to sit with. After 40, most people spend more time alone than with any other person. The visits home become occasional, then annual, then something you keep meaning to do. We are already in the long goodbye with most of the people we love, measured not in dramatic departures but in dinners not driven to. We just haven't noticed because there's a new ramen place to try.
And the thing is, I know this. I've known it for a while. Knowing doesn't seem to help. The brain adapts fastest to positive constants, which means the more reliable a source of love and comfort, the more invisible it becomes. Not because you don't value it. Because the system is calibrated to attend to change, not stability. Your mother's love is the most constant stimulus in your life. By the logic of how we're wired, it is the easiest thing in the world to take for granted.
There's something else, too. New experiences feel like an expression of who I am becoming. Familiar obligations feel like a reminder of who I have always been. Same 40 minutes of driving. Entirely different feeling. In a culture that prizes self-invention above everything, your mother never had a chance: she remembers who you were.
I was home last Sunday. My mother made dal and roti, the thing she always makes when I visit without warning. It was perfect in the way that only a meal no one photographs can be perfect. I sat at the table and I didn't post it and I didn't compare it to anything. For about an hour the algorithm had nothing on her.
The restaurant, for the record, has since closed. My mother is still 12 minutes away.