Setting: a coffee shop with various pastries. I crave a sweet treat. My friend, right in front, orders a cake-like confection consisting of alternating layers of creamy white and gelatinous red substance. I’m next in line.

The hungry but indecisive will recognize this situation as hell. Although dozens of promising pastries stare seductively at me from their acrylic-cased prison cells, section three paragraph four of social norms dictate that I can only choose one (1) pastry. Those are the rules. Rough, but rules tend to exist for a reason. A one-pastry limit is surely good for my wallet and my waistline—I just can’t choose which. I want the almondy cream-filled bread and I want the flaky chocolate confection. Critical decisions, truly. However, as I feel the nonexistent judgment in the eyes of the employee patiently waiting to take my order and simultaneously fail to feel the very existent frivolity of this incredibly first-world problem, I cede and order just one pastry (a strudel-like bread that’s long, thin, and covered in what looks like sprinkles but are actually black sesame seeds), and sit down with my friend, jealousy eyeing her clearly better choice the whole time we eat.

I need not repeat that this is the biblically correct description of the underworld, and one that I could not, logically you’ll agree, bear to linger in any longer. In a fit of passion, I broke out of this purgatory, the torturous, self-taught social dance. “Just one pastry,” they (I) say. Pfft! I (to myself), spit in return. The next time I entered a pastry shop, I channeled the inner leader my resume professes I am and I rebelled, ordering not just one pastry, oh no, but two!

In theory, my plan was perfect—fail proof, even—and the promised rewards great. The newfound latitude that getting two pastries affords is, well: consider pairing a rich pain au chocolat with a fruity raspberry tart. Imagine: a savory pastry perfectly complementing an extra-sugary confection. The patisserial possibilities expand exponentially when what was once one pastry becomes two. 

However, this victorious initial period after my rebellion was, perhaps predictably to anyone learned in the histories of passionate revolutions, short lived. 

My first oversight was that appetites (even my own) are not infinite. Consuming a pastry when your stomach is full is tragically not nearly as enjoyable as eating one when your stomach, or at least your “desert stomach” (known to no scientist but all children), has the space to accommodate another visitor. 

My next miscalculation was, however, the heart of the problem. A pastry seldom tastes as good as it looks. The shaved coconut and shining glaze on that croissant look unbelievably delectable together, but they will taste in reality very believably fine. Disappointment is inevitable. The difference with my revolutionary and patented two-pastry idea lies in the fact that if a pastry was bad back then, denial was still an option. I could have simply made a poor decision. But two mistakes are less brush-offable. Maybe happiness isn’t just one purchase away after all.

Such acute pastry-disappointment is a modern phenomenon. Surely the concept of two pastries existed only in the most far-fetched dream of my sheep-herding ancestors. In fact, peasants would experience what can only be described as euphoria when they so much as tasted the mere degenerate predecessors to our modern day confections. Hard brown lumps would be gratefully received as a once-a-year concession in exchange for their equally hard and brown labor in the swampy potato poop fields irrigated with cholera water. Indeed, social revolutions of the kind I epitomized by ordering two pastries the other week were routinely lulled in this way for centuries.

I’m obviously making this up. I’m also stuffing a pasteis de nata down my gullet to try and fill the empty inside. Modern prosperity made the two-pastries dream realizable, and that realizability killed the joy in its fantasy.

Pastries are now ubiquitous. When I chew my overpriced croissant, I don’t get the satisfaction of enjoying something someone else can’t have (siblings will be familiar), nor do I any longer properly enjoy the delicate dances of starch, sugar, butter, and more butter on my tongue. Instead I expected something more, something that might not even exist. I wanted gustatory orgasm. What I got instead were many calories and little nutrients and that late-stage capitalism post-indulgence depression you get after unwrapping the last present under the Christmas tree to find there’s nothing more but torn up paper and emptied plastic packaging. 

I had set the bar unreachably high. That glistening red gelatin from the opening anecdote? It turned out to be a lot like strawberry jam. It was ok—even good—but also entirely ordinary. 

They say the key to happiness is low expectations. Maybe it’s also keeping some  hope alive that even your suppressed high expectations could possibly be met. Taking just a taste, either by stealing a bite of your friend’s sfogliatella or indulging only with your eyes, leaves you wanting more. It keeps you optimistic that there is more beauty and joy and butter to experience in the world, even if that beauty, in the particular forms you had visualized, never really existed.