As is true of so many things, it turns out I was substantially misinformed about pillows as a child. I was always told that pillows lasted more or less forever. Pillows would be passed down from parent to child across generations. As long as they were at some point filled with goose down feathers and had at one point cost any money at all, they had a permanent role in the household because they were both “nice” and “expensive.” This included pillows in the stage of life where they had maybe five dozen pieces of goose down left in them because the rest had slowly worked their way out of the pillow by poking you in the face while you were trying to sleep.
I have been on a campaign throughout adulthood to recognize the New England Boomer policy of pointless economizing, wherein you save small amounts of money by not ever spending any of it on something that might materially improve your life and make you happier. This is especially toxic when combined with another New England Boomer specialty, believing the finest and most elegant version of anything was achieved in about 1945 and everything invented since that point is to be viewed with distrust and suspicion.
So when it became clear that it was time to replace the bed pillows after only 30 short years of meritorious and regular service I attempted to approach the replacement process with modern methodology, rather than simply buying whatever Marshall Field claimed was the top of the heap now while bemoaning how much more a goose down pillow cost today than it would have cost 75 years ago. We called this approach the Pillow Buffet.
It is fairly easy to return things to Amazon, and since they bring everything to your house in the first place, I have no objection to floating them $1,000 or so for 20 different pillows with the intention of spending a month testing them before settling on 2-4 finalists and conveniently returning the rest.
Golly Moses, Amazon has a lot of different pillow options. I bought pillows made of memory foam, shredded memory foam, one with goose down in it, several bamboo, multiple pillows that were in considerably non-traditional pillow shapes, and at least one thing that was more like a padded semi-reclined sleeping structure than a pillow.
It is an interesting exercise in neck flexibility, sleeping on a different pillow every other night for a month. That being said, pillow technology has advanced considerably. You can get adjustable pillows where they send you a little bag of extra shredded memory foam, so you can adjust the firmness upward. You can get neck pillows wherein you rotate the pillow 180° without flipping it over in order to optimize for whether you are sleeping on your stomach, back, or side. They are made of memory foam and look vaguely like an impressionist’s rendering of the outer superstructure of a crab. You can also get pillows with cutouts and internal bracings that allow you to sleep on your side without crushing your shoulder joint into it, a habit that will drive your chiropractor out of her mind over the long term.
All of these pillows were methodically tested by me. I kept the four best — two stuffed with shredded memory foam, one of the side-sleeping shoulder braces, and one very stiff foam pillow for the weird person next to me, who I guess enjoys sleeping on a slightly padded cinder block — and dropped the rest off at UPS for Amazon to search, repackage, and sell to you when you try the Pillow Buffet strategy.
Can’t recommend testing pillow diversity highly enough.