Our taste is that which confirms our identity. We pull from the timeline of culture, to reinforce to ourselves the effect we want to have on ourselves.

The inimitable G. K. Chesterton once said, "There is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."

You’re not “high iq”, your obsessive introspection is stopping you from being authentic and crippling you with a false sense of superiority that you’re too important to enjoy the small things in life, too esoteric for the smallfolk to understand, too proud to be happy, and in the end you win the prize of misery and loneliness—lonely not because you... See more

Taste is the personalizing of culture.

In a world of scarcity, we treasure tools. In a world of abundance, we treasure taste.

In a world of scarcity, we treasure tools. In a world of abundance, we treasure taste.

As the art historian Jennifer Roberts argued several years ago, “Just because something is available instantly to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness.” Or, as she also puts it, just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it.