Taste or something like that

Taste is the instinct that tells us not just what can be done, but what should be done.

Clear taste acts as a decision-making accelerant. Every choice becomes obvious when filtered through a coherent point of view.

Movies beckon different tradeoffs today. Seeing the movie isn’t enough reward to justify the cost. Social capital used to mean time given to friends in physical spaces where friendship was solidified. It now means attention given to me that can be used to grow personal social followings and participate in online fandom. The reward of going to see a... See more

True taste is less performative. It is a product doing exactly what you want it to do with minimal friction. It is a feeling of working with a system, rather than against it. It is intuitive but legible, familiar but anticipatory.

Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh.

I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh... See more

As Mumford observed almost a century ago, the world loses its soul when we place too much weight on the ideal of total quantification. By doing so, we stop valuing what we know to be true, but can’t articulate. Rituals lose their significance, possessions lose their meaning, and things are valued only for their apparent utility.