Taste
Beauty is complex. We don’t need to quickly resolve to a simplified version of it. Let the complexity sit.
beauty as a discipline: on attention, care and what really matters
youtube.comThe reference becomes the proof, the comfort blanket, the way to sell in an idea to stakeholders who fear risk.
The Reference Trap
The fear of underperforming is actually the motivator for sameness.
You stop looking sideways. You start looking inward and forward, letting your instinct meet the world on its own terms.
Taste is a lifelong conversation with yourself. It changes, expands, sharpens, softens. The courage is in staying present with it. In letting your preferences grow without forcing them to align with the cultural moment. In allowing... See more
Taste is a lifelong conversation with yourself. It changes, expands, sharpens, softens. The courage is in staying present with it. In letting your preferences grow without forcing them to align with the cultural moment. In allowing... See more
open.substack.com
You understand that originality is rarely loud but it’s often the result of someone being in conversation with their own fascinations for a very long time. It’s like finding back your old diary and reconnecting with the thoughts and feelings you used to have, but looking at it from a different, more matured perspective.
The Courage to Like What You Like
Courage, in the context of taste, is softer than you might assume. It’s the willingness to honour the pull before the explanation. To like something without packaging it for approval. To protect your curiosity long enough for it to teach you something.
The Courage to Like What You Like
But rebuilding this instinct rarely arrives through grand declarations. It grows through tiny acts of attention. A photo that stays with you for reasons you can’t yet name. A detail you keep returning to, a hand movement, a grain texture, a colour edge, a piece of clothing that feels cinematic. These traces form a map, even when the map looks... See more
The Courage to Like What You Like
Performative taste grows from here. It begins with small substitutions — saving one reference instead of another, quoting a photographer you think you should know, aligning with trends that feel distant from your natural pull or sharing images that will potentially go viral. It often feels harmless at first. A way of keeping up. A way of speaking... See more
The Courage to Like What You Like
We feel inclined towards a certain type of taste or style since that’s how we get rewarded externally (e.g. being part of the insiders, getting graded to pass in school).
When you start to be conscious, you start shaping it around an imagined audience. You basically build a version of yourself that feels culturally safe, professionally aligned, or socially impressive, even when your real appetites live elsewhere.