thoughts on "taste"

Developing taste is an exercise in vulnerability: it requires you to trust your instincts and preferences, even when they don’t align with current trends or the tastes of your peers. Because while having taste is cool, taste itself reflects a certain type of uncool earnestness – a commitment to one’s own obsessions and quirks.

Taste comes in lanes. To quote Susan Sontag again, “There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good... See more

Taste is not the same as correctness, though. To do something correctly is not necessarily to do it tastefully. For most things, correctness is good enough, so we skate by on that as the default. And there are many correct paths to take. You’ll be able to cook a yummy meal, enjoy the movie, build a useable product, don a shirt that fits. But taste... See more

Repetition, or scalability, is the enemy of taste, because in time it reveals a latent sameness in what we all like to like

I also believe taste is something we can and should try to cultivate. Not because taste itself is a virtue, per se, but because I’ve found a taste-filled life to be a richer one. To pursue it is to appreciate ourselves, each other, and the stuff we’re surrounded by a whole lot more.

As fancy and shiny as technology and all things digital are, we are still drawn to small, meaningful objects. Maybe it’s because they just feel really good to hold, own, display, and love.

Years may pass before you feel like you’re onto something, and this process will likely involve plugging your ears to the siren song of trends until you realize you actually have the same sensibility you had as a kid, it’s just grown up now. I like the word sensibility, I’ve started using it instead of taste when I’m trying to tap into something... See more