taste is a way of remembering yourself

Apr 26, 2025

i recently wrote a piece about why ‘taste is the new intelligence’ and it started tugging at me a bit because i don’t believe taste is only about curation. while our inputs are incredibly important and play a big role in dictating our outputs, that framing didn’t feel quite complete. so, consider this my follow-up :)

taste isn't only something you curate or build.

it's also something you remember.

before the scrolls, before the templates, before everyone had a brand to maintain, you knew what you loved. not because it was clever. not because it was curated. but because it made you feel more like yourself.

and then the world got louder.

more trends. more templates. more pressure to make your preferences legible. to fit them into a box. to explain them, monetize them, polish them until they looked juuust right… next to everyone else's.

it's easy to forget what moved you before you knew what you were supposed to admire. it's easy to start chasing coherence instead of truth.

we mistake admiration for alignment. applause for belonging. we start borrowing fragments of other people’s instincts until we can't tell if we’re choosing or imitating.

but real taste resists that.

real taste isn’t manicured. it isn’t optimized. it doesn’t always present cleanly. it’s often messy, inconsistent, and unexplainable even to yourself.

and maybe that's the point.

taste is memory work. but it's also trust work.

it’s trusting that what calls to you in quiet moments matters—even when it doesn't fit a theme, even when it doesn't signal status, even when it doesn't "perform" well.

taste is how you stay in conversation with your original instincts, even after they've been buried under optimization and survival and noise.

taste isn't a curated feed.

it's the gravity that pulls you back to yourself.

it's the pull you feel when you walk into a room and catch yourself lingering on something. a painting, a color, a line of light across the floor. it's not loud. it doesn't ask for attention. but it rearranges you anyway.

and if you aren't careful—if you rush past it, if you filter it through a checklist of what's "worthwhile"—you miss it.

real curation doesn't start with "what fits together."

it starts with "what feels like home."

when you move from that place, the alignment happens naturally. you don't have to engineer it. you don't have to brand it.

you just have to notice.

taste asks for patience.

it asks for slowness.

it asks for enough stillness to hear the small, irrational yes that moves in your chest.

and it asks for courage. because honoring your taste sometimes means letting go of things that are easy to explain. easy to validate. easy to monetize.

it means choosing the book no one else recommended. the project that doesn't have a roadmap. the person who doesn't make sense on paper but feels like home in your bones.

it means refusing to optimize every inch of your life into a public-facing mood board.

because the deeper risk isn't bad taste.
it's borrowed taste.

the kind that looks good in public but leaves you feeling hollow when you're alone.

taste isn't just what you consume.

it's how you remember who you were before the world taught you how to decorate yourself.

it's the connective tissue between the child who collected odd little objects for no reason and the adult who still feels something sharp and alive when you find the thing you weren't supposed to love—but do.

curation sharpens your world.

remembering gives it soul.

and maybe that's the real work of adulthood.

not sanding yourself down until you fit.

but protecting the pulse that was always yours—long before the world taught you how to disappear inside someone else's idea of beauty.

and when you live from that place, everything you build—your spaces, your work, your friendships, your art—starts to hum with something rare.

something you can't fake.

something you don't have to brand.

something that just feels—undeniably, unmistakably—like you.