TASTE

July 27th, 2026

"She has really good taste"

"Really? You licked her?"

"Uhh. . . No."

This might arouse the jocular humor of a twelve year old boy, but for many it will seem lame, and for others still, it'll appear in bad taste. Another moment comes to mind to help introduce the topic. I was walking with a girlfriend in one of this world's cities, and we happened to find ourselves at a corner waiting for the crosswalk next to another woman who had a great dress on.

"Oh my god, I love that dress."

"Right?! Thank you!"

"Where did you get it?"

At this point the wearer of the dress smiled particularly wide and with a strange sense of glee.

"I'm not telling!"

This seemed to inspire so much joy in her as she skipped away with her male companion that my girlfriend and I were left a bit flummoxed. What a bitch.

But bitch or not, her tactic is sound. If everyone has the desirable dress, then it loses a lot of value. Not all value, but a lot. Because unfortunately, our system for valuing things is based on a hierarchy that integrates rarity and difficulty of supply. No one is bragging about the fact that they can take a nice breath of air because, well, that stuff is free, and even worse, it's invisible. There's nothing worse in terms of making something high status or valuable if it's free and invisible.

So what is taste? It seems as though it may have some kind of connection to status and rarity. We see this in fashion: the finest taste is either something that is prohibitively expensive, or it's fleeting. The design of the style of the cut of the blazer or skirt or pants changes constantly to keep it rare. Otherwise it's bedazzled with millions of dollars worth of diamonds and is rendered rare by default forever.

This is an inherently unsatisfying definition though. It seems to mean that someone who is poor can't have taste, but of course this isn't true. I can think of a couple that I'm close friends with who have the most incredible house. They are far from wealthy and yet their home has more character and taste than any of the wealthy homes that I've visited. They have art on the walls, and trinkets from vintage stores, crayon drawings from kids hung next to exquisite charcoal drawings. They have a funny street sign displayed next to a sculpture one of them made. The central light in their living room casts a beautiful intricate pattern across the whole room, and it does that because the contraption affixed to the light was never intended to be a lamp shade. There is something immediately comfortable about the space they have created. It feels like you could snuggle up on the couch and watch movies forever and know you're in one of the many visions of heaven.

They have good taste. In fact they have exquisite taste. And it's rare. It's so rare that you can't buy it, you can't find it, and you'd be very hard pressed to develop it on your own. You might come close, but an attempt to do so would miss the point. And if you were to make an exact copy of what they had organically created in their home - well it just wouldn't be the same. Can you understand why? Can you smell the problem? Can you taste it?

You see the same thing walking the streets occasionally: someone who has combined a number of aesthetic elements with their body, walking in a particular way that just seems cohesive, and yet at the same time it stands out — as if a deeper and subtler component of thought was put into what you are seeing.

And before it slips my mind let's try to huck a dart in the direction of the bullseye when it comes to this slippery question.

Taste is the compressed expression of your entire life's impact on your sense of aesthetics.

The finicky word here is 'aesthetics'. It's not just visual. It's not just a matter of: oh he dresses the same every day in the laziest most comfortable stuff - he clearly has no taste when it comes to his visual presentation. Although — that's a fair criticism of taste. All the world's fashion and all the stacked decades of options and you insult everyone with your profligate worship of comfort in the style of saturday morning cartoons with cheerios and pj's? Lame.

And those who need such sloppy clothes to feel comfortable are —in my offensively humble opinion— simply out of shape, physically. The callous declaration that someone with no style doesn't give a shit what everyone else thinks is a cope and a cover for their insecurity about their body. It's interesting how people who are quite fit rarely seem so preoccupied with the sloppier styles of "comfort".¹

Apply it to anything: a person who has read nothing but Romantasy books. Are they going to have great taste when it comes to books? Eh. They might have a discernment when it comes to that genre, but that's no different than listening to Paul Graham list off the pros and cons of sandals versus crocs. The fact that any of it is on the menu is the actual problem.

A person who has only ever had british food: is such a person going to be an incredible cook? Maybe in the eyes of another Brit, but I can guarantee someone across the Channel is going to grimace and say a prayer in hopes of saving such poor and cloistered souls.

So we approach another question: is it possible to have great taste with a very limited and narrow scope of experience? It might be better to talk of it in terms of probabilities. Who is more likely to have a better sense of taste: someone who has lived in the same village their whole life, or someone who has read widely, travelled unusually, connected with a vast and colorful and random bunch of people, seen every film under the sun, toured the great museums, etc. etc. You get the point.

In order to paint a great painting, it helps to be aware of all the colors on offer to use. That's a first step but it's certainly not the only one.

To return to our working definition for a moment:

Taste is the compressed expression of your entire life's impact on your sense of aesthetics.

We can glean another quality. A person needs to have a certain variety of sensitivity — of awareness to a certain set of variables in order to be impacted. I'll be the first to admit that Paul Graham has great taste in some things. But I'll also be the first to state loudly that when it comes to all matters sartorial, the dude is about as sensitive as a block of granite.

So there's sensitivity to variables, a wide breadth of exposure to those variables, and then a creative remix of those variables.

Now the finicky word is creative. Being creative for someone who doesn't consider themselves creative is akin to trying to figure out how to levitate. How do you do it? is the common question.

This is, of course, an entire new essay, or book for that matter. But to compress it for the sake of moving forward, we'll say that creativity is a certain degree of relaxation with the connection between different elements. It's the ability to move and mix things into novel patterns and designs that are pleasing, practical or otherwise innovative. I say relaxation because almost all creative endeavours boil down to a novel combination of relationships between old elements, and in order to arrive at a novel cocktail of relationships, you need to relax the prior relationships in your mind so the elements can free float and bounce around and bind to new ones. Then a sense of taste is used to evaluate that new combination of elements. If it doesn't hit the same notes as tasteful and beloved works from one's past, then it gets rescrambled until something elicits that rare combination of novel excitement and nostalgia that heralds something of worth.