Taste, Time, and Attention: On Making Contact with the World

An essay sparked by some of my favorite ideas on taste

A new take on my Thoughts + Things format for you. Rather than breaking out little blurbs for each recommendation, I thought it would be fun to write a short essay and list a handful of recommendations that inspired it. I hope you enjoy it and can find time to read the list of inspirations in full—they are great.

Inspirations & Recommendations

• Notes on “Taste” - Brie Wolfson

• Taste is a guide for what is worthwhile - Jacky Zhao

• Ira Glass on Skill and Taste

• "Work with Material" Black Mountain College Bulletin 5 - Anni Albers

• How to Discover Your Own Taste - Ezra Klein and Kyle Chayka

• Reality has a surprising amount of detail - John Salvatier

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It's never been easier to consume anything and everything. Infinite supply of everything the world has to offer—and soon, anything we can imagine—available instantly. The same goes for creating: anything has never been more possible. So: where to spend our time?

There's been much discussion lately about taste. Taste is at its simplest, choosing. It's scarcity amidst an abundance of choice. It's judgment that is socially valuable and also personal. When we share it, taste can be a compass that points in the direction of our gaze. But what are these choices made of and how do we begin to choose?

I like the idea that taste is mostly a product of appetite. Most often, people with great taste in a certain field are those who have spent the most time there. Put another way, those with great taste usually get disproportionate energy from curiosity toward a domain. That appetite is the beginning of a journey of prolonged attention down an infinite rabbit hole. The breadth of the world folds in on itself in favor of discovering a universe of detail. Perhaps the complexity that another finds tiresome or boring may be a treasure trove for you.

I think this can be an antidote to the temptation to skim off the top of the world's offerings, searching for only the "best" of any domain. To be sure, we have more tools to find good stuff than ever before (even if "best" can be defined by algorithmic incentive systems that miss plenty of nuance, to say the least). But this keeps us at the surface and surely restricts us from enjoying the richness of what we consume—even if it happens to show up on our for-you feeds. Everything—especially creativity—exists in context, of course (something about a coconut tree).

The importance of time and attention extends to creating things: sometimes our taste and our skill may not line up. And the only path forward is to keep creating anyway. The story of the ceramics teacher and the students who make 30 pots usually holds true. Anyone who has ever tried to create anything knows that it can be a slog. Creativity can be an education in just how much more detail you ever thought there could be in a medium. The pursuit of creative taste is a yearning toward what we believe might lay further down the road. The invisible attraction between something deep inside us and the mystery of the world, pulling us forward.

It can be tempting to view (great) taste as objective. But it omits the fact that taste demands a personal connection. It's a kind of intimacy with detail. It requires deep familiarity and skillful consideration or creation of quality. But there's something else, too, something closer to self-expression. Brie Wolfson:

"Taste honors someone’s standards of quality, but also the distinctive way the world bounces off a person. It reflects what they know about how the world works, and also what they’re working with in their inner worlds. When we recognize true taste, we are recognizing that alchemic combination of skill and soul."

It seems that despite the pure quantity (of consumption or creation) needed for taste to form, it is also a product of constraint. It is the synthesis of many inputs into something opinionated. It can't exist without us being forced to choose: yes to this, no to that. And this process, like discovery and depth in a domain, is a product of time. Steve Jobs (via Make Something Wonderful):

"I don’t think my taste in aesthetics is that much different than a lot of other people’s. The difference is that I just get to be really stubborn about making things as good as we all know they can be. That’s the only difference.

…your [taste] gets more refined as you make mistakes. I’ve had a chance to make a lot of mistakes…But the real big thing is: if you’re going to make something, it doesn’t take any more energy—and rarely does it take more money—to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time. Not that much more. And a willingness to do so, a willingness to persevere until it’s really great."

This premise is warped by our digitally-dominated reality today. It can be easy for consumption and creation to be abstracted. In some ways, this is helpful for developing taste and skill. It leads to faster feedback loops, less friction, and more accessibility. But in other ways, abstraction takes us farther from the source. It tempts us to speed-run the development of taste and the process of creation.

Instead, we operate in the hyper-real: algorithms, replications, remixes, imitations, bits, pixels, concepts, interpretations, translations... all on a faster and faster cycle. When operating in digital contexts, we may benefit from self-imposed constraint, from slowing down. This isn't to say that an internet-accelerated collage of inputs can't be a superpower for us; technological accessibility may in fact drive more emphasis from skill to taste. But if we only operate at that pace, I fear we may not make time to see what it is we've filled our cups with, let alone let the contents dissolve.

Even if taste can approach something more than the purely subjective—and I believe developed taste can make it possible to point to a kind of universal beauty—it has an ineffable quality. This is realized not by over-consideration and thoughtfulness but by experience. Montesquieu:

"natural taste is not the same as theoretical knowledge. It consists in the rapid and subtle application of the very rules which we do not know."

Up-close attention, even contact, with the parts of the world that draw us in has never been more important. As our attention spans become increasingly programmed by short-term, shallow incentives, taste is a way to swim upstream with deliberation and depth. Through immersion—by way of prayerful attention—we participate in reality as it is, and if we are lucky, change it—by creating. Taste may simply be a symptom of that process.

I'll leave you with this scene in an otherwise odd, intense movie called Pig (2021). Nic Cage's character rebukes a former apprentice for losing touch with what he is truly drawn to.

"We don't get a lot of things to really care about."