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Taste has historically been reserved for conversation about things like fashion and art. Now, we look for it in our social media feeds, the technology we use, the company we keep, and the people we hire.

When I ask people what they mean by “taste,” they’ll stumble around for a bit and eventually land on something like “you know it when you see it,” or “it’s in the eye of the beholder.” I understand. Words like taste are hard to pin down, perhaps because they describe a sensibility more than any particular quality, a particular thing. We’re inclined to leave them unencumbered by a definition, to preserve their ability to shift shapes.

’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.

I can’t think of a piece of writing that does this more effectively than Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’” In her words, “a sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about... To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble.

Things don’t feel tasteful, they demonstrate taste. Someone’s home can be decorated tastefully. Someone can dress tastefully. The vibe cannot be tasteful. The experience cannot be tasteful.

Someone could have impeccable taste in art, without producing any themselves. Those who create tasteful things are almost always deep appreciators, though.

we typically talk about it in binaries. One can have taste or not. Great taste means almost the same thing as taste.

They’re the people you always go to for restaurant or movie or gear recommendations. Maybe it’s the person you ask to be an extra set of eyes on an email or a project brief before you send it out.

It requires intention, focus, and care. Taste is a commitment to a state of attention.

As John Saltivier says in an essay about building a set of stairs, “surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.”

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 visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.” The sought-after interior designer may not mind gas station coffee. The prolific composer may not give a damn about how they dress.

Taste in too many things would be tortuous. The things we have taste in often start as a pea under the mattress.

it is often formed through the integration of diverse, and wide-ranging inputs. Steve Jobs has said, “I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

taste gets you to the thing that’s more than just correct. Taste hits different. It intrigues. It compels. It moves. It enchants. It fascinates. It seduces.

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. This is why it is so alluring.

many snobs (coffee snobs, gear snobs, wine snobs, etc.) often have great taste. But I would say that taste is the sensibility, and snobbery is one way to express the sensibility. It’s not the only way.

If rich people often have good taste it’s because they grew up around nice things, and many of them acquired an intolerance for not nice things as a result. That’s a good recipe for taste, but it’s not sufficient and it’s definitely not a guarantee. I know people that are exceedingly picky about the food they eat and never pay more than $20 for a meal.

creating forces taste upon its maker. Creators must master self-expression and craft if they’re going to make something truly compelling.

artists are more sensitive. They’re more observant, feel things more deeply, more obsessive about details, more focused on how they measure up to greatness.

Picasso remarking that “when art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” Taste rests on turpentine.

the process of metabolizing the world is a slow one. Wield your P/N meter well, take your time learning what you find compelling, and why. There are no shortcuts to taste. Taste cannot sublimate. It can only bloom. To quote Susan Sontag one last time, “taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste.

Women spend twice as much time as men, on average, on childcare and household work. All groups experience a free-time gender gap, with women having 13% less free time than men, on average. Mothers spend 2.3X as much time as fathers on the essential and unpaid work of taking care of home and family Young women (18-24) experience one of the largest free-time gender gaps, having 20% less free time than men their age Working women spend 2X as many hours per week as working men on childcare and household work combined Mothers who work part-time spend 3.8X as much time on childcare and household work as fathers who work part-time Married women without children spend 2.3X as much time as their male counterparts on household work Among Latinos, mothers spend more than 3.6X as much time as fathers taking care of children and doing household work

The unequal division of unpaid work in the home, such as cooking, cleaning, and shopping for food and clothing, is a powerful testament to the tenacity of old gender norms. Women do significantly more of this work than men do, even when there are no children living in the home. This holds true for women regardless of their marital status, their employment status, or their level of education.

Among all adults without children, women do twice as much household work as men, dedicating 12.3 hours per week to these tasks, on average, compared to 6 hours for men. Similarly, among all single people without children, women do nearly twice as much household work as men, spending 10.6 hours per week on household tasks compared to 5.7 hours for men.

getting married seems to exacerbate the burden of household work on women. Married women do substantially more household work than their single women peers, while married men spend just a few minutes a day more than their single peers. Married women without children do 2.3 times as much household work as their male counterparts (14.3 hours per week versus 6.2 hours).

Working women spend significantly more time than working men on unpaid work in the home. This is the case whether they work full-time or part-time. It is the case whether they have children or not. Take household work like cooking, laundry, and the like. Women who work full-time do 1.8 times as much as men who work full-time; they spend 9.7 hours per week on it compared to 5.4 hours for men. Women who work part-time do 2.5 times as much household work as men who work part-time.

Across every group studied, men spend more time than women socializing, watching sports or playing video games, or doing similar activities to relax or have fun. Women overall have 13% less free time than men, on average. The gap balloons among some groups, with women having up to one-quarter less free time than men.

Women overall have 13% less free time than men, on average. The gap balloons among some groups, with women having up to nearly one-quarter less free time than men.

there is a wide gulf between our ideals and our realities, as we have seen in this report on how Americans divide the work of taking care of home and family. One reason for the persistence of these gender disparities is that the U.S. has failed to modernize its public policies to fit 21st century economic realities. Even though 78% of American women are in the labor force, the nation’s social infrastructure is still largely premised on the assumption that mothers will be at home with children.

Every high-income nation in the world provides for paid leave for new parents—except the United States. Most provide ample financial and institutional support for childcare and preschool. Our peers devote a substantial share of public spending to family benefits, but the U.S. invests only minimally in supporting families. For instance, family benefits account for 2.4% of GDP in Germany compared to 0.6% in the United States.

Even when young children enter school, typical American school hours are grossly misaligned with the workday, forcing families to either spend money on after school care or reduce their work hours.

Public policy alone will not entirely eliminate these deeply rooted gender disparities. Cultural change is needed too. But smart policy can nudge along positive behavioral change that ultimately advances equity and equality. For example, several countries include mechanisms in their family policy to encourage fathers to take paid parent leave. Many Nordic nations have a ‘use it or lose it’ provision for fathers. Other countries, like Canada, provide extra paid weeks of leave to families if both parents use the time.

The unequal division of care work, particularly, affects women’s opportunity and well-being in ways that cannot be measured solely in dollars and cents.

One way Americans deal with the housing affordability crisis is to move to distant suburbs and exurbs, where housing is cheaper than it is in central cities and job hubs. The tradeoff, however, is typically a long commute to and from work. But for women who are caring for children or elderly relatives, long commutes are often not feasible. Children and elderly parents get sick and need to get to doctors in the middle of a workday. School hours begin too late and end too early to accommodate a commute to a 9-to-5 job.

when schools close due to climate-driven events, mothers might have to take unpaid time off of work or pay for childcare. As Americans experience more dangerous heat waves, wildfires, and floods driven by climate change, the caregiving demands on women can increase, as they are more likely to be the ones responsible for helping children and elderly adults stay out of harm’s way.

Marx’s definition captures that taste isn't just having an eye, ear, or sense for quality, it’s about having an accurate filter for the choices that are uniquely you. As he explains, “There are occasional sui generis taste geniuses, but most people with good taste…are very curious and studious people who have learned it over time.”

A better barometer of whether someone has authentically cultivated their own taste—or merely adopted what the algorithm feeds them—is their enthusiasm for sharing what they’re into and why. For instance, I have little personal interest in exploring TV or movies, which admittedly might be off-putting to some. However, the last guy I dated had what I consider to be great taste in this area. Unfamiliar picks from the 1970s through the ‘90s, international and domestic alike – I loved that he could open me up to this world. His world.

if shared tastes are sometimes important and sometimes not, how should we incorporate taste into our dating decisions? According to Dr. Akua Boateng, a licensed psychotherapist with an emphasis in individual and couples therapy, how you and your significant other blend your interests is the real indicator of compatibility. “It really goes back to people’s psychology or politics of difference,” Boateng says. If differences are the kindling for conflict rather than connection, compromise, and acceptance, it’s doomed from the start. “If you're coming from two different worlds, and the things that make you tick and find joy are diametrically opposed, you're going to have conflict in how you spend your time,” she says.

“From 2009 through 2014, it felt like people were bringing real life, morals, values and judgements to the internet, whereas now it feels like we’re bringing internet values and judgements to real life and trying to force them into how we move and interact…” says Mark Sabino, a product designer and cultural critic. The ease with which algorithms relentlessly serve up “content” has brought a societal shift toward liking or disliking things that are relatable rather than personal.

As we grow together within relationships, we’re continuously collecting new markers of taste to bring home to our person. It’s an exchange in perpetuity – memes, restaurants, recipes – whatever moves you to feel something, you’re likely sharing with your partner. As Portrait of a Lady director Céline Sciamma told The Independent, “A relationship is about inventing your own language. You’ve got the jokes, you’ve got the songs, you have this anecdote that’s going to make you laugh three years later. It’s this language that you build.”

As much as taste can be a connector and a litmus test, it’s unreliable as a fixed lens for selecting partners. Instead of evaluating every prospect based on how they match up “on paper” to your taste do’s and don’ts, both Marx and Boateng point out that taste is one of multiple characteristics that can influence the quality of relationships. But if you just can’t get over someone’s allegiance to Taylor Swift or Burning Man, Boateng says, “It could be a sign that how this person operates in the world is just not intriguing to [you]. It's not problematic or bad. It's just not uniquely intriguing to you.” And here, you should definitely trust your taste.

We can finally define what it means for someone to be differently free from you. They are people who are playing just a slightly different game than you are. That difference makes them a reliable sources of non sequiturs in your life. Waiting for nature to present you with a parrot or a piece of corn to awaken you out of a finite game is a tricky, chancy business.

Differently free people change the equation in an interesting way. When you include a person in your life, it is because they have a definite worth (possibly negative) in whatever finite game you’re asleep in at the time. This means there is at least some overlap between their game and yours; some similarity between how you keep score and how they do. Some meaningful relationship (possibly adversarial)  between how you define winning and how they do.

This means you have a model of the person in your head. One that predicts how they will value things.

it is the parts that don’t overlap that matter. There are things that have a defined worth in their lives that are non sequiturs in yours, and vice versa. When you see through the eyes of a differently free person, you expect to see a landscape of presumptively valued things. A landscape based on your predictions of how they value things. When the other person appears to value something that doesn’t even register with you, for a moment, that thing turns into a non sequitur, a candidate parrot. It lingers just a little bit longer in your own mind than it would if you yourself saw it. Long enough that you do a double take and notice it consciously.

My alternative to the heuristic, which many of you have heard in off-blog conversations, is that I am only interested in people as long as they are unpredictable to me. If I can predict what you’ll do or say, I’ll lose interest in you rapidly. If you can keep regularly surprising me in some way, forcing me to actually think in unscripted ways in order to respond, I’ll stay interested. It’s reciprocal. I suspect the people with whom I develop long-term relationships are the ones I surprise regularly. The ones who find me predictable don’t stick around. We’re not talking any old kind of surprise, but non sequiturs. Surprises that you can’t really relate to anything else, and don’t know what to do with. Mind-expanding surprises rather than gap-closing surprises.

A hundred years ago, when image creation and distribution was more constrained, commerce was arranged by class. You can conceive of it as a vertical model, with high and low culture, and magazines and product catalogs that represent each class segment. Different aspirational images are shown to consumers, and each segment aspires upward to the higher level.

The world we live in is no longer dominated by a single class hierarchy. Today you have art, sport, travel, climbing, camping, photography, football, skate, gamer.

Class still exists, but there’s no longer just one aesthetic per class. Instead, “class” is expressed merely by price points that exist within consumer subcultural categories

In the starter pack meme, classes of people are identified through oblique subcultural references and products they are likely to consume. Starter pack memes reverse engineer the demographic profile: people are composites of products they and similar people have purchased, identified through credit card data and internet browsing behavior tracked across the web. While Reddit communities for gear were self-organizing consumer subcultures from one direction, companies and ad networks were working toward the same goal from the other direction.

API-ification has happened across the entire supply chain. Companies like CA.LA let you spin up up a fashion line as fast as you’d spin up a new Digital Ocean droplet, whether you’re A$AP Ferg or hyped NYC brand Vaquera. Across the board, brands and middleware were opening new supply chains, which then became accessible entrepreneurs targeting all sorts of subcultural plays. And with Shopify, Squarespace, and Stripe, you can open an online store and accept payments in minutes. Once the goods are readily available, everything becomes a distribution problem—a matter of finding a target demographic and making products legible to it.

Products begin their life as an unbranded commodities made in foreign factories; they pass through a series of outsourced relationships —brand designers, content creators, and influencers—which construct a cultural identity for the good; in the final phase, the product ends up in a shoppable social media post

way: in the cultural production service economy, all culture is made in service of for-profit brands, at every scale and size.

European and American commentators of all political stripes recognize the current cultural moment as one that is stuck in some way. Endless remakes and reboots, endless franchises, cinematic universes, and now metaverses filled with brands who talk to each other; a culture of nostalgia with no real macro narrative

Beyond our workplaces, what else is stepping in to provide a sense of community and belonging?

All in all, product marketing businesses can only do so much to situate their goods in these broader cultural worlds without eating into their margins. This seemingly insurmountable gap is what my workshops were trying to address. But what would it mean for brands to stop pointing to culture, and to start being it?

Culture is a process, with the end result of shaping human minds.

Today, social media has become a more perfect tool for culture than Arnold could have imagined, and its use a science of penetrating the mass mind. All communication now approaches propaganda, and language itself has become somebody else’s agenda. Little

When you bought Bitcoin and Ether, it’s with the knowledge that there was also a culture there to become part of. Now years later, there are many tribes to “buy into,” from Bitcoin Christians to Bitcoin carnivores, from Ethereum permissionless free market maxis to Ethereum self-organizing collective decentralized coop radicals. Even if none of these appeal to you, you still end up becoming what “the space” (crypto’s collective term for itself) calls a “crypto person.” The creation of more and more “crypto people” is driven by the new revenue model cryptocurrencies exhibit. The business logic of these tokens is “number go up,” a feat accomplished by getting as many people to buy the token as possible. In other words, the upside opportunity is achieved with mass distribution of Bitcoin and Ethereum culture—the expansion of what it means to be an ETH holder into new arenas and practices. Buyers become evangelists, who are incentivized to promote their version of the subculture.

In the 2010s, supply chain innovation opened up lifestyle brands. In the 2020s, financial mechanism innovation is opening up the space for incentivized ideologies, networked publics, and co-owned faiths.

Under CPSE models, companies brand products. They point to subcultures to justify the products’ existence, and use data marketing to sort people into starterpack-like demographics. Subcultures become consumerized subcultures, composed of products

Authenticity, I came to understand, was more than a culture of irony and suspicion of everything commercial culture has to offer. It drew on a deep moral source that runs through our culture, a stance of self-definition, a stance of caring deeply about the value of individuality.