Unlike the “trauma plot,” Parul Sehgal’s coinage for the use of trauma as narrative payoff, the therapeutic plot doesn’t wallow in trauma itself. Instead, it offers formulaic accounts of diagnosis and healing—what Janet Malcolm has called “the streamlined truisms of the age of mental health.”

Book blogs sort recommendations by pathology (severe social anxiety, schizophrenia, body dysmorphia), symptom (anxiety, panic attacks), and trauma (parental suicide, psychiatric stay). Fans diagnose characters with mental disorders (a fan theory diagnoses the character Bruno from another recent Pixar offering, Encanto, with obsessive compulsive disorder). Self-diagnosis even informed the development of Everything Everywhere. In early drafts of the script, Evelyn suffered from undiagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Writing and researching her character inspired Kwan to identify and seek treatment for his own heretofore undiagnosed ADHD.

No doubt, such a medical diagnosis can provide relief and resolution. But is such a diagnosis the job of art? What is lost when audiences and creators eschew other ways of discussing fiction (for example, E.M. Forster’s distinction between round and flat characters) and instead reduce characters to clinical profiles?

In ancient Athenian tragedy, catharsis was defined by Aristotle’s Poetics as the ritual purification and purgation of emotions, particularly pity and fear. Pity arises from identification with the tragic hero, whose nobility is compromised by a fatal flaw, and fear is elicited by his excessive punishment. The therapeutic significance of catharsis originated much later in the theories of Sigmund Freud. By applying Joseph Breuer’s “cathartic method,” Freud theorized that hypnosis allowed patients to recall the traumatic experience at the root of their condition. Catharsis was Freud’s first major breakthrough, and his first brush with the powers of the unconscious that would form the underpinnings of psychoanalytic theory.For Aristotle, catharsis was the result of anagnorisis—the humility produced by the tragic hero’s recognition not only of the calamity that had befallen him, but also of his own role in bringing it about. Freud, meanwhile, described an inherent tragedy in the “impossible profession” of psychoanalysis, “in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results.” It wasn’t that Freud had no faith in his own methods; he simply perceived the enormity of the human condition, and understood that the odds of success were not stacked in the psychoanalyst’s favor.Humility is absent from today’s therapeutic catharsis, which assumes with algorithmic certainty that sharing will lead to understanding, and that understanding will lead to healing. Art’s role, according to Everything Everywhere actress Stephanie Hsu, is “to hold space for trauma and offer catharsis,” and to recognize that “empathy and radical empathy and radical kindness are also a tool.” Buried beneath this gauzy language is the fact that the “empathy” of Turning Red and Everything Everywhere rely on the transformation of the mothers, not their children. The adults must learn that children are individuals rather than extensions of parental will, and when empathy is granted to mothers, it is only through their shared status as victims.

Pity the immigrant women who fled war-torn nations and corrupt regimes only to be subjected to psychoanalysis from hipster filmmakers and their own children

All this is not to say that storytelling holds no empathic power, nor an ability to transcend individual perspectives. But this power lies in art’s ability to overthrow, not reify, easy solutions—to challenge rather than “validate.” The transmission of suffering from one generation to the next is a worthy subject for art, but not because its effect on any particular demographic has been under-represented.

Our approach to culture should account for rigor and complexity, not defer to trite solutionism.

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.

Though taste may appear effortless, you can’t have taste by mistake. It requires intention, focus, and care. Taste is a commitment to a state of attention.  It’s a process of peeling back layer after layer, turning over rock after rock. 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.”

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

While taste is often focused on a single thing, 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 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 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 requires originality. It invokes an aspirational authenticity. Writer George Saunders calls this “achieving the iconic space,” and it’s what he’s after when he meets his creative writing students. “They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space” — the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves…At this level, good writing is assumed; the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.”

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.

f 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.

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.

We fully acknowledge that it’s hard to be confident in any predictions at the pace the field is moving. Right now, though, it seems we’re much more likely to see applications full of creative images created strictly by programmers than applications with human-designed art built strictly by creators.

Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean? A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have. And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal. And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?

I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. "A lot of them seem smart," he said. "What I can't tell is whether they have any kind of taste."

Mathematicians call good work "beautiful," and so, either now or in the past, have scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers, writers, and painters. Is it just a coincidence that they used the same word, or is there some overlap in what they meant? If there is an overlap, can we use one field's discoveries about beauty to help us in another?

Humor us for a moment and picture your favorite neighborhood restaurant. Ours is a corner spot in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It has overflowing natural light, handmade textile seat cushions, a caramel wood grain throughout, and colorful ornaments dangling from the ceilings. Can you picture yours? Do you feel the warmth and spirit of the place?A Silicon Valley optimizer might say, “Well, they don’t brew their coffee at exactly 200 degrees. And the seats look a little ratty. And the ceiling ornaments don’t serve any function.”But we think that’s exactly the point. That these little, hand-crafted touches give our environment its humanity and spirit. In their absence, we’re left with something universal but utterly sterile — a space that may “perfectly” serve our functional needs, but leave our emotional needs in the lurch.

Operating systems were bubbly and evanescent, like nature. Apps were customizable, in every shape and size. And interfaces drew on real-life metaphors to help you understand them, integrating them effortlessly into your life.But as our everyday software tools and media became global for the first time, the hand of the artist gave way to the whims of the algorithm. And our software became one-size-fits-all in a world full of so many different people. All our opinions, beliefs, and ideas got averaged out — producing the least common denominator: endless sequels that everyone enjoys but no one truly loves.When our software optimizes for numbers alone — no matter the number — it appears doomed to lack a certain spirit, and a certain humanity.

In the end, we decided that we didn’t want to optimize for numbers at all. We wanted to optimize for feelings.While this may seem idealistic at best or naive at worst, the truth is that we already know how to do this. The most profound craftsmanship in our world across art, design, and media has long revolved around feelings.

When Olmstead crafted Central Park, what do you think he was optimizing for? Which metric led to Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight? What data brought the iPhone into this world? The answer is not numerical. It’s all about the feelings, opinions, experiences, and ideas of the maker themself. The great Georgia O’Keefe put it this way: "I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me... so I decided to start anew."

James Turrell took inspiration from astronomy and perceptual psychology. Coco Chanel was most influenced by nuns and religious symbols. David Adjaye drew from Yoruban sculpture, and Steve Jobs from Zen Buddhism and calligraphy.

And yet, in so much modern software today, you’re placed in a drab gray cubicle — anonymized and aggregated until you’re just a daily active user. For minimalism. For simplicity. For scale! But if our hope is to create software with feeling, it means inviting people in to craft it for themselves — to mold it to the contours of their unique lives and taste.

You see — if software is to have soul, it must feel more like the world around it. Which is the biggest clue of all that feeling is what’s missing from today’s software. Because the value of the tools, objects, and artworks that we as humans have surrounded ourselves with for thousands of years goes so far beyond their functionality. In many ways, their primary value might often come from how they make us feel by triggering a memory, helping us carry on a tradition, stimulating our senses, or just creating a moment of peace.This is not to say that metrics should not play a role in what we do. The age of metrics has undeniably led us to some pretty remarkable things! And numbers are a useful measuring stick to keep ourselves honest.But if the religion of technology preaches anything, it celebrates progress and evolution. And so we ask, what comes next? What do we optimize for beyond numbers? How do we bring more of the world around us back into the software in front of us?