“This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.”—Oscar Wilde
I’ve always admired people who knew how to live well.
When I was young, it seemed as if so few people understood what I was talking about. Maybe they figured I meant silk shirts and sunny days.
I didn’t.
I knew it exceeded product discrimination and keeping a clean apartment. There were a few rap artists, old cinema stars, and classic literary figures, who understood me. I’m not sure why, but even some adults I knew just got it.
They simply floated through life, as if they detached their feet when they needed to go outside to avoid scuffing them. They were easy, light, comfortably dressed, even when they seemed out of place. They could handle the world.
These people knew how to live, and it was intentional.
What made them different? It wasn’t charisma, or riches, as some who’d possessed the same gift or status could be crude and awkward. People who learn how to live seem to be asking something of us and refusing everything else.
I think it begins with becoming sensitive to what you taste. I don’t strictly mean with your tongue, but with your senses. Meaning, you must be comfortable discriminating.
Before you can ask, you must first learn how to refuse.
It might even be necessary to detest what’s ugly to better understand what’s beautiful. Living well isn’t about possessing any one car or club membership. It’s about insisting on the world. It’s soulful. It begins and ends with you.
The specific item of consumption is not what matters.
Only that you perceive the value of some item to be of the utmost quality and to be the most satisfying thing you can consume. Your reward isn’t merely the power to acquire and consume. It’s to feel something only you can feel.
This is how you learn to taste.
Every person has an inner life that subjects them to preferring one thing over another. It’s difficult to tell someone who doesn’t like the smell of Bergamot in a fragrance that it’s objectively good, and they’re wrong.
What you can do is present them the best options and have them decide.
So long as each option achieves feature parity, their selection will be the right one. It’s not necessary they select the option you or I might choose. Quite the opposite. This is what’s peculiar about subjective tastes.
The possessor can make them objective.
The many combinations of sights, sounds, and smells, that exists succeed across most of the population. Most people are other people, so this is anticipated.
A person with taste can create new combinations by being intentional.
They pay attention to what they like and why. They ask questions about the materials. The technique involved in the creation of the item or experience begins to matter. It’s one of a few complex realities where no process appears to be random.
Time passes and knowledge is acquired.
They want order in what they consume, which they might call design. They prefer the truth in product marketing, which they might call heritage. They become demanding of the services you present them, just as they’ve become of themselves.
They race around the world to win, and insist the rooms they recover in to reflect that. When a person implicitly understands their value, they may require the world because of who they are, not because of what they do. Nouns come before verbs.
The question isn’t if the Bergamot smells nice, but if it represents them.
A possessor of taste isn’t buying quality for the sake of quality. Of course, the thing is quality (or “luxury,” if you prefer). What the possessor is really buying is another piece of themselves. It isn’t, “what’s expensive?” but instead, “what’s ethical?”
The only answer is you. Your taste is the truth unless you lie to yourself.
When you evolve taste, consumption isn’t about feeling full, but being nourished. And the most nourishing, and affirming, substance in the world is the truth.
Aesthetics isn’t about beauty, after all; rather, the achievement of ethics.
Whether Wilde or Ruskin, beautiful or utilitarian, you’ll arrive at the question, ‘what’s the truth?’ Here’s where the aesthetes, or those of taste, return to power.
If surname and terroir represented what was true in the old world, I believe traditions of exceptional human behavior will represent what’s true in the new world; so long as at least one product designer remembers it was never about the product.
Then maybe people will finally understand what I was talking about. Maybe.