Created: July 24, 2020
Modified: July 24, 2020
Modified: July 24, 2020
developing taste
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- The hedonic treadmill manifests in taste for things like wine, beer, coffee, fine cuisine. I've never spent effort refining my taste in these things, because I don't want to get to the point where I dislike the cheap stuff. It is ultimately bad for your life utility (and for utilization of Earth's resources) if your pleasure depends on something expensive and rare. But. I wonder if the exercise of developing taste is part of training yourself to figure out what you actually like. Right now I just buy good coffee that other people say is good coffee. If I dug into it and learned to articulate what it is about coffees that I actually like, then I'd be following my own desires rather than someone else's.
- Of course coffee is irrelevant; what matters is to develop desires and taste in important things: ideas, research, life goals, relationships, politics, etc. Coffee and wine are games, like fashion: they let you practice on an easier domain, and they're common enough as interests that you can use your ability to develop taste there as a signal of your ability to develop taste in deeper things.
- OR: noticing what you like about things is just literally how you enjoy life. As always, attention is fundamental. Choosing not to enjoy life doesn't mean you won't have bad times, it just means you won't have good times.