On Taste

Notes on friction, the unoptimised self, and the comfortable lie

The most comforting lie one can tell oneself, in the boardroom or in the bedroom, is that the rules governing taste, those vague and inconvenient mechanisms reflecting a point of view, do not apply to you. It is a necessary fiction, for to admit that taste matters is to admit that the model and the metric can fail.

A few months ago, I was in one of the S…