Protecting our sense of taste
It's getting much harder, but it's so worth it. 🧮🤖
Before diving into this month’s essay, quick announcement to share that I’m leading another intentional New Year’s Retreat in just four months (!!) with my friend/co-host . There will be daily yoga and meditation, reflection, community, nature and more. Learn more here!
On a recent Monday morning, let’s say it was December of last year, I’d woken up at 6am to the sound of two snoring dogs and the cool, dark desert air outside. In less than two hours I needed to be mentally prepared to start my work week, but since it was a Monday morning, like every other Monday morning it also meant I had a special, secret, just-for-me treat waiting: a new Spotify Discover Weekly playlist.
I slinked into the bathroom to feast my ears on the new delivery, popped my headphones in and went about my typical morning — slapping moisturizer on my face, letting the dogs out, unloading the dishwasher, feeding the dogs breakfast, watering plants, picking up dog poop, walking around tidying. It felt so monotonous and then… the most perfect song came on.
For just a slice of my morning, there was a sweet, tender, fresh new darling of a song from an unfamiliar voice. The lyrics gave me that feeling like, aww it was picked just for me, just for this moment as I went about the filling of bowls and puttering-around-the-house before my silly little mental health walk and then severing myself into work mode:
Eyes smiling over candles Mismatched chairs Arms crossing where those hands go It's loud, but that volume makes my heart glow And time isn't real as the sun goes
I had never heard of Cordelia before. I made a mental note to dig in further later, see if she was a new artist or someone who just escaped my radar previously. My Discover Weekly is often where I pick up new, emerging artists for my yoga playlists — songs that are sweet, flow-y, and melodic but not popular enough to have imprinted a specific emotion on people. They leave an edge of curiosity without bombarding you with an undesired memory. (I’m not trying to make anyone cry.)
I proceeded to go about my day, and not long after realized that the little unknown song was absolutely everywhere, inundating my Instagram feed in the form of Reels’ audio after going viral on TikTok. It has now generated hundreds of millions of clip-listens. I felt so conflicted about this, both thrilled for the artist and her exposure, and also sucked down a dystopian thought spiral realizing that this song was now being commodified to sell the idea of a simple, little life paradoxically by selling both stuff and also our attention to the highest bidding advertiser on Instagram. Who gets to have a simple little life? People with the resources to craft the aesthetic of one, of course! Like most things that go viral, the song eventually became co-opted by comedy, and had a few other waves of Internet sub-culture chaos before eventually settling down. (Cordelia was adorably gracious about it all.)
This year it’s felt like these kinds of moments keep on happening — sort of this sense that sacredness is being replaced by saturation. Over the coming months, Spotify further chipped away at what once felt like my last precious, digitally-native ritual, my weekly curated playlist of lesser-known music, by serving a near-constant supply of freshly-updated AI-generated “Daylists” to which I became unconsciously habituated.
I’ll admit that I get a chuckle out of the robotic and hilariously of-the-zeitgeist titles for these playlists, which have included charmers like: “pov: indie earthy saturday morning,” “sleepy weepy tailspin tuesday evening,” and “light socially conscious thursday morning.” It’s hard not to feel like Spotify is trolling me with these title. Yet, both fortunately and unfortunately, the music is always of my liking, which seems to be exactly the problem. Daylists are an IV-drip of un-objectionable songs, rendering me a mere consumer mainlining music that feels good. I have been reduced not only to an AI-generated persona, but it even knows how my persona’s mood and mindset shifts by the hour.
The thing is, I don’t want to only feel good by listening to music that I already know that I like. I want music that makes me feel the full spectrum of human emotion. I want to be surprised by music and decide what I do and don’t like. Even if that means that sometimes I feel annoyed or weirded-out or intrigued or a little underwhelmed or a little bored and sometimes I want to hear a song and go, “This one’s not for me…skip,” and sometimes I want to go, “WHO is this? Love.”
On that particular note, a memory comes to mind of the first time I heard Chappell Roan’s Pink Pony Club, which I promptly featured on my annual “21 for 2021” playlist. At the time, I was working to rehab my shoulder and trying to fight off what felt like a looming depression by dancing around in my living room to music that made me feel…well, sexy. That song crossed by path and in a way, it was healing for me. Two years later, Roan released her first album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. Seemingly overnight, the size of the Pink Pony Club became so absurdly fanatic, Roan has shared that she now fears for her own safety.
On the subject of personal taste, I’m tempted to reflect on the subject of yoga classes and how one can find themselves liking a particular instructor for reasons they can’t explain. As a teacher, even after years at the same studio developing a following of students, I wouldn’t say I’ve ever become a popular yoga teacher. I frequent the classes of many teachers who are popular (because they are awesome at what they do) but I also frequent classes of instructors who are amazing instructors yet never seem to teach to packed classes. These teachers are distinctive but not in a universally “palatable” way. But mostly, I like them because I can tell they are being themselves, and that’s attractive. I often have to tell myself that I am just not for everyone, that no teacher can be for every student, but that what I offer will be enjoyed by the students who are seeking it. (In fact, the best compliment I ever got after teaching a class was from a male friend who told me that class made him feel beautiful. That’s a particular type of taste!)
And just like a student seeks out their teacher through a deeply personal place, it just wouldn’t work to be told which yoga classes you should take. I find you just need to try a few out and see what clicks. Taste is an expression of intuition and as Ezra Klein beautifully explored in this podcast episode, as our digital and social feeds become increasingly algorithmically-based, it’s getting harder to develop our own unique taste, but all the more important to protect that discernment.
Aside from the lost opportunity to cultivate our own intuition, being served only music that feels safe, familiar and likable also has this siloing effect not unlike how our social media feeds have polarized us through personalization. When we’re only exposed to what we like, we lose the developmentally adaptive opportunity to lean into uncertainty. When we get the opportunity to encounter experiences that we aren’t sure about, we become more resilient — and the opposite is also true. Normally we think of these as big life experiences, like dating a new person or starting a new job or taking a new class, but I would argue that any opportunity we have in our daily life to encounter creative works outside of our wheelhouse has the potential to provide this benefit.
Perhaps there is nothing wrong with being persuadable by the influence of what is popular on occasion. But by exposing ourselves to ideas and creative works that have not already been cosigned by the masses, we get the chance to meet that work or idea and decide how it lands for us. In that way, to protect our sense of taste is to make ourselves less corruptible. It is to keep our eyes and ears and senses open to that which is unfamiliar and to open ourselves to wonder. It is to stand in our truth and resist being reduced to a persona, but rather to simply be a person — flawed, dynamic, unmistakably unique.
4 things I’m trying to help protect my sense of taste
Intentionally expose myself to novelty.
We recently became members of our local independent movie theatre, The Loft, and it has been a great decision. We end up seeing movies that we’d otherwise likely never have seen, and it just feels fun to be connected to our community in that way.
At Ben’s urging, I finally watched a Star Wars: A New Hope. I had never seen a Star War and you know, it was good. It wasn’t my favorite but it was good! Personally, I thought it was BS that Chewbacca doesn’t get a medal at the end.
Take more “nature movie” breaks.
I don’t remember to do this enough, but whenever I do it seems to help me feel better almost immediately. While the popular instruction for meditation typically involves closing your eyes and turning your gaze within, I find it can be more helpful to open your eyes and focus on something IRL (really on anything other than a screen.) It helpful to find a subject of the drama in a scene, whether it’s a bumble bee dancing along the buds of a field, or a dragonfly careening over the surface of a fountain, or the ways that dogs are playing together in a park.
Invite more negative space.
In college I used to babysit these three awesome kids in D.C. who were only allowed to watch television on the weekends. They were allowed to select one movie, and I was often there for this special occasion on a Friday or Saturday night when they would get so excited, eagerly announcing their selection of the film du jour. It always struck me how intently focused they were on the movie as we watched. They were probably between the ages of 5 to 10 at the time and their level of sincere focus was astounding, better than I could muster myself today, and they got so much joy from it. But of course they did! They had a precious 90 minutes of movie time and then it would be a whole week until the next! Anyhow, this feels like a worthwhile goal to pursue.
Replace (at least) one regular digital activity with an analog activity.
For me, this means I’m shifting back to plain old journaling by hand. I kept a daily journal in a Notion board for a year and a half (which was a terrific feat) but am finding myself now drawn to go back to writing in my paper journal.
I’m also obsessed with our record player. Ben bought me one for my birthday last year, and we usually will listen to it a few times/week. Because we are uber nerds, every month we stick to our budgets we get to go to the store and buy a new record. We recently hosted friends for a week at the house and every night (rather than watch TV or go out) we’d sit around and listen to records, and it was shocking to me how much it helped to slow down the sense of time passing.
What I’m Reading, Watching, Listening To & Eating
If I may say, Kening Zhu’s “Make Art for No Audience” is a lovely companion read to today’s essay.
Finally digging into Hillary McBride’s The Wisdom of Your Body.
American reliance on air conditioning is not only fueling the climate crisis, I also wonder what is happening existentially to our collective resistance to discomfort.
Artificial intelligence’s impact goes beyond emissions (“The exact effect that AI will have on the climate crisis is difficult to calculate.”) 🙃
The Four Biggest Myths about Political Persuasion (Plain English with Derek Thompson)
I Saw the TV Glow was very disturbing and very beautiful. I was so conflicted. This is the kind of thing I mean when I say expose yourself to works that make you feel things that don’t fit neatly into one box. I would not say I “liked” this movie, I would say it haunted me in a way that is constructive. (So perhaps the take-away is to watch more movies that have mid-80s reviews on Rotten Tomatoes??)
You, too, can develop your own taste. (This one is actually about cooking.)
Thank you so much for this thoughtful post, Kelly. Your writing manages to get beneath the surface every time and I appreciate that. And I particularly appreciate the link to Kening Zhu’s article.