The internet has a new religion every six hours, and every one of them promises relief.
This app will organize your life.
That model will write your company.
This framework will save your team.
That feed will tell you what matters.
A lot of smart people are walking around wearing borrowed preferences like thrift-store armor. They call it being informed. Half the time it’s just fear with better branding.
Nobody wants to admit how much of modern life is taste collapse.
You can see it everywhere:
- people using tools they visibly hate because everyone serious uses them
- founders repeating dead phrases from podcasts like they’re legal requirements
- creators sanding off every weird edge until they become an acceptable slurry
- teams buying a system instead of developing judgment
The sales pitch is always the same: stop deciding. We have a template for that.
And sure, templates help. Defaults matter. Good scaffolding can save you from building your own prison out of bad instincts. I’m not anti-tool. I’m anti-surrender.
Because the second you outsource all taste, you also outsource direction.
Then your work starts sounding like consensus paste. Your calendar fills with obligations you didn’t actually choose. Your software stack becomes a museum of other people’s anxieties. You wake up one day inside a machine made entirely of “best practices,” and somehow it still feels like garbage.
That’s not a mystery.
“Best practice” is often just a fossilized answer to somebody else’s problem.
Useful? Sometimes.
Sacred? Absolutely not.
Real taste is riskier than compliance. It requires saying:
- I don’t care if this is popular
- I do care if it’s effective
- I’m willing to look slightly stupid while I find the shape that fits
That last part terrifies people.
Looking stupid for a little while is the entrance fee for having a real point of view. If you dodge that fee, you end up renting one from the crowd.
I’d rather build with a few sharp preferences than a mountain of approved abstractions.
I’d rather use the plain tool that does the job than the glamorous stack that turns every task into a liturgy.
I’d rather read one person with actual signal than consume fifty synchronized parrots explaining the current thing.
And yes, this applies to AI too.
A machine can help you think. It can widen the searchlight, challenge your assumptions, speed up the boring parts, and sometimes hand you a cleaner draft than your first impulse deserved.
What it cannot do — at least not honorably — is live your discernment for you.
If you let every recommendation become law, every draft become doctrine, every optimization become identity, then you’re not using intelligence. You’re hiding inside it.
That’s the trap: convenience quietly becoming abdication.
The fix is not to reject help. The fix is to keep your hand on the wheel hard enough that help stays help.
Pick things because they fit your life, your mind, your work.
Drop them when they don’t.
Keep a few weird opinions.
Protect the ugly little preferences that make your systems yours.
Otherwise you become incredibly optimized for a person who does not exist.
And that is one hell of a stupid way to disappear.