how to not develop good taste

1. Distract yourself. In fact immerse yourself in so much media that you never have to pay attention to the world or your thoughts about it. Sat in a coffee shop? Make sure you stare at your phone. Never make eye contact with the barista or ask about her day. People watching? Why would you do that?

2. Follow what the crowd is doing. TikTok and instagram are your friend. Force yourself to enjoy the trends to stay up to date. Don’t question it. The more people are following it, the better it has to be.

3. Make sure to suffocate your genuine intellectual curiosity. Why do you care about ‘18th century french literature, or the migratory pattern of swallows? What value is it going to add to your life? Make sure you crush any intrinsic curiosity to delve into those - its not helping you in your career or life mate.

4. On that point, make sure to optimise your life. You are the most important thing. Dial in your nutrition and sleep. Your body is a temple. Minimise any excess time, and make sure to always be doing. Hustle.

5. ABC : Always be connected. You need to be in the know. Monitor the situation.

6. Make sure to live entirely in your mind. The body is just a vessel to be sculpted.

7. Make sure to always have your AirPods in- listening to podcasts/news/music on 2x speed. The smartest people are the ones who know the most.

8. Make sure to plan every detail in advance. Leave little room for trial and error, serendipity. Top down approaches (‘a vision’) are always better than a bottom up unfolding.

9. Ask LLM’s their opinion on everything. It’s not sycophancy, its just evidence you’re doing the right thing

10. Seek social cohesion. Dishonest peace is much better than honest conflict. Put on different faces around different people.

11. Make sure to have any opinion on everything. Not sure? Ask the LLM

12. Consume more than you create.

13. When you do decide to put something out into the world, make sure to tailor everything to the audience. It’s about them at the end of the day. Grip tightly on the outcome of everything you make.

14. Addition > subtraction

15. Never re-read books or re-visit art. Always be on the lookout for the new thing.

16. Never sit with discomfort or boredom. The moment you feel even slightly unstimulated, reach for your phone. Those brief moments of emptiness between activities? Dangerous territory for actual thoughts to emerge.

17. You can get to the end of the feed if you scroll hard enough.

18. Outsource all your aesthetic decisions. Interior design? Copy Pinterest boards wholesale. Personal style? Whatever the algorithm serves you. Why develop your own sense of what you find beautiful?

19. Speed through museums. Take photos of every piece but never actually look at them. The goal is documentation, not experience.

20. Treat silence as your enemy. Fill every moment with noise - podcasts while showering, audiobooks while walking, background TV while eating. Raw sensory experience is inefficient.

21. Never cook without a recipe. Tasting and adjusting? That’s for people with too much time. Follow instructions to the letter and move on.

22. Avoid anything that can’t be immediately understood or monetised. If you can’t explain its ROI in under 30 seconds, it’s not worth pursuing.

23. Replace intuition with data. Don’t trust your gut - there’s surely a study, poll, or review aggregate that can tell you what to think instead.

24. Make sure your hobbies are resume-worthy. Pottery because you enjoy the feeling of clay? No. Pottery because it shows you’re “creative” and “well-rounded.” (Make sure to add it to your linkedin!)

25. Never admit you don’t understand something. Nod knowingly at contemporary art, pretend you get the wine notes, agree that yes, you definitely hear the difference with those £500 headphones.

26. Cultivate opinions based on their social currency rather than genuine interest. Know just enough about trending topics to participate in conversations, but never enough to actually care.

27. Never leave a conversation without something actionable. Every interaction should yield a book recommendation, productivity hack, or networking opportunity. Human connection for its own sake is inefficient.

28. Quantify everything. Rate your experiences out of 10. Track your moods in an app. If you can’t measure it, did it really happen?

29. Never buy anything without reading at least 47 reviews. Your own instincts about what you might enjoy are far less reliable than aggregated stranger opinions.

30. Minimise time between point A → B. Wandering is for people who lack direction. Time is money

31. Never trust your first reaction to anything. Google what you’re supposed to think first. Your authentic response is probably wrong.

32. Always be preparing for the next thing. At breakfast, plan lunch. During your vacation, research the next one. The present is just a launching pad for the future.

33. Remember: spontaneity is just poor planning in disguise. That random urge to take a different route home, to stop and examine something that caught your eye? Suppress it. Efficiency is everything.

34. Most importantly, never trust yourself. Your instincts, your preferences, your odd little fascinations - these are all just bugs in your programming waiting to be optimised away. The path to good taste runs through everyone else’s brain but your own.

35. And finally, if you ever catch yourself genuinely enjoying something - something weird, something useless, something you can’t explain or justify or monetise - immediately stop. You’re clearly doing it wrong. Good taste is serious business, and there’s no room for joy in the optimisation of the self.

Remember: The best taste is no taste at all - just a perfectly calibrated response system that mirrors back what everyone else has already approved. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to check what everyone else thought of this post before I decide if I like it.