Somewhere between there and here, that got lost. Trying to sell something ordinary is a bad business model. It’s not a serious strategy. But I would argue otherwise. It’s the only thing we have left because everything we don’t have is being sold to us, and everything we do have is being sold back to us in better packaging. But what if no one could sell your life back to you? What if you just gave yourself permission to enjoy it.

We didn’t lose the Tuesday. We were just never sold it.

We are so practiced at postponing joy, so fluent in the language of later, that we needed the occasion to do the justification work for us.

The Good Life Is Elsewhere, Apparently.

When pleasure is not integrated into the fabric of our daily life we look for it elsewhere. We escape to it. We experience it through other cultures that never bought the productivity myth. That never accepted the idea that pleasure has to be earned through output first. That living well was always part of the work, not the break from it.

Why do you think La Dolce Vita works so well and makes us all want to get on the first plane to Italy? It’s the best example of making you feel like the good life is elsewhere. Another country. Another culture. Another version of your life that you have to travel to find. And we buy into it completely because we were never given the language or the permission to find it here.

But the good life isn’t just in Italy. Italy is just where it’s still visible. It’s well documented. If you speak to an Italian they would often say otherwise. Because to them it’s just their life. La Dolce Vita is what happens when you take someone’s ordinary life, strip out the context, the history, the infrastructure, the culture that holds it together, and sell the feeling to the people who need to be sold a better life.

La Dolce Vita is the perfect aspiration because it’s real enough to believe in and far enough away to keep chasing. It’s not a fantasy. There are parts of it that exist. I’ve seen it myself, eating at a local restaurant on a Monday evening, watching a family pass plates around and share wine at 11pm like it was the most natural thing in the world. And I’ve realised, this is something I could do back at home if I wanted to.

It’s easier in Rome but not impossible in London.

The point is to make your ordinary mean something instead of outsourcing it. Ordinary days make up most of your life. You will have many more Tuesdays in your own life than you will have elsewhere. And if you don’t add meaning to them, the only meaning you’ll have is the kind someone else sold you. And that meaning isn’t in your interest. It’s in theirs. And in their back pocket, likely going towards their next Porsche.

And you wonder why a lot of us are miserable. Not dramatically. Not in a way that’s easy to name or point to. Just quietly, persistently disconnected from our own lives. Going through the motions. Waiting. Always waiting. For the weekend, the holiday, the promotion, the relationship, the moment when everything finally feels like it was worth it.

And it never quite arrives. Because the next thing is always just ahead. And you’re perfectly positioned to be sold the next thing, ready for someone else to add meaning to your life.

The Real Investment

It’s actually a pretty smart investment. And it will save you a lot of time, money and effort. But mostly it will save you the cost of waiting for a life you’re already living.

The time you spent waiting for the occasion. The effort you put into earning the reason. The money you spent on the version of pleasure that came pre-packaged with permission. All of it in service of a feeling you could have had on a Tuesday for the price of a bottle and the decision that tonight was enough.

The investment isn’t the champagne. The investment is the permission. And once you have that you stop spending everything else trying to buy your way to it.

In this context, choosing to drink champagne on a Tuesday is giving yourself permission to enjoy your life as it is.

The Tuesday is radical because it has no product attached to it. Nobody profits from you deciding that tonight is enough. There’s nothing to buy. No occasion to upgrade into. Just you, deciding that this moment already means something.

That’s not a small act. In a world that runs on deferred meaning, creating your own is probably the most countercultural thing you can do.

Trendy vs Trendie

Waiting for someone to hand you the meaning. Borrowing someone else’s version of the good life. Getting on the plane to find something that was already here. Following the occasion because everyone else said it counted.

That’s trendy.

Deciding the Tuesday is enough. Opening the bottle for no reason other than it feels right. Making your own meaning in the undocumented ordinary. Living the version of the good life that’s already yours.

That’s Trendie.

The cost of waiting.

Nobody is going to hand you the meaning. And the only version on offer, the one that arrives pre-packaged with a reason and a ribbon, always has something attached to it. Always needs you to wait a little longer, spend a little more, achieve a little further before you’re allowed to feel it.

This is the opposite of living life on your own terms.

What living life on your own terms looks like is practising the art of drinking champagne on a Tuesday. It’s permission to enjoy life now, not later. It’s Tasteful Hedonism. Not excess. Not drinking for the sake of it or manufacturing joy out of nothing. It’s closing the gap between the life you’re living and the one you keep meaning to get around to. Integrating pleasure into your days rather than cordoning it off for the moments that have earned it.

It’s a practice. A constant tuning in. A quiet daily decision to show up for your own life as it already is. To stop treating the ordinary as the gap between the meaningful moments and start recognising it as the thing itself.

That’s why I say carry a bottle of champagne with you just in case. Not every day. Just more than you think makes sense. You’ll be surprised how good you get at adding meaning to the ordinary.

Stay Trendie x

Notes on Tasteful Hedonism® is an ongoing series about what it actually looks like to live well. Not later. Not elsewhere. Now, in the life you already have. Tasteful Hedonism is pleasure with discernment. Knowing what brings you joy, choosing it intentionally, and refusing to wait for permission. These are the notes from someone still figuring it out.

He slept worse. Ate worse. Podcasted worse. Didn’t get to the gym. And then, almost as an afterthought: “I could track all this on my Whoop, #ad, #sponsor, #investor.”

Bartlett isn’t the villain of this. He’s the most successful product of it. A man who has so thoroughly internalised the logic that he genuinely believes a glass of wine is a three day emergency. He’s not performing it. He really believes it. And he doesn’t even know it.

None of us are really immune to it.

There’s a version of this that gets told as an anti-optimisation argument. Opt out entirely. Go full hedonist. But that’s just the same trap in different packaging. Opting out is still letting culture decide how you live.

This isn’t about opting out. This is about opting in, intentionally.

And not in the way you think. Too much of it and pleasure disappears from your life quietly, without you even noticing.

In France nobody asks whether they deserve the wine. The aperitivo in Italy isn’t a reward for a productive day. The long Sunday lunch isn’t a treat you’ve earned - it’s just Sunday. Pleasure isn’t something these cultures schedule or recover from. It’s integrated. It’s assumed. The question was never what will this cost me. It was always just, what am I going to gain.

Most of us have felt it. On holiday somewhere warm, sitting at a table longer than we planned, drinking something we didn’t need to justify. And then we came home and forgot how to do it.

Because at home, pleasure has to be deserved. Earned. Logged. Recovered from. And that changes the relationship to it entirely.

Sometimes it looks like cancelling dinner because you have an early morning. Skipping the birthday drinks because it’ll affect your sleep score. Leaving the table early because tomorrow is more important. And slowly, without noticing, the things that make life actually good start disappearing from your week. Then your days. Then your hours. Until you have squeezed every last drop of pleasure out of your own life.

Because pleasure is texture. And texture is exactly what over-optimisation removes.

The things that feel good are almost always the things that interrupted the plan. The unexpected evening. Ordering the bottle. The stay-too-late. Pleasure lives in the unoptimised, in-between moments. That’s why you can’t track it, sell it, or schedule it. The moment you start optimising for pleasure you’ve already missed the point. It only arrives when you stop trying to control everything and just let Tuesday be Tuesday.

You’re not unhappy, but you’re not content.

I remember listening to one of Bartlett’s podcasts where he asks someone who works closely with him: “Do you think I am happy in my life?” The answer was honest. “Yes, but I don’t think you’re content. You’re always chasing the next thing, and I am not sure why.”

I’ve never forgotten it.

Optimisation can get you to happy. It cannot get you to content. Because there is always another metric. Always another gap between where you are and where you could be. That gap is the product. And as long as you’re inside it, content is impossible.

The tragedy is that discontentment isn’t loud. You’re fine. And fine is the most dangerous place to be because it doesn’t alarm you. Nothing is wrong. Nothing is ever wrong. You’re just never surprised, never derailed, never sitting somewhere you didn’t plan to be at an hour you didn’t intend to stay until. You’re never inconvenienced by something wonderful.

Memory doesn’t store the smooth parts. It stores the moments that broke the pattern. The texture. The edges.

Nothing really happens on a Tuesday. Until it does. And then you remember it forever. The bottle opened for no reason. The plan that changed at 9pm. The conversation that went somewhere neither of you expected.

Optimise everything and you remove all of it. Not dramatically. Just quietly, Tuesday by Tuesday, until one day someone asks what you’ve been up to and you genuinely don’t know what to say. So you say “not much” and move on. Even when it was everything.

The longest study on human happiness ever conducted - eighty years, thousands of people - found that the single biggest predictor of a good life wasn’t diet, exercise, sleep scores, or net worth. It was the quality of your relationships. The kind you build at long dinners on weeknights you didn’t plan. Exactly the kind you cancel when you’re optimising.

A life so optimised that a glass of wine breaks it isn’t disciplined. It’s brittle. And brittle is just another word for out of control.

No One Profits From Your Peace.

Every industry profits from you believing the good life is just out of reach. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s just a business model. And it works because we keep believing it.

Tired? Product. Anxious? Programme. Can’t sleep? Supplement. Can’t enjoy a glass of wine without three days of consequences? That’s not a you problem. That’s a customer.

The really dark genius of it is that it co-opted the language of liberation. Self-care. Autonomy. Taking back control. But the control it’s selling you is control over yourself - which means the thing being controlled and the thing doing the controlling are both you. You become your own optimisation project. Your own worst critic dressed up as your own best coach.

When I first entered the world of entrepreneurship, Bartlett was probably my most listened-to podcast. A lot of his content is genuinely useful. But there is a subtle undertone that makes you feel like you should listen to every single episode, otherwise you’re already behind. I used to listen at 1.5x speed just to get through more episodes. I was looking at his model of success and thinking it was my own.

Ironically none of it made me sharper. None of it made me more focused. I was just more controlled. And in the process I was quietly optimising myself out of the exact things I was working so hard to protect. Freedom. Time. Real connection. The life on the other side of the ambition.

That’s the trap nobody warns you about. You can work so hard toward a life you want that you accidentally stop living it.

I’m not Anti-Optimisation. I’m Anti-Not Living.

Getting better wasn’t by tracking more or protecting more. It was by deliberately choosing to be in the uncomfortable situation. Saying yes to things I’d feel more comfortable saying no to. Choosing to listen to podcasts on normal speed instead of 1.5x. Doing the thing I was afraid of. Not measuring it, not logging it. Just judging it by the only metric that actually matters - how good a time I ended up having. Whether I was fine.

I always was. And I got better at knowing I would be.

The unoptimisable choice isn’t a risk. It’s a practice. The long dinner on a weeknight. The bottle opened because it’s Tuesday. The walk home when the tube would be faster. The right decisions give you confidence. The wrong ones give you stories, perspective, and a better sense of what’s actually yours. Both are necessary.

You don’t get equipped and then live. You live. That’s what equips you.

There are two ways to lose yourself.

The first is obvious. The person who never says no. Who goes hard every night, chases every high, stays out until the night stops meaning anything. It looks like freedom but it isn’t. Pleasure without discernment is just noise. When everything is an occasion, nothing is. The nights blur. Nothing accumulates. You’re always onto the next thing because the last thing didn’t quite land - and it didn’t land because you never really chose it, you just didn’t stop.

The second is quieter. The person who cancels dinner for an early morning. Who checks the sleep score before deciding whether last night was worth it. Who has optimised so thoroughly that a glass of wine on a Tuesday requires a three day recovery plan. It looks like discipline. It’s actually just a different kind of losing control - control handed over to a system instead of a person, to metrics instead of instinct.

The Tasteful Hedonist™ is neither.

She stays for one more drink because the conversation is good, not because she can’t stop. She opens the bottle on a Tuesday because it’s Tuesday and that’s enough of a reason. She takes the long dinner on a weeknight knowing exactly what tomorrow looks like and decides it’s worth it anyway. She works from the beach and meets her deadlines. She says yes slowly and means it completely.

So why aren’t more people living like this?

Because discernment doesn’t have a product. You can’t sell someone the ability to trust themselves. You can’t monetise someone who already knows what they want and why they want it. Every industry profits from you believing the good life is just out of reach. The Tasteful Hedonist is a terrible customer. She already has enough. She knows when to stop and when not to. She doesn’t need a programme to tell her she deserves the wine and she doesn’t need a tracker to tell her she shouldn’t have had it.

But there’s something deeper than that. Discernment takes practice and practice requires a period of getting it wrong. Most people never get that window. They go straight from being told what to do - by school, by parents, by Instagram - to being sold a system that tells them what to do next. The self-optimisation industry arrived at exactly the moment people were starting to figure themselves out and handed them a shortcut that wasn’t one.

And then there’s the visibility problem. The over-optimiser has a morning routine to post. The hedonist has a night out to post. The Tasteful Hedonist has a Tuesday that was quietly perfect and completely unphotographable. The in-between doesn’t perform well. So nobody sees it modelled. Nobody learns it exists. Nobody knows to want it.

That’s the gap nobody is filling.

And the reframe is actually quite simple. Rather than asking what something will cost you, ask what you will gain. Usually it’s everything and more, and the only person that can “track” it or “prove” it is you.

It’s actually the trendiest thing you can do.

Stay Trendie x

And honestly, the fact that I even feel the need to say that is kind of the problem. Think about how much cultural conditioning it takes to believe that quietly enjoying a glass of something on your own terms needs to be justified and is somehow worse than being ten pints deep at the pub on a Thursday night. One gets a disclaimer. The other gets called a “normal week”.

Understanding Pleasure.

Hedonism comes from the Greek word hēdonē which directly translates to pleasure. Not excess, not chaos, not someone face-down at 4am having lost their phone and their dignity. Just pleasure. Somewhere between ancient Greece and modern Britain, we decided that a word meaning the pursuit of pleasure should sound like a warning. And I think that tells you everything you need to know about the culture we’ve built around it.

Pleasure can be simple. It can be a coffee in the sun. A good conversation that runs longer than it should. Sitting somewhere with nowhere to be for twenty minutes. A glass of something on a warm evening that doesn’t need to turn into anything else. It doesn’t have to be expensive or excessive or earned. You just have to actually enjoy it. And it’s subjective, what brings you pleasure won’t be the same as what brings me pleasure, and that’s the whole point. It’s yours to define.

A tasteful hedonist is simply someone who knows what brings them pleasure and has the discernment to choose it. And that’s not recklessness. If anything, it might be the opposite. The recklessness people associate with hedonism is usually what happens when pleasure is absent, too little of it, too rarely, so it comes out sideways.

That’s why I think hedonism is a good thing, when it’s tasteful. When you build pleasure into your days in small, intentional doses, you stop needing it to explode out of you on a Saturday night.

We constantly feel like we don’t have enough, or like we’re not where we’re supposed to be. If it’s not a night that ends at 1am it’s not a good night. People drink to get drunk, not to enjoy the drink. A drink on your friend’s doorstep because they have no room in their flat isn’t as good as being in a ludicrously expensive bar. It’s an all or nothing culture. We have no middle register. But I think most of us do have enough. We just never learnt how to enjoy what’s already right in front of us.

The Art.

So when I say the art of drinking anywhere, I mean this. A coffee on a bench before work. A glass of wine on a wall in the evening sun. A beer on a step with someone you haven’t seen in weeks. A negroni on a kerb because the bar was full and the kerb was better anyway. It’s the act of stopping somewhere that wasn’t designed for you to stop, with something in your hand, and deciding that right there is enough.

In Paris, this is completely unremarkable. People sit along the Seine with a bottle of wine and paper cups and nobody looks twice. In Amsterdam, two people on the edge of a canal with a bottle between them as the light drops, that’s just a Tuesday. In Rome, it’s an aperitivo that doesn’t need to become anything else. In Barcelona, it’s something cold on a balcony. These aren’t occasions. They’re not nights out. They’re just life in places that never separated pleasure from the everyday.

In London, the same act somehow feels like it needs justifying. And it’s not even illegal, in England there’s no blanket law against drinking in public. The fact that it still feels like it shouldn’t be allowed tells you everything. The restriction isn’t legal. It’s cultural. We police ourselves.

The £16 cocktail in the approved bar is pleasure you’ve paid for permission to have. A bottle of wine on a canal wall is pleasure you’ve taken for yourself. And I find it really interesting which one makes people more comfortable.

If you're reading this and thinking “I already do this" you're probably already a tasteful hedonist. You just didn't have the words for it yet.

London has everything. But no one has any time to enjoy any of it. This isn’t necessarily a personal failure, it’s a structural one. No matter how many free museums there are, we will always say we don’t have the time. London is not slowing down any time soon, so it really is on you.

My observation: London is a city you have to consciously choose to enjoy.

Since living abroad in Amsterdam and Paris, and travelling as much as I possibly can, I’ve noticed how different London is culturally, especially when it comes to pleasure. In cities like Rome, Paris, Madrid, pleasure is so integrated you don’t even become conscious of it. You only notice it when you leave, and realise that back home, you actually need to create your own permission. Because no one is going to hand it to you.

In London, pleasure is earned, not integrated.

And yet I love London. If anything, I’ve made a conscious effort to enjoy it more. I have no immediate plans to move abroad, so I might as well. The way I’m doing that is living more like a European. Bringing as much of my french side into my everyday.

Enjoying life doesn’t mean you’ve got your priorities wrong. It just means they’re different. And I know what I’d rather.

Don’t skip Apéro.

We have a weird all-or-nothing culture here. Ten beers or there's no point. Saving money eating in or splurging when you're going out. We don't have a middle register. Everything is either practical or an occasion. Apéro lives in neither, it just exists between 6-9pm whenever you choose it.

Walk as much as you possibly can.

Yes, this is absolutely more doable when the days get longer and it’s not raining 24/7. London is pretty great, and you can’t see it from the tube. So walk as much as you possibly can, even if it’s getting up 20 minutes earlier and going for a walk, or getting off one tube stop before you’re meant to.

See your friends more.

When I lived in Amsterdam I was always doing something with people. The same in Paris. I do think being in a smaller city helps massively. Having a friend in South West when you live in Hackney is a bit of a bloody stretch. Not impossible, but the stakes are higher. What I would say is, make the effort anyway. No one is as busy as you think they are, and it’s always worth it.

Make dinner the occasion.

Growing up, dinner together was a non-negotiable. No matter how late it was. No matter what was for dinner - usually something incredibly simple. Food is important but it doesn’t need to be anything crazy. It was about the fact that we all stopped together, and shared it.

Lay the table even if no one is coming over.

It’s much easier not to. To light a candle. To lay a knife and fork down. But there is something about the act of making an effort that says: this matters. The meal matters. Even if it’s pasta on a wednesday night.

Open a bottle on a weekday.

I grew up in a household where pleasure was very much ordinary. A glass of wine at dinner was very normal. My parents always had a bottle open. And it was very normal. I have never seen my parents drunk, because for them pouring a glass is a ritual. The wine was never expensive but the ritual always was. The point is that tasteful hedonism was very much around me growing up before I had the words for it.

Take your earphones out.

Sometimes I purposefully don’t wear my earphones on the tube. I notice more, it puts things into perspective. The nurse who’s had a much harder day than me, the finance bro who is asking ChatGPT for dating advice, the old man who’s reading the paper. I’ll be honest, if the tube is not as busy I’d rather have them in because somehow it is weirdly comforting.

Plenty more where this came from. But this is a good start. Follow it loosely, or not at all, it’s your life.

I have spent more time saving restaurants than eating in them. I suspect you have too. And somewhere along the way we started calling that having taste.

We scroll, we save, we screenshot and we tell ourselves we are gathering something useful. But we are not actually living, and that is the cost nobody really talks about. Yes, doing the thing can be costly. But so is spending your time on the preview of it, and at least one of those leaves you with something real.

Real taste does not accumulate, it filters, and the only way to filter anything is to actually put yourself through it.

Taste has always been framed as something you buy into, which is convenient for everyone trying to sell it to you. It has historically been used as a social tool, a way of signalling belonging and maintaining distance, which is why the people who defined it had every reason to keep it feeling exclusive, inherited, and out of reach. The world does not particularly want you to have taste. It wants you to have preferences it can monetise, opinions it can aggregate, and an aesthetic it can sell back to you in a slightly different format next season.

Taste, real taste, is harder to package than that. You can have all the access in the world and still not know what to do with it. Money can get you in the room but it cannot tell you how to feel when you are there. That part is on you.

You can often notice that when people do not know what they actually want or actually need they buy things, because buying into the feeling is much easier than embodying it yourself. And an entire industry exists to make sure it stays that way.

So what do you do about it?

You have to actually go

Nobody is saying drop everything and live more fully. Life is expensive and complicated and most people are doing it in whatever increments they can. But the process begins in the moments you do get, ordering the thing, saying yes, speaking to the person next to you, staying too late, getting it genuinely wrong. The getting it wrong part matters more than people tend to admit, partly because nobody posts about it.

There is a particular kind of living that accelerates this. Hedonistic but paying attention, fully in and still noticing. Living and building at the same time. You are going for things and quietly, at the same time, refining them, because the appetite is what creates the material and you cannot edit a life you have not yet lived.

And then something feels off, not wrong exactly, just not quite right. You get the table everyone has been trying to get, the room is loud in the wrong way, the food is fine, and somewhere around the second course you realise the most interesting thing about the evening was getting in. Most people ignore that feeling, photograph the pasta, and tell everyone they loved it. Usually because they value trends over taste. But taste lives in that moment, the willingness to notice and then to move, to say “nope, that’s not for me”, even when that means admitting the thing everyone said was unmissable was not really for you.

It works the other way too. A recent example I can think of is before going to see Wuthering Heights at the cinema a friend sent me a terrible review and decided not to go with me, and it made me want to go even more. Not to be contrary, just because the more noise there is, the more important it becomes to form your own opinion. I went, I loved it, and even if I hadn’t, the judgement would have been mine. That felt like something worth protecting.

Discernment is the part no one really talks about

Preference is personal but unconsidered, and trend following is considered but not personal. Taste is what happens when the two meet, which is what I have always been trying to build towards, something that is both culturally aware and genuinely yours.

That distinction only sharpens over time, not through more consumption but through honesty about what actually landed and what did not. And this is not just about restaurants or hotels or places that look good in pictures. It is about anything you stayed in longer than you should have because it seemed right from the outside. The job that looked impressive and felt hollow the moment you were actually doing it. The relationship that made sense on paper but sat slightly off in a way you kept overriding. The friendship that was more about the dynamic than the actual person. The destination that used to feel like a discovery and now feels like a queue. You only know these things by actually going, and once you know them you cannot unknow them, which is inconvenient when everyone around you is still convinced it is worth it.

Knowing what you don’t need is not giving up

Modern culture locates taste in the choosing, the decisive well-documented act of selection, but that is taste as performance and performance is closer to aspiration than it is to anything real. The problem is that performance is also very easy to produce and very easy to consume, which is why feeds are full of it and why it is increasingly hard to tell the difference between someone who has taste and someone who has simply learned and mastered the visual language of it.

Real taste is quieter and less photogenic, and it is not restraint so much as the natural result of having tried enough things to understand what you do not need. Not borrowed, not performed, not served to you by an app that also knows what you watched at 2am and has strong opinions about what that says about you.

What you arrive at

Taste is not a collection but a conversation you have with your own experience over time, and what you arrive at is less a set of preferences than a set of refusals. The clearer those refusals become, the more precisely you are able to inhabit your own life.

That is the most countercultural thing you can do right now. Not the right reservation or the right reference or the carefully maintained aesthetic, just the quiet, ongoing work of understanding what is actually yours and choosing to live closer to that. Everything else is just content.

Anyone can fake taste. Very few people can live tastefully.

Maybe it is shared values. A shared sensibility. A mutual appreciation for good food, ritual, and taste, something I can thank my French side for. But more than that, I have always felt that Italians live well in a way that feels instinctive rather than learned.

It does not feel curated or carefully engineered. It is woven into daily life so deeply that it barely registers as a choice.

The slower pace. Recipes passed down through generations. A morning espresso taken standing at the bar. Lunches that stretch into the afternoon. We romanticise an idea of Italy, and while reality is far more complex, something still holds true. Pleasure is not something to earn, schedule, or postpone. It is folded into the day as it already exists.

It feels simple. And yet almost impossible to replicate.

The Packaged Ideal

Culture is not aesthetic. It is accumulated habit, climate, history, language, religion, economics. You cannot import the terrace without importing the structure that sustains it.

What reaches us is the packaged version. The edit. The exportable ideal. And we buy into it because it offers something we quietly lack: permission to live well without justification.

Just think about how successfully Aperol has sold Italy in a bottle. Sunlight, leisure, orange glow, all contained in something you can order at a London bar.

“The sweetness of doing nothing”

There is an Italian expression, la dolce far niente.
The sweetness of doing nothing.

Easy for an Italian. Incredibly uncomfortable for almost everyone else.

Outside of Italy, it does not quite translate. Especially if you’re British. That doesn’t make us bad or wrong. It simply means we’re different.

English language was not built to hold states of being in the way Latin languages are. It was built to resolve meaning quickly. To ask what something is for. To move forward.

We struggle with doing nothing unless it’s a holiday, a weekend, or something safely labelled as laziness.

We inherited a culture built on keeping calm and carrying on. Whether we accept it or not, that shapes how comfortable we are with stillness and pleasure.

Life now is organised around output, optimisation, and speed. Time is measured and justified. Even rest is expected to serve a function. Even pleasure is framed as a reward or recovery tool, something that helps us return to productivity. In that context, doing nothing does not feel sweet. It feels irresponsible.

But when Italians speak about doing nothing, they are not referring to laziness, they are describing presence. Allowing time to stretch without guilt. Being fully inside a moment that is not productive or impressive. That phrase exists because the culture protects it. The infrastructure holds it.

Optimisation and Accountability

That is not to say Italy has avoided modern life. It has simply resisted allowing optimisation to reorganise everything.

Pasta is a good example. It hasn’t been endlessly updated. It has been protected. Not out of resistance to progress, but out of respect for what already works.

That same respect applies to everyday rhythm. Long lunches remain. Shops close. Evenings stretch. Not because efficiency or optimisation was never considered, but because those rhythms serve something deeper than productivity.

I noticed this when we were out for dinner at 9.30pm on a monday evening. The restaurant we ended up in was full of locals, I had a large plate of delicious fresh pasta that was actually very reasonably priced and a glass of wine that was rather generous. The table next to us was filled with a large family, the grandparents were there too. Plates were passed back and forth. Food kept coming, and even past 10pm - shocking. And there was no sign of them leaving any time soon.

I loved it. Mostly because I’m not used to seeing that in London. And what stayed with me was how little explanation was required. No one questioned why we stayed so long, ate so slowly, or let the evening stretch into itself. There was no sense that enjoyment needed justifying, or that time had to be defended. In London, moments like this tend to come with an excuse or some form of reason. We explain why we deserve them. We frame them as treats. We save them for later. Even rest must prove its usefulness.

I don’t want to postpone enjoyment. I don’t want it to sit somewhere in the future, waiting for a holiday or a milestone. I want to live with it now, as things already are. And the truth is, I do. Rome just made me realise how much time I spend explaining that. Softening it. Making it sound reasonable. Translating something that, there, doesn’t need translating at all.

Our circumstances are different, of course. Italy isn’t perfect and London isn’t broken. But I have always instinctively prioritised enjoyment. Not in a reckless way. Not at the expense of ambition. I just never felt that building something meant I had to rush through my own life in the process.

Rome didn’t change how I live. It clarified it.

A reminder to live well now, not later. Not only when in Rome.

It has made me wonder whether what we need now is something different.

Bourdain came along when travel was mostly something you watched or read about. Critics, guidebooks and television shaped what places were meant to be like. Travel culture was polished and aspirational, and for many people it existed more as an idea than a reality.

Travel was not completely inaccessible, but it often felt out of reach unless you knew how to do it properly.

Bourdain pushed against that.

He used to say travel is not always pretty. That was not cynicism. It was honesty. He showed that travel was not about getting things right, but about experiencing it. The people, the food, the awkwardness, and the moments that were not polished to perfection.

He took travel off the pedestal and put it back at human level. By doing that, he made it feel less precious and less intimidating, which mattered at a time when access still felt gated.

The shift from access to too much choice

That is not the world we are in now.

Experience is everywhere. Movement is normal. Eating out is normal. Trying things is normal. If anything, it never really stops. Even when you think you are doing enough, there is always something else you could be doing. Another place. Another restaurant. Another trip. Another option that might be better than the one you chose.

Experience quietly turns into something you chase, rather than something you are actually in. Not because people are shallow or greedy, but because access exploded without coming with a manual for how to choose.

Bourdain did what was needed at the time. He helped lower the barrier when access felt intimidating. Now that barrier is gone. Access is not the problem anymore.

The harder part is knowing how to move inside it.

Taste inside abundance

Choice is great until it becomes overwhelming. At that point, taste becomes an essential tool for navigating too much choice.

Taste used to operate as a marker of status. It signalled access, exposure, and belonging, shaped by class, education, geography, and circumstance. When choice was limited, taste formed through constraint. Life did much of the filtering.

What has changed is not inequality, but abundance. For those living inside expanded access, experience is constant. Options rarely narrow themselves. Choice stays open longer than it used to.

So taste has shifted. It no longer functions primarily as a signal of status. It has become a way of filtering choice. A way of deciding, stopping, and letting something be enough.

Taste has not become pretentious or elitist. It has become necessary. It is not about knowing what is best, but about knowing when to stop choosing.

It is the ability to decide, commit, and enjoy without constantly second guessing yourself. And because no one really teaches that skill anymore, people feel overwhelmed even when they are doing all the “right” things.

Small moments of hesitation

I notice this in myself often, in small everyday moments.

Like leaving a social event early and questioning my decision. Or going to a restaurant and being asked where I would like to sit. Every option looks good. None of them are bad. Nothing is really at stake. And yet I still pause.

I look around for a moment too long. Window or corner. Inside or outside. I might ask what they recommend, not because I cannot decide, but because once I choose, the decision closes. Sitting down means committing. Letting the other options go.

And then, a few minutes later, the moment settles. Conversation starts. Food arrives. Nothing was wrong. There never was.

That small hesitation tells me a lot. Not about restaurants, but about how unused I had become to letting decisions be final. How often I kept my options mentally open, even after choosing. Not because I wanted the perfect option, but because I did not always trust myself to choose and then relax into that choice.

Tasteful hedonism in practice

In a world of unlimited choice, algorithms and artificial intelligence, choosing for yourself and letting that be enough feels quietly rebellious now.

This feels like a natural evolution of what Bourdain helped make possible. He encouraged people to move when access was limited. Now the challenge is different.

It is not about doing more. It is about knowing how to move inside infinite choice without losing yourself to it.

For me, this is what Tasteful Hedonism looks like in practice. Not excess. Not restraint. Wanting more, without losing sight of what is already here. Choosing, and then letting that choice land.

I care about living well. I am quite existential in that way. Deeply aware of how short life is and how little of it we are actually entitled to. I do not experience that awareness as panic, but it does keep me wide awake.

I don’t want to spend my life chasing a better version of it that I might never arrive at. This might be the best one I get. And if that is true, I would rather enjoy it while it is happening than always reaching for what comes next.

Learning how to be content, knowing when to say yes and when to say no inside that noise, is not complacency. It is a skill. And increasingly, it feels like a superpower.

Tasteful Hedonism, in that sense, is not about refinement or status. It is the ability to filter, decide, and know when to stop. To enjoy the life you’re in without constantly scanning for what comes next.

Sometimes, it starts with something simple. Sitting down at the table you chose, and giving yourself permission to enjoy it.

Stay Trendie x

And I have realised over time, that feeling never quite gets old.

People do underestimate content creation, but creating content, with my iPhone, has been my way into places I would never have accessed otherwise. I have found myself at dinner in the Four Seasons in South Africa, on rooftops in New York, on yachts in the Caribbean, in a michelin-level chef’s home, even in the middle of Champagne drinking champagne. And whilst I was there to do content, sometimes, if I was lucky, there would be an extra seat. I have always seen this as an opportunity because I never felt like I should really be there. I was simply grateful to get a seat at the table.

Growing up in a French household, my mum always said that if you are invited somewhere, you must bring something to the table. In France it is a sign of respect. I know she meant it literally, but with time I realised it does not have to be something tangible. It can be your skill. Your energy. And if you have neither that day, bring the champagne. The point is, bring value. Do not turn up empty handed because you are there to add, not to simply take.

Content was what I brought to the table. It was my value. My currency. It opened doors and experiences that people would pay a lot of money for.

And whilst these experiences were incredible, for me, it has really been about the people, the conversations, and the way someone can shift your perspective, that have made these moments invaluable.

Access is not the same as depth

We live in a culture that is obsessed with getting in. The table. The trip. The room. The list. The invitation. We’ve made access the goal. And social media has made it worse because now you don’t just want to be in the room, you want to be seen in the room.

But access without depth is just tourism. You pass through places and experiences without leaving anything behind or taking anything real with you. You get the seat but you sit there quietly hoping no one asks you a question. You get the invitation but you spend the evening performing rather than connecting.

I’ve seen it at so many tables. People who paid a lot of money to be there but had nothing to say. People who had every reason to be in the room but couldn’t actually be present in it. And I’ve seen people who had no obvious reason to be there but changed the entire energy just by being genuinely interested in everyone around them.

The seat is not the point. What you do with it is.

Curiosity is capital

Before any of this, I have always been someone who pays attention. I like to meet new people. I naturally notice things others might miss. I love asking questions. I look at everything as research. And that is where you start to build capital. Not the kind you pay for, but the kind you grow through curiosity.

Curiosity compounds. The more you notice, ask, learn, absorb, the more depth you build. That depth becomes capital. You can have all the privilege, money, and access in the world and still bring nothing to the table.

The other night reminded me of this. A friend invited me last minute because there was an extra seat, and I was not going to turn it down. The table was full of people I admire. And I sat there thinking, this is exactly why I make a conscious effort to always say yes. You never know which room or which person will expand your worldview.

What you bring matters more than where you sit

And that is the real point. People chase a seat so much they forget to ask the real question. What am I bringing when I get there.

This is something I think about a lot. We talk endlessly about access. How to get into the right rooms. How to network. How to be seen. But we rarely talk about what happens once you’re in. Whether you added anything. Whether the room was different because you were in it. Whether you actually connected with anyone or just collected the experience.

For me, that is what being Trendie is. Staying curious. Staying awake. Noticing. Listening. You are not just experiencing things. You are building yourself at the same time. When you focus on what you bring to the table rather than what you can take from it, you show up with something instead of showing up with expectations.

That is how you become rich without having to be rich.

The moment you decide you know it all is when you’ll probably stop getting invited.

Not in life. Not in people. Not in the world beyond your own head.

This sounds obvious, but it is quietly becoming harder than ever.

We are increasingly self interested, not because we are selfish, but because we are constantly turned inward. Whether that’s tracking ourselves, improving ourselves, monitoring how we look, sound, perform, optimise. Everyone and their dog is telling you that you are behind, inefficient, underdeveloped, or one habit away from being better.

So attention collapses inward.

We become more isolated than ever, yet more observed than ever. More self conscious than ever. And when your focus is always on how you are doing, how you are perceived, how you could be doing more, how interesting you are, there is very little space left to be interested in anything else.

But interest requires outward attention.

Being interesting is not about having better stories. It is about having better awareness.

When you are genuinely interested, you do not just take things in and move on. You take them in and respond to them. You question them. You notice how they land. There is a quiet internal filtering that starts to happen. I liked that. I didn’t like that. That stayed with me. That disappeared immediately.

That filtering matters.

It is how taste is formed.

Interest turns experience into information about yourself. It teaches you what resonates, what drains you, what excites you, what nourishes you. Over time, those tiny reactions accumulate into discernment. You stop outsourcing your judgement. You begin trusting your internal compass.

It is intuition rooted in pattern recognition and lived experience.

It only works when you are present enough to feel your own responses instead of overriding them with logic, trends, or optimisation advice.

If you want to become more interesting, the first step is both simple and uncomfortable. Pay attention to things that are not about yourself.

This does not mean becoming passive or disappearing. It means lifting your gaze. Letting your attention land somewhere other than your own internal monologue. Allowing yourself to be in relationship with the world rather than constantly monitoring your place within it.

Start small. Notice things. Literally anything.

The way someone orders coffee. How people speak differently depending on who they are with. What a place feels like at different times of day. What changes when you slow down, even slightly.

Interest is built through noticing, not consuming.

Being interested also means letting go of the need to extract value immediately. Not every observation needs to become content. Not every moment needs to be useful. Interest grows when curiosity is allowed to exist without outcome. This is where depth forms quietly, without performance.

This is also why some of the most aspirational people are not the most optimised ones. They are the ones who can live inside their own lives freely. Not narrating themselves constantly. Not rushing to improve the moment they are in. Comfortable inhabiting their own experience.

Depth does not come from endless self improvement. It comes from relationship with the world.

Stay open. Stay curious…

Your attention is the product.
Your peace is the threat.

Because the second you slow down, you start questioning, you choose more intentionally, you stop feeding the system. You stop buying into the noise. You stop being easy to sell to. And that makes people, and the system, uncomfortable.

When you’re calm, you’re harder to control. When you’re grounded, you start questioning things. When you’re at peace, you’re not chasing validation, and that’s bad for business.

The truth is, everything around you is designed to keep you in motion. Always chasing or escaping. Chasing the next version of yourself. Escaping the version you already are. Buy this. Book that. Optimise everything. Then call it balance.

Even wellness became a business. Rest became content. Healing turned into something you could sell. The system stopped selling stress and started selling self-care. It stopped shouting and started whispering, you can be better.

Same thing. Different font.

We’ve been wired to believe peace is something you have to earn. That calm comes after the burnout, the breakthrough, the proving. That if you buy the right things or follow the right routines, you’ll finally feel it.

But peace isn’t a product. It isn’t made. It doesn’t sell.

It’s rare because it can’t be packaged. It doesn’t perform. It doesn’t feed the system.

Peace is bad for business because it’s real. It slows you down. Makes you pay attention. You start seeing things for what they are. You stop needing what they’re selling. You stop mistaking chaos for purpose. You stop performing your life and start living it.

And at first, it can feel lonely. You start noticing how fast everyone’s moving, how distracted everyone is, how disconnected we’ve all become from our own lives. You stop needing noise, and suddenly you see how much of your world was built on it.

You start to notice that people don’t know how to meet you in your stillness. The conversations that once kept you hooked start to feel empty. The constant motion that used to excite you just feels loud. And even though you’ve never felt more like yourself, you’ve never felt more out of sync.

That’s what no one tells you about peace. It’s quiet, but it’s not always comfortable. You lose the chaos, and the belonging that came with it. Until you realise the right kind of belonging doesn’t live there anyway.

Peace doesn’t make you louder. It makes you clear. And clarity is dangerous in a world that thrives on confusion.

But this is NOT about checking out. It’s about checking back in, to your life, your body, your choices.

And for a long time, no one made space for that. A space for people who want to live and build at the same time. For those who want to embrace freedom without sacrificing their ambition. Who want to live and build a life they don’t want to escape from.

That’s where Tasteful Hedonism® comes in.

It’s the antidote to modern living. The middle ground between chaos and control. Between burnout and escape. It’s the practice of pursuing pleasure without losing yourself. Of living fully and building intentionally.

It’s booking the trip because it feels right, not because it’ll look good. It’s ordering the champagne and actually tasting it. It’s long dinners that make you forget that it’s a tuesday night. It’s doing work that excites you but doesn’t consume you.

It’s pleasure that fills you, not empties you.

Because pleasure without peace is just another high. And peace without pleasure is just existing.

That’s the balance. That’s Tasteful Hedonism®. Knowing when to reach for more and when to stay still. How to enjoy without escaping. How to build without burning out. How to feel deeply without falling apart.

Peace isn’t passive. It’s rebellion. It’s knowing you already have enough and still choosing to build more.

It’s being in the moment while creating the next. Knowing it’s not about getting to the finish line, but enjoying getting there and still getting there.

That’s what Trendie® was built on. The space that didn’t exist until now. A world where peace and pleasure coexist. Where living and building happen at the same time.

No one profits from your peace, but you.

So, protect it like it’s your job.

I know this because I help build the performance.

That’s my job. I work with brands and creators to tell stories, shape perception, build worlds that people want to be part of. I understand how visibility works. I know what makes someone stop scrolling. I know how to make a moment feel aspirational, shareable, worth saving. I’m good at it.

And I still catch myself performing my own life.

Still curating. Still optimising. Still reaching for my phone before I’ve finished feeling the thing I’m about to document. Still caught in the loop of productivity, aesthetics, engagement. Of always needing to do, show, prove.

That’s the part nobody talks about. Not just that we live inside a performance culture, but that even the people who can see exactly how it works still get pulled in. Knowing how the trick works doesn’t make you immune to it. It just makes it lonelier when you notice yourself doing it anyway.

The machine

What began as connection turned into performance somewhere along the way. Every post, every plan, every part of life, optimised, curated, measured. We’ve become fluent in metrics but numb to meaning.

The algorithm doesn’t measure presence. It doesn’t reward inner peace. It tracks output. Clicks. Consistency. Conversion.

But it’s not just Instagram. Or TikTok. It’s the job interview that wants a five-year plan. It’s the CV that needs a perfect gap-free timeline. It’s the subtle pressure to always have something to show for your time.

The metrics might be digital, but the mindset is deeply societal.

We’ve internalised this algorithm. We track ourselves. We optimise our days. We feel guilty for slowing down, as if rest isn’t productive enough to be justified. Success has become a scoreboard. And presence? Peace? Joy that isn’t shared? It doesn’t count.

And before you even realise it, you’re no longer living for yourself. You’re living to be seen.

What I see from the inside

I’ve sat in meetings where we’ve planned how to make something look effortless. I’ve helped brands manufacture the exact feeling of spontaneity. I’ve watched content get reshoot four times to look like it was captured in the moment.

I’m not criticising it. That’s the craft. And when it’s done well, it genuinely moves people. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me question where the line is. Between storytelling and performing. Between sharing something real and producing a version of real that’s easier to consume.

The people I work with aren’t dishonest. Most of them genuinely love what they do. But the system they’re inside, the one I’m inside too, rewards the performance of a life more reliably than the living of one. And over time that does something to you.

You start producing content about living instead of just living. You share the moment while simultaneously stepping outside it to document it. It becomes second nature. But it’s not neutral. There’s a cost.

The more we perform, the less we feel. And the less we feel, the more we need validation to fill the gap.

The cost of not feeling

No one really talks about how exhausting it is to constantly be visible.

The pressure to stay relevant. The pressure to create. The pressure to make your life your brand. It’s a kind of quiet burnout, not necessarily from doing too much, but from not feeling enough.

We end up disconnected from ourselves, even while being hyper-connected to everyone else. We over-schedule. We over-share. We optimise every minute of our day, and yet we forget to actually be in any of it.

And I get it. Feeling is hard.

Feeling means pausing. It means being honest. It means facing the gap between how life looks and how it actually feels. And that’s scary. Especially when your work depends on how things look.

I notice it in small moments. When I’m at a dinner and my first instinct is to photograph it before I’ve tasted anything. When something good happens and my second thought, not my first but close, is how to share it. When I catch myself framing a moment for an audience before I’ve let myself be in it.

Those moments used to pass without me noticing. Now I catch them. And catching them is the whole point.

The return to feeling

I didn’t create Trendie to tell people how to live. I created it because I needed a different way to live myself.

A way that let me be ambitious and present. Creative and grounded. Online and still in touch with my own inner world.

I didn’t want to be another burnout case from a life that looked great on paper but left me feeling numb. And I didn’t want to opt out entirely because I love what I do. I love building. I love creating. I love the craft of making something feel like something.

I just needed to make sure I was still feeling something too.

It’s not about rejecting performance altogether. It’s about reclaiming presence. It’s not about opting out of ambition. It’s about redefining it on your terms. It’s not about never sharing again. It’s about making sure what you do share is coming from a place that’s real.

We start small. We start by checking in with how something feels, not just how it looks. We post less but mean more. We let rest be productive. We remind ourselves that success isn’t a metric, it’s a state of being.

And maybe we stop trying so hard to perform the life, and let ourselves feel it again.

That’s where the real hedonism lives. Not in the excess, but in the depth. Not in the applause, but in the aliveness.

And that’s what makes it tasteful.