Everyone is trying to sell you taste - don't buy it
On borrowed taste, the confidence gap, and why yours was never missing.
No one wants to tell you that your own trend is the only trend worth following.
Full stop.
The English language doesn’t have a word for what I’m describing when I say your own trend. Intuition loses most people immediately. The closest we get is taste. Knowing before you can justify it. Deciding before anyone can talk you out of it.
Everyone has taste. We’re just made to feel like ours isn’t good enough.
Somewhere along the way taste became associated with money, access, a certain postcode. And someone called that having good taste. So everyone who didn’t have those things decided they didn’t have taste at all. But that was never taste. That was exposure. More reps, more refinement, more rooms to walk into and develop the knowing. The faculty is, and always was, yours. Others might have just had more opportunities to use theirs.
Money buys exposure. It never bought taste.
The person who knows when something is enough, that’s taste. Unrefined maybe. Undeveloped in certain directions. But entirely real, entirely theirs, and entirely free.
You were born with preferences before anyone taught you to have them. The raw faculty exists before the world gets to it. And it does.
The Confidence Gap
The world needs you to be trendy. Which is exactly why no one’s going to tell you what I’m about to.
Here is a paradox nobody in the attention economy wants you to notice. The entire apparatus, the influencers, the algorithms, the trend cycles, the tastemakers, none of it actually wants you to have taste. What it wants is for you to have borrowed taste. Someone else’s knowing, worn as your own, requiring constant renewal. That’s trendy. Trendie is having your own. Because a person who knows exactly what they like and trusts that knowing completely is, from a commercial standpoint, essentially useless. You cannot sell anything to someone who has already decided.
We don’t actually need a lot. We need connection, ritual, presence. Things you cannot actually package. But we’re made to feel like we need 20 different beauty products and a routine to fix the thing that was never broken. And that gap is worth billions.
Which is why the question worth asking isn’t why people follow trends. That part is obvious and fairly forgivable. The more interesting question is why the confidence gap exists at all. Why is it that most people have perfectly good instincts and yet somehow cannot bring themselves to trust them without permission. And the answer, once you look for it, is everywhere. Like the film you won’t watch until someone tells you it’s worth your time. Or the self help book that makes you feel broken enough to buy the next one.
The gap is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is infrastructure. Carefully maintained infrastructure, because the moment it closes, the whole thing stops working. It worked through comparison, through rating systems that turned subjective experience into a score, through feeds that showed you what everyone else was choosing until your own instinct started to feel like not enough. And now, having spent years eroding your taste, the attention economy is trying to sell it back to you. Pre-packaged, at a premium price. Wellness got tired. So now it's onto the next profitable thing. Taste.
But you cannot buy taste.
Your taste is there. But maintaining it is a practice. And a difficult one in this economy.
The invisible string / gut instinct / taste.
Your taste is the thing that runs underneath every good decision you’ve ever made, every right turn, every moment that felt genuinely yours. It’s always there. You just lose sight of it. Constantly. Not because you’re weak or unoriginal but because there is an enormous amount of noise designed specifically to make you lose sight of it. I think about it like a piece of string. Lose it and you drift further from yourself. Follow someone else’s and yours disappears entirely. Every time you make a decision and back yourself, that’s you keeping hold of your string.
We just needed to be reminded. Often.
Following is the default. It’s how we’re wired. Socially, evolutionarily, culturally. We look to each other to know what’s safe, what’s wanted, what’s worth having. That instinct kept us alive for thousands of years and now it’s being used to sell us things. So not following isn’t just a lifestyle choice. It’s quietly radical. It goes against something deep and biological. Which is why it’s hard. Which is why most people don’t do it. Which is why the people who do are trendie without even trying.
None of us are really immune to this. I certainly am not. I still find myself checking reviews before going somewhere. Checking the Rotten Tomatoes score on a film I’m about to watch. Or asking Claude whether something sounds right. It has never been easier to get validation. We have every tool possible. But those same tools are what keep us questioning whether our decisions are good enough. What I try to practise is going anyway. Watching it anyway. Posting it anyway. Even when it’s much easier not to, and much more comfortable to sit through something you already know is good. It’s a necessity in this day and age to do it for no one else but yourself. If it was terrible, you know. If it was great, you know that too. Either way you’re refining your taste. And backing it.
Trendy vs Trendie
A trend is just collective approval moving in one direction at the same time. Enough people wanting the same thing at the same moment that it starts to feel like the obvious choice. Like taste, even though it isn’t. Following trends is outsourcing approval. Staying Trendie is not needing it. And doing the thing anyway.
Doing your own thing is the trendiest thing you can do.
Someone who is Trendie isn’t blind to trends. They’re culturally aware. They move with trends, but they don’t lose themselves to them. Because trends aren’t the enemy. They’re how culture moves. But a lot of it is noise. Things you don’t need, directions that aren’t yours. The real cost isn’t the money or the time, it’s what it does to your taste. Every time you follow something that isn’t yours you move slightly further from the thread.
That’s why Tasteful Hedonism is a practice. A constant returning. Your taste is the thing you keep hold of whilst you’re living fully. Lose it and you lose yourself. Tuning back in to what feels good, what feels yours, what feels true, that’s not a lifestyle choice. That’s how you stay in your own life. Anchored in taste that’s yours.
And the next time someone tries to sell you taste in pretty packaging, remember you already have it.
Stay Trendie x