You built a refined cage and called it taste
On the art of curating yourself into a corner.
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Fran Leibowitz often says, without apology, that she finds most people profoundly boring and has no interest in pretending otherwise. She says it in that particular Leibowitz way: not cruel, not performed, just stated, the way you’d report a weather condition. The audience or the interviewer usually laughs nervously.
Right now, everyone is talking about taste, especially here on Substack. Which references you’ve absorbed, whether you can tell the difference between something technically excellent and something that merely appeals to you, how to develop an eye that isn’t just a mirror of your algorithm. These are real ideas. The most interesting versions of the conversation, the ones asking whether taste is a skill, or how personal style gets swallowed by trend, are circling something true.
But they keep stopping at a particular door.
The door that opens onto the question of whether developing real taste requires you to sit with things that don’t want to make you comfortable. Not things that are bad. Things that are honest.
Susan Sontag was not comfortable. Neither was James Baldwin, nor Joan Didion at her sharpest. These are figures we claim to admire. We quote them in bios. We put their books on our shelves. What we don’t do, not with any real consistency, is let them actually land.
Sontag's argument in On Photography is that taking a picture is a way of refusing an experience converting it into something possessable, a souvenir, a proof which is not uncomfortable until you recognize that this is exactly what we do with ideas we admire. We collect them. We photograph them. We do not let them alter us.
Didion's argument in The White Album is the other side of the same problem. "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," she opens but the essay that follows is not a celebration of narrative. It is about what happens when the story stops holding. She describes imposing a narrative line upon disparate images, using ideas to freeze what is actually shifting and incoherent and what she's diagnosing is not a failure of intelligence but a survival mechanism. The stories work, and because they work, we never interrogate them. The problem is we rarely notice the moment they stop being true and start being protective.
These arguments don't ask you to agree. They ask you to hold still while the logic reaches you, and then recognize it in yourself.
Taste conversation should not just be about aesthetics.
The good news, or the version that feels true at first, is that we all have taste. It already lives inside us. This is something a lot of Substack writers on the topic have gotten genuinely right: taste isn’t about what’s trending, it’s about what lights you up before you’ve had a chance to talk yourself out of it. That quiet inner yes. The small spark before the justification kicks in. Most of us have had the experience of being drawn to something, a song, a room, jewellery, clothing or a sentence that we immediately second-guess because it doesn’t fit the aesthetic we’re performing.
The problem isn’t that we don’t have taste. The problem is that we’ve been trained to censor it. And the censorship has gotten very sophisticated.
We used to think the threat to taste was the algorithm. That infinite scroll and optimized feeds were flattening everything into a beige sameness, serving us back what we’d already clicked on, narrowing our world into a mirror. This is true and worth taking seriously. But there is a subtler version of the same problem that the algorithm conversation misses.
It is not just what we consume that has been shaped by the need to feel safe. It is who we are willing to hear.
Palatability, the condition of being acceptable to receive, has quietly become an ethical position. The idea, now widely internalized, is that discomfort in the receiving is evidence of harm in the delivery. That to be made uneasy by an argument is a legitimate reason to dismiss it. That the package determines the worth of the contents.
This is different from asking that ideas be made accessible. Accessibility matters. The willingness to translate, to meet a reader where they are, is a real form of generosity. But accessibility and palatability are not the same thing. One is about clarity. The other is about advance permission. And we have confused them so thoroughly that the confusion now shapes what we’re able to actually hear.
Leibowitz is not accessible in the palatability sense. Her way of covering topics can be considered terse, occasionally contemptuous, and entirely uninterested in softening her premises so you can feel held while you receive them. Neither was Sontag at her most rigorous dissecting how we sentimentalize suffering, how illness becomes metaphor before it becomes policy. These are uncomfortable arguments. Not because the delivery is hostile. Because they name something you already sensed and had been hoping to avoid.
You can usually tell where someone’s taste ends and their comfort zone begins by watching which parts of an argument they can hear. The parts that critique something they already distrust land cleanly. The parts that require them to hold still while the same logic is applied to something they’re invested in a community, a self-image, a belief they’ve organized their identity around suddenly require a different tone. More caveats, warmer framing, better manners.
Admiration is not the same as alignment. We know this intuitively when it comes to aesthetics, you can find a room beautiful without wanting to live in it. But we rarely apply it to ideas. We collect thinkers the way we collect references. We build a very curated library of voices we’ve decided represent our taste, and then we engage only with the parts of those voices that confirm what we already believe.
This is not just a taste problem. It is what happens when comfort becomes the unit of measure for a whole epistemic culture when the question shifts from “is this true” to “does receiving this feel okay.” Leibowitz, Baldwin, Sontag: we keep them on the shelf because they signal something about who we are. We don’t let them do what they actually do, which is make the existing map insufficient. A thinker who only confirms the map you already have isn’t a thinker you’ve actually read. They’re a reference you’ve acquired.
What would it actually mean to develop taste when it comes to how we think?
It would probably look uncomfortable. It would mean sitting with a Leibowitz or a Baldwin not just to extract the quotable parts but to follow the argument all the way to where it stops flattering you. It would mean noticing the moment you reach for a reason to dismiss something and asking whether that reason is principled or just protective.
The taste conversation has a lot of good ideas about how to train your eye. Fewer about how to train your tolerance for being genuinely unsettled by what you see or read.
The question isn’t whether every uncomfortable idea is worth your time. Not all friction is instructive. Some things are just wrong, or cruel, or not worth the energy.
The question is harder than it looks: what has actually moved you lately? Not upset you. Not offended you. Moved you in the direction of a thought you didn't have before.
If the answer keeps being same type of ideas by same thinkers, you haven’t developed taste.
You’ve built a very refined cage and called it a curation.
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Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and futurist writing Perceptio, exploring the honest contradiction between what categories expect and what only you can credibly do.
The palatability/accessibility confusion is doing so much work right now and nobody wants to say it out loud. You did. "Discomfort in receiving is evidence of harm in delivery" that's the whole conversation in one line.