Taste as the Defining Human Trait
Why the future belongs to those who can still feel
Taste as the Defining Human Trait
Automation made creation infinite, but it also made meaning scarce. This reframes taste as humanity’s last real edge. It’s the ability to sense what’s alive beneath what’s optimized. The future will not belong to those who make the most, but to those who can still feel what’s real.
The Infinite Buffet
The algorithm learned to paint like Caravaggio on a Tuesday.
By Wednesday, it could write like Hemingway, compose like Simone, and design with the precision of Vignelli.
Oh, and by Friday? It had generated seventeen thousand sunsets.
Each one technically flawless, each one utterly forgettable. Similar to the 812 on my phone I've never looked at.
We thought abundance would feel like freedom. Instead, it feels like drowning in a sea where every wave looks identical. Is it one more? Is it the same one?
There’s a specific exhaustion that comes from scrolling through "content" that doesn’t move you. The Instagram feed that feels like a buffet where everything tastes like NY-littered cardboard shaped into a baker's dozen flowers.
The Spotify playlist where every song has the right BPM but none of them make you pull your car over like Cornell's voice did me the first time I listened to Say Hello 2 Heaven with the top down. The design trends that look expensive but feel cheap because you can guess the prompt they used based on what you're looking at.
This isn’t the fault of the creators. They’re doing everything “right.” Following the frameworks. Hitting the metrics.
The problem is what the f*ck does "right" mean anymore?
Creating for the sake of what was once deemed "right" has snowballed into creators chasing the algorithm with stuff they don't believe in faster than Buddy The Elf hurling snowballs.
The machine can make anything now… anything except the thing that makes you feel something.
Taste used to separate the connoisseur from the consumer. Now it separates the living from the automated. It’s not about knowing which wine pairs with fish. I couldn't tell you the the first thing about either.
It’s about knowing which silence feels sacred. And which scream actuallys slows your heartbeat down.
The Death of Novelty
Every creator recognizes the moment, the split second between having an idea and realizing it’s already been done seventeen ways before breakfast. Not similar. Identical. AI didn’t democratize creation. It obliterated novelty.
You can smash out 4 variations of an output in Mid Journey with a single prompt, create 4 variations of each of them, and have them all animate with another click - in less than 5 minutes.
That used to take weeks. Hell it would've taken Walt a helluva lot longer than that.
We’re living in the first era where every possible variation has been exhausted before lunch. Every color combination. Every typographic pairing. Every story beat. Every chord progression that doesn’t sound wrong.
The creative landscape can start to look like a beach after high tide - infinite sand, nothing new to discover.
So we started asking the wrong question: How do I make something no one’s seen before?
I sure have. Apple's "Think Different" campaign crosses my mind every time I work with a new client. It's become a default way of thinking to "be different".
The question I'm asking now: How do I make something that feels alive?
Because taste isn’t about originality. Ever heard Johnny Cash's version of Hurt? That's right. That wasn't originally his song. Now it is. Ask Trent Reznor himself.
It’s about resonance. The thing that makes your nervous system recognize home before your brain can name it.
The painting that doesn’t just look beautiful but makes your chest tighten. The poem that doesn’t just convey meaning but changes your breathing after you remember that one morning with that one person. The guitar riff that doesn’t just resolve musically but resolves something in you that you didn’t know needed resolution.
That’s not pattern recognition. That’s attunement.
Attunement as Survival
Taste is what happens when all five senses collapse into a single pulse of recognition. It’s synesthetic… the color that sounds like rain, the song that tastes like summer, the design that feels like finally sitting down after standing all day.
It’s not learned from courses. It’s not extracted from data sheets. It’s calibrated through lived experience. Through the accumulation of moments where something made you stop and feel more human.
When something created by another human you never met helped you understand something about yourself you never knew.
The AI can analyze what made Caravaggio revolutionary. It can replicate his chiaroscuro, generate a thousand paintings that follow his visual logic.
But it cannot experience the specific darkness that made him paint light that way. It cannot feel the weight of divine absence that made him obsess over illumination.
And that obsession wouldn't impact the entire history of how light is used across all mediums to the point I learn about it in my Art History class my senior year of high school hundreds of years later.
The machine makes images. The human makes meaning.
Meaning isn’t information. It's not input. Meaning is what happens when experience collides with recognition… when you see something and think, Oh. That. Yes. Exactly that.
This is why taste becomes the defining economic asset. Not because it’s rare, but because it’s real.
In a world where everything can be generated, the only thing that can’t be faked is the feeling of being seen.
From an album that makes you realize that somebody else's heart may be just as broken as yours to a Tik Tok comment making you realize "Oh, wait. Somebody does have as dark of humor as me."
The brands that survive won’t be the ones with the most impressive technology. They’ll be the ones whose aesthetic fingerprint feels like hanging out at your childhood best friend's house.
The artists who matter won’t be the ones who generate the most content. They’ll be the ones whose work lands like a long-lost letter written specifically to you.
The leaders who rise won’t be the ones who simply optimize systems. They’ll be the ones who can sense what’s missing from the room before anyone knows how to articulate it.
The Rebellion of Discernment
Restraint has been misunderstood. People mistake it for minimalism as if taste means owning fewer things, using fewer words, or making quieter art.
But taste isn’t restraint for its own sake. It’s discernment, the ability to feel what the moment actually needs.
Sometimes the right move is silence. Other times it’s a symphony. Less can be sacred, but more can be holy if it makes the work come alive.
Taste is what tells you when you’ve added enough color to wake something up, or when one more stroke will drown it. It’s not austerity. It’s awareness.
Creative restraint is beautiful when it’s chosen - when you cut from instinct, not imitation. But copying someone else’s restraint is just another form of excess. It’s abundance wearing minimalist clothes.
Taste is the intelligence behind the choice. The nerve that knows when to burn hotter, when to hold back, when to walk away. It’s what separates design from decoration, emotion from noise, alive from almost.
Like Miles Davis shaping silence into music by giving the notes some space, presence itself becomes the work. As Virgil Abloh showed through remix, sometimes three percent is all you need to make something breathe again. The point isn’t less or more. It’s alive or not.
The Last Human Language
In ten years, everyone will have AI that can make anything.
The difference won’t be what you can make. It’ll be what you can feel is worth making. It'll still be the same 24 hours. I don't think anybody's cracked that yet.
This isn’t about gatekeeping. It’s about presence.
It's about developing the sensory intelligence in your nervous system to know when something has soul and when it’s just technical proficiency. It’s about refusing to let your creative instinct atrophy just because the machine can execute "something" faster.
The future doesn’t belong to the people with the best tools. OpenAI exists for this reason. It belongs to the people with the most calibrated nervous systems. The ones who can walk into a room and sense what’s missing, the ones who can look at a hundred options and feel which one breathes.
Taste is not luxury. Taste is literacy.
And just like literacy separates those who can decode meaning from those who can only see shapes, taste will separate those who can create resonance from those who can only generate output.
The algorithm can replicate your work, but not your wonder. Not that child-like curiosity we all used to have.
That’s yours. That’s human. That’s the signal the machine will spend eternity trying to decode while you’re already three moves ahead, following the pulse of something it will never feel.
The world is about to get very loud. Very fast. Very full of things that look right but feel wrong.
Your job isn’t to compete with the noise.
Your job is to remember what silence sounds like.
The machine makes everything. Taste makes it matter.
