On Personal Taste

The things that make life a little brighter

created: 2023.07.19. 06:46 · modified: 2024.03.08. 13:21 ·  · license

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• Summer
• The front seat on the right side of a city bus
• A thick, juicy beef patty that hasn’t been cooked to a crisp
• Villa Erbatium Mossy Glen
• Impressionist oil paintings with people in them
• A conifer forest glowing darkly in the faint sunlight

What do these things have in common?

They all give me a quiet sense of satisfaction. You could say they’re my kind of thing.

When I browse Instagram, I come across people around my age who are far better than I am at recognizing, exploring, and documenting their tastes. Looking at their feeds, I can see a subtle sensibility running through their posts—something quite different from the usual Instagram aesthetic. I have a lot of respect for people like that.

Lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about how important it is to identify exactly what you like. There are a few benefits:

• It keeps you exploring new things. You inevitably get used to old favorites. In seeking fresh experiences, you deepen your knowledge and widen your circle of acquaintances.
• It makes you grateful for chances to experience the things you like (summer comes around again!). That leads to a life full of happiness.
• It helps people remember you as a more fully rounded person. Which would stick in your mind longer: Geonhee Lee, an aerospace engineering student, or Geonhee Lee, who gets excited about rocket reentry technology?

There are levels to personal taste—not in the sense of good or bad, but in how much effort it takes to discover a particular preference. The items above, for example, are listed in order of increasing effort.

• I learned that I like summer more than winter simply by living through the seasons.
• To find out that I liked Mossy Glen, I had to go out of my way to ask a friend what perfume they were wearing the other day.
• If I hadn’t been able to visit a Canadian national park, I might have gone my whole life without knowing that I love conifer forests glowing in faint light.

There are things you already know you like, and others you discover unexpectedly at some moment in life, thinking, as the app’s name suggests, “Oh, wait—I like this?” Some you can discover only by seizing a rare opportunity. Others remain out of reach no matter how hard you try, unless the world gives you the chance.

My goal is not to miss a single chance to discover something I like, as long as the world makes it possible.

This way of thinking probably began when I started climbing in February last year—or perhaps the year before. I saw a friend’s story looking for someone to go with and tagged along out of curiosity. Climbing went on to become my biggest hobby for over a year. I would never have taken it up on my own. Until then, I’d pictured climbing as scaling a high cliff while hanging from a rope, and extreme sports like that weren’t for me. But the type of climbing I tried on my first day—bouldering—involved no ropes. The goal was to solve problems rather than climb high, and I loved it.

I was amazed by how different the reality was from what I’d imagined. I thought about all the fun things in the world I might have passed by out of vague assumptions or indifference, and resolved not to miss them anymore.

That was part of why I tried bungee jumping on a recent trip to New Zealand. Watching someone else jump from the observation deck did send my adrenaline surging, but the main reason I went ahead without hesitation was that, if I might like bungee jumping more than I expected, this was the perfect chance to find out. (Or so I tell myself to justify spending 70,000 won per second. Haha.) I didn’t come away thinking, “I can’t live without bungee jumping now,” but I did learn how much I like it and how much time and money I’d be willing to spend on it. That knowledge means a lot to me.

Once you’ve identified something you like, it’s just as important to remind yourself of it now and then. If it’s something you can’t easily enjoy in everyday life, you’re bound to forget about it even if you love it—like a song buried deep in an old playlist. The easiest way I can think of to start doing that is to decorate your room. In teen movies, don’t the main characters always have posters of movies and bands on their walls?

Keeping the things you love where you can see them every day can make life richer. I’ve moved around a lot—especially lately, when I’ve been living like a grasshopper—so I haven’t done much decorating myself. But I have done one thing: I bought a wire grid at Daiso and put up Life Four Cuts photo strips and travel photos I’d taken over the years. I already knew those photos so well that I could roughly describe their framing and poses without looking. Yet simply seeing them often gives them far more meaning than they had tucked away in a corner of my bookshelf. Being reminded that there are people I care about, who care about me in return—people who are my kind of people—makes life feel a little less lonely.

I’m skeptical about the metaverse, but another option is to fill my computer and phone wallpapers—which I look at far longer than my walls—with things I love.