My Taste is Not Myself (462 words)

It occurred to me recently that we often mistake our passions for our selves.

One time in college, a professor had us go around and introduce ourselves and say what our passion was. I said mine was aesthetics.

I was smitten—still am—with the look of things, with the sound and taste and touch of them. With art and design, mainly. In my 20s, I would sit in my apartment, cutting images out of Wallpaper magazine and pasting them into a spiral notebook. There was a look I was going for, a look I wanted for my whole life, a look I loved as much as a person can love something.

Along with having a strong sense of aesthetics came the conviction that my taste was correct, that in fact, there was objectively good taste and bad taste, good and bad art, and nothing subjective about these matters. I clung to this belief for many years, and my sense of aesthetics—and the judgments that flowed forth from that sense—I unconsciously believed to be the true me. Who I was, deep down, was my finely attuned sensory antenna.

For most of us, if we're lucky, our passion has something to do with our work or a hobby. We love some genre of music, or solving puzzles, or comic books, or being in nature, or helping people, and we explore this passion, and it becomes a part of who we are and how we spend our time. We become aficionados in our passion.

But if we’ve mistaken our passion for our innermost self, then when something inevitably comes along to threaten or diminish that passion, it feels like an existential, life-or-death threat. At some unconscious level, I think I used to believe that without my sense of aesthetics, I may as well not exist.

But there is a core selfhood in us, more fundamental than anything associated with passions, personality, or identity. That essential self has nothing to do with all the things we think matter. It has nothing to do with stuff or status, with displays of erudition or style or power, or anything else we think is so important in this life. Those things—those material things of this material existence—are not ultimately important. They are not what we will think about on our deathbeds.

Don’t get me wrong: having a passion is one of the things that makes life worth living. It’s one of the great gifts of this existence. But I no longer mistake my sense of taste for myself. I still care about aesthetics deeply, but I am far less certain about taste than I was when I was younger. I am far less decided, and surprisingly, this feels not like a loss or a defeat, or some kind of death. It feels like freedom.