You Don't Actually Know What You Like

Tasting blind. The only way to form an opinion that is actually yours.

There is some irony in a style publication making this argument. A website with opinions about what Paris just told us about fall dressing is not the most obvious place to suggest you stop taking cues from websites like this one. We are going to make it anyway and trust you to hold both things at once.

When wine tasters are told a wine is expensive, MRI scans show measurably increased activity in the brain's reward centers. Not increased satisfaction after the fact. Increased physical pleasure during the experience itself. The price does not change their opinion of the wine. It changes what the wine tastes like. The preference is real. It is just not about the wine.

This is not a story about gullible people. It is a story about all people. The brain does not separate the experience of a thing from the social information surrounding it. It never learned to because for most of human history there was no reason to. Price, scarcity, and desirability were reliable signals about what was actually worth wanting. The mechanism made sense once. It just did not anticipate the handbag industry.

Paul Giamatti in Sideways, 2004. The opinion formed before anyone poured a glass.

The Opinion That Formed Before the Sip

In 1990, Merlot was a perfectly respectable grape. By 2005 it was a punch line. Nothing changed about Merlot. A film came out in which a character worth identifying with announced, with some force, that he was not drinking Merlot. Sales dropped measurably across the country. People who had no strong feeling about the grape one way or the other decided they did not like it. The opinion formed upstream of any experience entirely.

Daniel Kahneman spent a career documenting the two systems the brain runs on. System 1 is fast and associative. It processes the price tag before you consciously register the glass. System 2 is slow and deliberate and capable of actually tasting the wine, but it is expensive to run and defers to System 1 whenever it can. The entire fashion industry, the trend cycle, the logo, the thirty second video, is engineered to reach System 1 before System 2 wakes up. Developing genuine taste is just the practice of slowing that process down.

This is the Sideways effect and it is not really about wine. It is about how social animals process information about taste and belonging. The character in the film had a point of view. The audience wanted the point of view without the years of attention that produced it. So they took the conclusion and left the thinking behind. Which is how you end up with a generation of people who know they don't like Merlot and cannot tell you why.

The fashion version of this runs on a shorter cycle but the mechanism is identical. A person worth identifying with wears something. The something becomes desirable. The desirability has nothing to do with the object and everything to do with the association. The brain's reward center does not distinguish between these. It just responds to the signal.

A vintage Daytona. The quality is real. That is not what is driving the preference.

The Objects

The Rolex. The Mercedes. The Chanel bag. The cashmere coat in a colorway that does not announce itself. Each one arrives pre-loaded with price information that the brain processes before the hands touch anything. The person who feels better wearing the Rolex is having a genuine experience. The question worth asking is whether that experience has anything to do with the watch or whether it would transfer to anything carrying the same price signal. It probably would. Which tells you something about what is actually being purchased.

None of this makes the objects bad. The Rolex keeps extraordinary time. The Mercedes is engineered to a standard most cars are not. The cashmere is actually softer. The quality is real. The problem is that the quality is not what is driving the preference in most cases. The preference was formed before anyone looked closely at the movement or sat in the car or ran a hand across the fabric. The conclusion arrived first. The experience came later and confirmed it, because that is what the brain does with conclusions it has already reached.

The Logo Turned Inward

There is a detail about French women and Chanel bags that gets passed around, probably too freely, but contains something true. The woman who buys the bag and wears it with the logo facing her own body rather than the room. She bought the signal and then declined to send it. Which raises an obvious question about why she bought it at all, and the answer is probably the most interesting one available. She wanted the object. The logo was simply the part that was not for her.

That is a different relationship to a luxury purchase than most people manage. She has separated the thing from the meaning the market attached to it and kept only the part she actually wanted. The bag is well made. The leather is good. The construction will outlast almost anything bought at a lower price point. Those things are real and she knows they are real and that is enough. The room does not need to know.

Most people cannot do this. Not because they are vain but because the social information and the personal experience arrive together and the brain does not sort them into separate columns. Developing the ability to separate them is slow work and nobody is selling a shortcut.

Tasting Blind

The honest version of developing taste is forming a view before the price enters the room. Tasting blind. Wearing something without knowing what it cost. Sitting with an object long enough to decide how you feel about it before the name or the number arrives. It sounds simple. Almost nobody does it because almost nobody has to. The social information is always already there, in the store, in the magazine, in the thirty second video explaining what French women actually wear.

The question worth learning to ask is a simple one. Do I actually like this. Not is it correct to like this. Not what does liking it say about me. Not will liking it put me in the right company. Just whether the thing itself, without the price, without the name, without the logo facing outward, does anything for you at all.

Most people have almost no idea what the answer is. Not because they are incapable of having one but because they have never been in a room quiet enough to hear it.

Getting to that room is not a purchase. It is not a trend to follow or a brand to find or a video to watch. It is just attention, applied slowly, over a long time, to things you actually encounter rather than things you have been told to want.

It produces something the price signal cannot touch. And it cannot be faked for very long before it shows.