A few days back I saw a post on twitter, which, loosely put, was this:
I don’t think we’re ready for how evolved gen alpha’s taste is becoming. my 8 yo nephew turned down dinner plans unless it was an asian place with avacado rolls.
And it annoyed me a bit, I’m not going to lie.
The fact that their nephew’s taste was perceived to be evolved based just on the fact that it included asian cuisine and some avacado rolls, rubbed me in a wrong way.
First thing first, I’m not a person who should be judging a person based on their taste, which I totally am not. What I do in fact judge, is calling one thing evolved compared to other “tastes”.
Sometimes I wonder, if we really know what taste actually means? What’s good or bad taste? Or is it just a fancy word to just impose the good’ol classism en’masse.
What even is taste? And what makes one taste better than the other? Accessibility? Proximity? Or the absence of proximity, that is.
After being on the internet for so long, I have realised that, art, no matter of what kind, has an audience. One person would be throwing up experiencing one thing and for another person, that would be the best thing ever.
I remember once scrolling a reddit post where the author was very conscious of one of their physical shortcomings, and another user pointed out
are you crazy? there’s a whole subcategory in the dropdown for this
and it made me wonder. humans are a fascinating species.
This means that whatever we find pleasing to experience, is just conditioning. So based on the right conditioning, we can create demand for a particular kind of “taste”. And that’s what social media is exactly doing.
The Algorithm of Desire
Social media platforms have become the new arbiters of taste. You would think the “algorithm” is just following your preferences, but instead, it is manufacturing them.
The algorithm shows you what’s trending, what’s getting engagement, what the “right” people are consuming. And slowly, without you even noticing, your taste begins to form, it begins to align .
An 8-year-old demanding avocado rolls isn’t evidence of evolved taste. It’s evidence, or rather work of successful marketing, of cultural signaling that has trickled down through TikTok videos, Instagram posts, and YouTube influencers. The child has learned what’s supposed to be desirable even before they’ve had the chance to develop their own genuine preferences.
The hierarchy that we pretend doesn’t exist
We’ve created an unspoken hierarchy of taste that maps almost perfectly onto class and access. Liking Ethiopian food? Sophisticated. Liking McDonald’s? Basic. Listening to experimental jazz? Cultured. Listening to mainstream pop? Uncultured.
But strip away the social context and what are we really saying? That experiencing things fewer people have access to makes you superior? That rarity equals quality? That’s not taste, that’s just scarcity masquerading as refinement.
The irony is that many of the foods and art forms we now consider “elevated” were once common, everyday experiences for the cultures that created them. Sushi was Japanese fast food. Jazz was “pop” music once. Their elevation in status happened when they became exotic, when they required cultural capital to access and appreciate.
The performance of preference
What troubles me most is how taste has become performative. People don’t just enjoy things anymore, they curate themselves through their consumption. Every restaurant check-in, every Spotify wrapped share, every “aesthetic” photo is a declaration: this is who I am, this is my tribe, this is my level.
We’ve turned preferences into personal brands. And like any brand, it requires constant maintenance and optimization. You can’t just like what you like, you have to like the right things in the right way at the right time, to be perceived as you wnt to be perceived.
This creates an exhausting cycle where nothing is experienced for its own sake. Everything is filtered through the question: what does this say about me? An 8-year-old already performing this calculation, already aware that Asian cuisine signals something desirable, is not evolved. It’s sad.
When consumption becomes identity
But here’s where it gets darker. We’re not just performing taste for others anymore. We’ve become dependent on our consumption patterns to understand who we are. Or rather, who want to be perceived as.
Think about it.
When someone asks you to describe yourself, how long before you mention what you consume? “I’m a coffee person.” “I’m into indie music.” “I’m a foodie.” “I’m a cinephile.” We’ve outsourced the hard work of self-discovery to our shopping carts and streaming queues.
This isn’t accidental. In a world where traditional identity markers have weakened—where careers are unstable, communities are fragmented, and religious or cultural affiliations are optional—consumption offers an easy answer to the question “who am I?” You don’t need to do the internal work of figuring out your values, your purpose, your authentic self. You just need to know whether you’re a Starbucks or a local coffee shop person.
The existential crisis of modern life has been repackaged as a consumer choice.
It’s a brilliant trap because it feels like self-expression while actually being self-evasion. We mistake the curation of our consumption for the cultivation of our character. We think that by carefully selecting what we eat, watch, listen to, and wear, we’re building an identity. But we’re really just building a persona, a collection of consumer choices that we hope adds up to a coherent self.
And the scariest part? We’ve become so dependent on this consumption identity that we panic when we can’t consume in our usual way. What happens when your favorite restaurant closes? When your go-to brand changes? When the music you’ve built your personality around goes mainstream? You don’t just lose a preference, you lose a piece of yourself. Or at least, what you thought was yourself.
This is why people get genuinely upset when someone criticizes their taste. It’s not just about defending a preference anymore. It’s about defending their entire sense of self. If you are what you consume, then an attack on your consumption is an attack on your existence.
The cult mentality
The word “cult” in my title isn’t accidental. There’s something cult-like in how we approach taste now. There are the initiates who know the right references, follow the right accounts, consume the right content. There are the gatekeepers who determine what’s authentic and what’s trying too hard. There are the heretics who commit the sin of liking something deemed “cringe” or “basic.”
And like any cult, there’s the constant promise that if you just acquire the right taste, consume the right things, signal the right preferences, you’ll achieve some form of enlightenment or belonging. But that moment never comes because the goalposts keep moving. What’s sophisticated today is passé tomorrow.
What we’ve lost
In our rush to develop “good taste,” we’ve forgotten how to simply enjoy things. We’ve lost the ability to like something just because it brings us pleasure, without needing it to represent us or elevate our status.
I think about street food vendors in India, about home cooks making the same dal recipe passed down through generations, about local restaurants serving the same menu for decades. There’s no pretension there, no performance. Just food that tastes good to the people who eat it, made with care and consumed with satisfaction.
That’s not “evolved” or “basic,” it just is. And maybe that’s what real taste looks like, stripped of all the cultural baggage we’ve loaded onto it.
The way forward
I’m not advocating for taste nihilism, where everything is equally good and preferences don’t matter. I’m advocating for honesty. For the courage to like what you actually like, not what you think you should like. For separating genuine appreciation from social performance.
Maybe an 8-year-old who genuinely loves avocado rolls after trying different foods and discovering what brings them joy has developed their palate. But an 8-year-old who demands avocado rolls because they’ve learned it signals the right thing? That’s just another victim of the taste cult.
The antidote to this epidemic isn’t developing better taste, it’s developing the confidence to stop caring whether our taste is perceived as good or bad in the first place. It’s remembering that consumption is not the same as identity, that preferences are not the same as personality, and that the things we enjoy are meant to be experienced, not displayed.
Until we break free from the taste cult, we’re not evolving. We’re just performing evolution while standing perfectly still.
