The Google Drive for our upcoming September wedding currently resembles an overstuffed keepsakes box. Full of mismatched files and folders labeled “Possible Centerpieces v7,” “Piano or String Trio?”, and “Chicken?”, each one a rabbit hole we’ve tumbled down as life’s regular obligations pile up around us. The catering menu presents unexpected challenges, such as whether Philly-cheesesteak egg-rolls at cocktail hour can really hold up to a pairing with top-sirloin au poivre as an entrée. Pinterest lingers in the background to give endless grids of inspiration that feel more like photo albums for parties I haven’t been invited to.
In many aspects of life, we’ve learned to lean on recommendation algorithms out of habit, grateful to have something just to “throw on.” Yet lately the convenience feels flat, like lukewarm instant coffee beside a fresh espresso. Spotify recycles the same 30 songs on your hyper specific “cowboy sunshine indie road trip” daily mix. Same cymbal crash, different day. Netflix lines up reco’s in thumbnail form, hoping we click, but rarely do. A 2024 analysis from Luminate’s Streaming Report found that the average listener skips a song before the thirty-second mark. Abundance, it seems, can dull appetite. That impatience lives in my thumb every time I hammer ‘next’ hunting for a show to watch. In an age of algorithmic overload, what can be said about the importance of good taste?
As our wedding date draws nearer, the band we hired sent over a template to help finalize the finer details. Staring at its vacant rows felt like peering into a void that somehow expected a perfect soundtrack from me. I wanted every song that once blasted from tinny car speakers on teenage summer nights, every melody that had stitched itself to a chapter of our story, yet I also wanted each guest to feel as though the set list had been tuned to their pulse. I peppered my fiancée with rapid-fire questions—Was “Mr. Brightside” too on-the-nose? Would my family actually dance to Phoenix?—until the task outgrew the moment and started nibbling at our patience. The recessional, that single walk back up the aisle, felt especially important: it had to avoid wedding-playlist cliché, respect the ceremony’s gravity, and elicit joy. Spotify and ChatGPT lists only multiplied the possibilities, each suggestion convincing me we were missing a better one just out of frame. After an hour that felt like three, we knew we had to move on and hope we’d come up with something better later, a tried-and-true strategy for tastemakers.
Imagine the relief I felt when a few weeks later our wedding band’s lead singer offered a single, perfect suggestion for our recessional music. A real human, not a digital hive-mind, had paid attention long enough to offer a choice that made me feel something. It’s what ‘good taste’ can actually mean: sorting signal from noise, turning overwhelm into relief, and nudging a crowd toward shared delight. It’s central to the human experience. It’s how we keep refining the texture of daily life. And when that fine tuned judgement fades, the loudest voice can end up setting the tune. The question isn’t wedding playlists. It’s one of cultivated discernment in an age of abundance.
Some people spend entire careers betting on that compass. Music producer Rick Rubin devotes a chapter of his acclaimed book The Creative Act: A Way of Being (2023) to the claim, “I have no technical ability. I know what I like and what I don’t like. I’m paid for my confidence in my taste and my ability to express what I feel.” Rubin has earned nine Grammys, co-founded Def Jam while still at NYU, and shepherded household names like Johnny Cash, the Beastie Boys, and Adele. In 2002 he asked Cash to pare Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” down to voice, guitar, and the creak of a pew, a great rendition that still feels fresh today. Taste, for Rubin, is a muscle built by attention and exercised without hesitation.
If Rubin shows how taste can be inward and spare, John Maeda—former president of RISD, longtime MIT Media Lab professor, and now Microsoft’s VP of Design & AI—demonstrates what judgment looks like when algorithms churn out options faster than humans can blink. Writing in a 2023 Figma essay that distills his annual Design in Tech Report, Maeda warns that “AI promises unparalleled efficiency and limitless potential for creatives. On the other, it threatens to spawn a masterful new generation of cookie-cutter designs that could spell the end of many creative careers.” Speed, in other words, is no longer scarce; meaning is. He adds a blunt reminder that echoes our own playlist fatigue: “The most efficient solution is not always the most creative one… the route of greatest efficiency is rarely the most impactful.” Maeda argues that as software floods the canvas with flawlessly executed variations, designers must trade the role of maker for that of orchestrator. To be the person who decides which one-in-a-thousand image actually matters here and now. It’s the same relief I felt when a very human bandleader, not an algorithm, named the perfect recessional song. One of the important few luxuries still seemingly far out of reach for LLMs.
Enter Alice Waters. The Berkeley, California chef opened Chez Panisse in 1971, seeded the farm-to-table movement, and accepted the National Humanities Medal for melding the ethical and the edible. Taste, she told the New York Times Magazine in a 2021 profile, “is a language of its own; once you learn it, it guides every other choice you make,” and, as she wrote in The Art of Simple Food, when the ingredients truly sing, “you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is.” For Waters, taste begins not with seasoning but with the life of the soil and ends with the judgment of the cook. Her writing and activism insist that even a single carrot plucked from the earth embodies dozens of tiny yet critical decisions, resulting in a cumulative act of discernment. Taste, in her hands, is not flourish but foundation.
Different domains, identical pattern: judged attention over raw abundance. Across music studios, design boards, and farm rows, the lesson is clear. Cultivated discernment in an age of abundance hinges on the habit of noticing, the courage to choose, and the willingness to live with the fallout. Rubin’s practiced conviction, Maeda’s orchestral eye, and Waters’s reverence for craft suggest that good taste is an ongoing discipline of noticing keenly, choosing bravely, and sharing decisively. It listens hard, arranges what it finds into something coherent, and offers the result with enough confidence that others can feel it too. Now, more than ever, good taste matters.