Your Taste Should be Private

The Recommendation Economy is in a recession.

I spent my holiday season reading Anna Karenina. At the risk of sounding like someone discovering that gorgeous, quaint, little town of Paris, France—ya heard of it?—what a novel! Tolstoy, I could kiss you. I noted on Substack about a particularly sublime line: “He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without looking.” Marinate in that for a second. Perfect, right? I thought so too…until someone in the comments popped my bubble: “I mean, isn’t this in…Seinfeld?”

Reader, it was in Seinfeld. S04EP16 to be exact, where Denise Richards plays a buxom teenager (hey, I didn’t write it!): “Looking at cleavage is like looking at the sun. You don’t stare at it. It’s too risky. Ya get a sense of it and then you look away.” Woah. Also true. Cleavage is like that.

This is basically the history of all ideas: building, subverting, parodying, until the subversion/parody/etc becomes something new and then the cycle begins again. Somewhere along the way, we lost the soul of this process: that what we’re building on has to be sturdy enough to take it. We’re recycling material to the point of degradation, and the materials we’re starting with weren’t quality anyhow (like remixing AI Slop, or pulling exact looks from the archives, or regurgitating the same TikTok video concepts)! How many times can you reuse takeout Tupperware before you admit the microplastics are leaching into your oatmeal?

For 2026 I’d like to get back to the foundation. I’m talking about having a sense of PERSPECTIVE PEOPLE!!! Perspention is IN! (That’s perspective + intention). I don’t care that the new word I made up sounds like perspiration.

Might I suggest watching Errands Show? It’s a mesmerizing slice of life show where people take you on their errands. I got hooked after watching i-D contributor Taryn Segal pick out her weekly sweets at Economy Candy. Errands feels fresh with its morning-after-a-one-night-stand intimacy. It’s kind of a spiritual successor to the MTV shows of the ’90s/aughts, had that vibe not been made extinct by the Buzzfeed Celebrity playing with puppies/Tiktok/brainslop asteroid. Another delightful thing about Errands: It’s about taste without being about Taste.

This comes down to the difference between Personal Taste and Public Taste. Personal Taste is dependent on something you might not even be totally aware of, an essential relationship, irreplicable but imitable, while Public Taste is an attribute aggregated from social and personal value. Public Taste is what the Recommendation Economy runs on—it insists upon itself. Personal Taste is what makes something interesting. Public Taste is saying you get your haircut at Shizen. Personal Taste is some guy named Peyton asking his friend Marta, who is cutting his hair, not to make him look like “the kid from Holes.” Public Taste is what feeds the algorithm, but Personal Taste is what feeds the soul.

I’d so much rather see Lola Dement Myers pick up her dog tags from wherever she has them fabricated, inspect them, then read a list of ten cool spots in New York: I don’t really care about what people are doing or where they’re going, I want to know what they’re thinking about when they do it.

I think the best content of 2026 has already, and will continue to capitalize on that distinction. Health Gossip Obv. Biz Sherbert’s American Style. Honestly, Dua Lipa’s Book Club. Sex Talk from Sex Magazine. Zoe Latta’s Rotting on The Vine. Or Shaad Magazine. Laura Love’s Skin Talk. Princess Babygirl. Aimee France on Tiktok.

In the spirit of Errands I sold a sweater on Depop yesterday. Whatever goodwill I had accrued over the holidays evaporated immediately upon entering the United States Post Office. The line was fifteen sorry souls deep, there was only one window open and the self service kiosk had a sign on it telling you, in three languages, that it did not work, would never work, and adios estúpido. A wet-eyed woman roamed the office, having lost her mind around the half-hour mark, trying to meet anyone’s gaze, to tell them that the USPS kept sending her mail back to Arizona. She didn’t even know anyone in Arizona!

As I stood there I realized: Doing errands is like staring at cleavage. Fun to look at others but boring to be faced with your own.