This letter is a response to Intentionality in Alaska, a letter from Spencer Chang to me.
Spencer,
Your vacation sounds lovely; while you were in Alaska, I was visiting Minneapolis to see my friend Simone, so I too was privileged to see a bit of fall foliage I normally wouldn't find in Houston. Since we've last written here, another season has come and gone - it's early December and winter with it's marginally cooler weather (at least in Houston) and subtle mood changes is upon us.
Did the vast Alaskan wilderness inspire you to ask questions of similar scope? Thinking about what I want to be doing with my limited time always stirs up existential dread for some reason. It really shouldn't, since I have more or less unilateral authority to decide how I spend at least a part of my time, but, like you, my interests are broad and prioritization is difficult.
In a sense, this kind of prioritization of interests and time expenditure is the same question you asked about tastes and preferences. I appreciate your comment about me having a good sense of what I like, and it's true, I do try to reflect on what I like and why I like it often. But, that reflection welcomes some measure of anxiety. What I struggle with the most when I think about what I like and why I like it is the degree to which tastes and preferences are arbitrary and highly path dependent.
I might have told you about this in person when we last met up in San Francisco, but over the last 9 months or so, I've been drinking wine. Not that I didn't consume wine before, but it was a rare part of my beverage diet when compared to whiskey or cocktails. You see, what inspired this shift was a vacation I took to Maine and wrote about in the first letter to you back in June. There, at my sister's encouragement, I made a tiny change to my preferences: I tried white wine.
This doesn't seem like a massive shift in taste, but in reality it was transformative. I found acidic, tannin-free, white wines absolutely delectable, and since tasting those first bottles in Maine, I've tried dozens, maybe even more than a hundred white wines over the last few months.
Long story short, earlier in life I'd arbitrarily designated myself as a red wine drinker, and not a particularly interested one at that. Then, a minor shift in taste resulted in a huge change in priorities and interests. This is what I think about most when it comes to developing taste: ultimately it's arbitrary, and we have to embrace this, or face existential dread.
To me, there's a notable side benefit to embracing arbitrary taste as meaningful: it encourages intentional living grounded in the present. There's no need to dedicate oneself to old tastes, outdated preferences. When priorities shift, so be it.
Of course, there's a caveat here, and it intersects with my earlier thinking about what I want to be doing with my limited time. When time is scarce, it makes arbitrary shifts in taste seem intimidating, and almost wasteful and foolish. And in some domains, this is correct. When I think about passion projects like writing or coding projects, or what I want to read and think about, or who I want to date and associate with, I strive to find a balance. Relationships and intellectual interests shouldn't be flipped like a wine preference. Some solace might be found in realizing that if you engage with small tastes in the present, and let them be arbitrary, you'll worry less about them and have a bit more precious time to spend on top priorities.
Yours,
Avery