Expectations vs Taste

Ultimate desires of life

Ask yourself this question - what are your ultimate desires in life?

desires of life

at the end of the day if not survival the only aim is to be happy. having no regrets is a subset considering regrets cause sadness/pain a person does everything else just to be happy. if you disagree and have exceptions to this in your mind, again it might be because of what I’m about to explain below.

Everything under control

Now imagine the choice of expectations now that I have framed the context, what are the kinds of expectations you should have regarding every experience in life? low or high the expectation scale

just to satisfy the desires graph, having low or no expectations is the ideal way to optimize for happiness and even survive. we have evolved into beings of high adaptation, yet not beings of low expectations. my hypotheses is that that is because of the boundary of taste. what is taste again?

Defining taste

For many taste is just having some set minimum expectations about something. Take an example of music. If a person likes heavy metal, for them a person with good taste is another person who likes heavy metal. If a person likes minimalist design, those websites and art will satisfy their definition of taste. And literally speaking, the word must have originated from being able to discern good food taste according to some other person’s liking or disliking. The whole definition of taste is centered around comparing it with either yourself or someone else.

But how does this relate to expectations?

Everyone who knows me well knows that I am a person with low expectations. so they conclude that I do not have taste. but that is actually incorrect, as if that were the case, whatever things I would build or create would not be cool and interesting. They would agree that I have a sense of design and creativity, hell I can even cook good food^{*(acc to my mom)} while even appreciating some random mess food which I never had before. Not that I liked the mess food, the fact is I did not hate it, because I expected it to be bad. I expect my cooked food to be good so I like it onoly if it is really good.

yeah this sounds like a rant of defence but what you have to take from here is that it is that good taste is knowing about what expectations to keep from things, and not about having a set minimum expectation of them

I strive to be a person with no expectations as I mentioned even in my other articles about causality or life in general

“Be a person of no expectations and high taste.”

Later thoughts

• Interestingly many people may not agree with this blog, but that is in some sense their taste of life
• I would love to know more thoughts/critics if any in comments or via twitter