Good Taste Is Expensive

Day 178 – May 20, 2026

I think good taste is expensive in ways people don’t talk about enough.

Not just financially, though obviously yes, life keeps trying to charge luxury prices for things that should be basic human rights. Peace, beauty, decent lighting, emotionally literate company, and a body that doesn’t react to one weird noise like it just got drafted into war.

I mean expensive in the deeper way. Good taste costs you things.

It costs illusion. It costs denial. It costs the ability to pretend ugly energy is “fine” just because it arrived well dressed. It costs the comfort of not noticing. That’s the part I’ve been thinking about.

Because I do think taste goes way beyond aesthetics. Yes, I like beautiful things. Yes, I care about atmosphere. Yes, I believe a bad font can be a moral failure in the right context. But taste, to me, is bigger than decor or clothes or whether a woman knows how to pick the right lipstick for a bad day.

Taste is discernment.

Taste is knowing the difference between what is beautiful and what is merely shiny. What is real and what is performative. What is soft and what is weak. What is intense and what is actually worth your time.

That kind of taste gets expensive because once you have it, you can’t really go back.

You can’t unsee bad energy. You can’t unknow when a room is cheap in spirit. You can’t make yourself want things that no longer match the life you’re trying to build just because they’re available and everyone else keeps calling them “good enough.”

That’s over for me.

And I don’t mean that in some snobby little “my standards are high” way people say when they’re trying to make their inability to connect sound glamorous. I mean I have suffered too much, learned too much, and rebuilt too much to hand my attention over cheaply now.

My life costs more than that. My peace does too. My body definitely does.

And maybe that’s one of the stranger gifts of surviving what I’ve survived. You get clearer. Pain does that sometimes. It burns the fog off things. It makes certain compromises impossible to romanticize anymore. It makes you much less willing to confuse familiarity with safety, attention with love, or aesthetics with actual substance.

That’s useful. Annoying, but useful.

Roger, obviously, also has taste. He likes the good blanket. The right spot on the couch. The correct people. The proper level of admiration. He has no interest in watered down affection or spiritually mediocre snacks.

I respect that in him.

And maybe that’s the mood right now. Less about acquiring more, more about refusing less. Less about “elevating” my life in some fake glossy way, more about honoring what I already know I cannot live well without.

Truth. Beauty. Humor. Depth. Warmth. A room that feels good in the body. People who feel better than they talk. The right kind of softness. That’s taste too.

And yes, sometimes it makes life more difficult. Sometimes discernment means you leave faster, expect more, refuse more, clock things sooner, and lose patience for the emotionally underseasoned.

Fine.

That’s still cheaper than abandoning myself to fit somewhere that was never worth me in the first place.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And me, learning that good taste is expensive because it keeps asking for the truth.