The Taste Spiral: How Liking Things Became the Most Embarrassing Thing You Can Do

Remember when having good taste was aspirational? When someone with a carefully curated home, a precise coffee order, and strong opinions about film scores was considered interesting rather than insufferable? That era is gone. Quietly, aggressively, and probably via a TikTok sound, it died — and now we're living in the wreckage.

Somewhere in the last few years, the cultural script flipped. Aspiration became sus. Refinement became performative. And the most credible aesthetic position you can hold right now is to be loudly, deliberately, almost aggressively uncool about everything you love.

The Speed Problem

Here's the thing about trend cycles: they used to be slow enough that you could actually live inside them. You had time to discover something, fall in love with it, incorporate it into your identity, and enjoy it for a while before the next wave rolled in. Trends moved at the speed of magazine publishing schedules and mall window displays.

Now they move at the speed of a For You page, which is to say: incomprehensibly fast. A visual aesthetic can go from underground to mainstream to ironic to dead in about six weeks. If you're a person who pays attention to culture — and a lot of us are, whether we admit it or not — keeping up stopped being fun and started being exhausting somewhere around 2021.

Worse than the exhaustion is the shame. Because when a trend dies, it doesn't just disappear. It gets retroactively mocked. The people who were early adopters of cottagecore or dark academia or whatever the current clean-girl iteration is don't get credit for being ahead of the curve — they get lumped in with everyone else who "fell for it." Taste, once a source of identity, became a liability.

Enter: Performative Messiness

Nature abhors a vacuum, and internet culture abhors sincerity. So into the space left by the collapse of aspirational taste came its opposite — the deliberate embrace of the bad, the gaudy, the embarrassing, the unrefined.

We're not talking about genuine outsider weirdness here (that's always been cool in its own right). We're talking about a calculated performance of bad taste by people who absolutely know better. The person with the film degree who watches and loudly loves terrible reality TV. The design-school graduate whose apartment is full of intentionally ugly tchotchkes. The music snob who has made their whole personality about earnestly championing mid-2000s pop-punk.

It's a hedge. If you claim the bad taste first, no one can use it against you. You can't be accused of trying too hard when your whole thing is that you're not trying at all. It's aesthetic armor, and right now it's everywhere.

Hollywood has caught on too. Look at how prestige television handles itself these days — even critically acclaimed shows are careful to signal a kind of self-awareness about their own quality. The ones that play it completely straight, that ask audiences to just invest without a winking layer of irony, are rare and often get punished for it with discourse about whether they're "taking themselves too seriously."

Cringe as a Life Philosophy

Cringe started as a reaction — that full-body wince at something that was trying too hard and failing visibly. It was a specific, useful feeling. Then it became a TikTok format. Then it became a content category. And then, somehow, it became a worldview.

To be "cringe" now isn't just to be embarrassing — it's to be sincere in a way that the culture hasn't pre-approved. Liking something too much, being too enthusiastic, having too clear an aesthetic identity — all of that reads as cringe. The safe zone is a studied indifference, a posture of being slightly above whatever you're consuming.

The irony is brutal: the fear of cringe has itself become cringe. The person who performs their ironic detachment too hard is now just as embarrassing as the person they were trying not to be. There is no exit. There is only the spiral.

The Genuine Liking Problem

So what happens when you actually, genuinely like something? Not ironically. Not as a bit. Just — you saw a movie, it moved you, you want to talk about it.

It's gotten weirdly complicated. You have to pre-clear it. Acknowledge the discourse around it. Establish your relationship to the cultural context. Make it clear that you know how this looks. And even then, someone's going to read your enthusiasm as a personality brand, a desperate relevance grab, a parasocial bid for community.

This is the logical endpoint of a culture that processes everything through the lens of performance. When every expression of taste gets read as a move — a positioning play, a community signal, a brand — then the honest expression of genuine feeling becomes the most suspicious thing of all.

The people who seem the most authentic right now are often the ones who've opted out entirely. They're not curating an anti-aesthetic or performing their bad taste — they just genuinely don't seem to care what the aesthetic conversation is doing this week. They like what they like. They'll tell you about it without a disclaimer. They're not building an identity around it.

Which, of course, is now the most aspirational thing imaginable. Give it six months and someone will figure out how to monetize it.

The Way Out (There Isn't One, But Still)

There's no clean resolution to the taste spiral. The trend cycle isn't slowing down, the irony isn't going anywhere, and the cultural pressure to be legible — to have a readable aesthetic identity that signals the right things to the right people — is only getting more intense.

But there's something clarifying about naming the trap. Once you see the mechanism — the way aspiration collapses into embarrassment, the way genuine enthusiasm gets coded as desperation — you can at least stop letting it make decisions for you.

Like the weird thing. Like the uncool thing. Like the thing that just came out and hasn't been pre-approved by the discourse yet. Like the thing that's been declared dead for two years. Like it loudly or quietly or not at all, but do it because it's actually true.

The most radical act in the current cultural moment might just be having taste that belongs to you — messy, inconsistent, embarrassing in all the right ways — without performing any of it for anyone.

Or don't. Honestly, no judgment. We're all just out here spiraling together.