Accounting For Taste, or Searching For Surprise, or Do You Like Stuff?

Nothing implied.  I just miss old Simpsons episodes.

One of the several themes I write about, which has nothing to do with travelling through time, is fandom and why people like what they like.  I have heard “to each his own” and “there is no accounting for taste” my entire life and I understand why these clichés exist.  They are there to keep us from punching each other in the face every other day.  But just like there are patterns to how we engage with each other at age six and the predictable tides of the world’s oceans are synched with the moon’s gravitational pull, I think there are patterns why we like what we like.  In fact, the more we love something, the tighter we adhere to these patterns.

We do love things for different reasons. But the reasons are not infinite.  I think it boils down to intellectual curiosity, nostalgia and tradition, and for lack of a better term, white noise.  White noise is the generic love for an art form or media, just for the sake of it being “on” or near you.  These are people who love “the radio” or play movies while they do the dishes.  They like something about it, but it is more for comfort or companionship.  The nostalgic are people who simply like the familiar.  It’s as easy to predict as tulips blooming in the spring.  There is a memory that is tickled or an underlying feeling that is stirred.  We usually don’t care about the quality of the art or media; we just like how it makes us feel. We feel young again, we feel inspired again. Then, there is intellectual curiosity.  This is the sharpest of all the bonds to the things we love.  It makes us get out there and seek new things.  It’s that sense that makes us compare and contrast and gets us in the most arguments.  It is the seeds of passion and nerdiness of any specific artistic pursuit.  But even this clinical view has an emotional undercurrent. It is the search for the new. It is the search for surprise.

Each one of these levels of commitment can apply to any form of art or media in your life.  You may only care for nostalgic music, but when it comes to books you are searching to be surprised by a plot or a character.  The next great story is around the corner somewhere.  And, maybe you watch TV to have on in the background.  Or you could be strictly a visual person who only aims to be surprised by 2-D art, and everything else is a bunch of white noise. 

Searching for a surprise sharpens as you get older.  You have experienced so much and if you are paying attention, you have seen the patterns and are waiting for something new to charge you. I love comedy.  I sought it out, and I sampled everything.  Some things don’t make me laugh.  They may very well be funny, but I have refined my tastes.  That thing you’re laughing at doesn’t make me laugh like it makes you laugh, because, to you comedy is white noise that is simply there to entertain you, and for me it has been an intellectual curiosity.  The same goes for music.  It’s not shocking that parents crap on their kids’ music.  If the parents merely love music because of a nostalgic connection, nothing their kids download will measure up. If music was an intellectual pursuit, parents have already essentially heard whatever the kids blast from their bedrooms.

This can apply to everything.  Art, music, entertainment, food, sports… scrapbooking.  Many times arguments could be settled by understanding that one person’s passion is another’s nostalgic daydream.  That thing I have sampled 10,000 times tastes a lot differently to me than it does to you. 

For the passionate, the common thread is limitations.  Colors, the canvas, twelve notes. Two hours or so of screen time.  The English language.  Twenty-nine possible plots.  A joke requires exactly one exaggeration.  It is a pursuit because the human mind has a limited set of tools for every pursuit.  You can only eat what’s edible.  There is a ton, but it is finite.  Now what do you do?  The mind and the palate take over and continue to search for a surprise.  For music lovers, the styles must evolve.  You have to add to your warehouse of knowledge because you’ve learned how blues songs follow the same patterns and punk and rap have a small range of beats.  There is classical and jazz and a world of unpredictable styles out there that will surprise you.

Of course there are combinations.  I have mostly an emotion connection to music, so I’m probably nostalgic for certain styles.  But within those styles, I have an intellectual curiosity for what will happen next.  I still want to be surprised.  The narrower the scope, the longer you have to wait between surprises.  (I guess the same could be said about me with time travel movies.)  Even within the white noise of radio, or the drone of network TV, something is bound to make you take notice and turn up the volume.

Point?  I have always had a toe in the pool of sociology.  That doesn’t mean I’ve read as much as I should, but I still have the intellectual curiosity to ponder how people are wired.  Every time you nail down what you think separates us into a chart full of categories, you end up discovering what makes us all the same.