Over our lifetime, we get to know ourselves better. Our tastes follow a gradual solidification process (we settle on a some classes of things) but also a gradual migration process (for example, we acquire some tastes). We become more aware of (or discover) concepts and products that align with our tastes more precisely and give us positive utility (I can’t decide whether the marginal utility increases or decreases with age — it may be the former because as we get more sophisticated, the potential for significant utility gets unlocked; or the latter because as we get older, we strive harder and harder for gaining a little bit of additional utility).

It’s interesting to trace that evolution because very often what we settle on isn’t that different from what is the most natural (and may be seen as least sophisticated). Our tastes don’t necessarily follow a linear path. Yes, most of the time we end up purchasing products which are increasingly more expensive (because later in life, we can afford them — or, to put it differently, we get sensitive to comfort and are willing to pay more for it), but there are some interesting cyclical patterns.

For example, as we spend more of our lives cooking, we discover organic food. At first we join the organic food bangwagon, expanding the trend into things like the organic duvet cover (I actually bought one recently!). Soon we realize that supermarket food just doesn’t cut it, and discover CSAs, or start growing food in our own backyards. In our quest to find the best-tasting food, we are willing to forgo the comfort of an all-in-one-supermarket purchase and go as far as spend the time to wait for random food to arrive, or outright grow our own food.

Photography is an interesting field, mostly because everyone seems to be interested in photography these days. We get spec-buff point-and-shoots that make our friends jealous and our parents dizzy with settings. The first step towards the increasing sophistication of taste is the abandoning of flash. We then buy a decent SLR, and after many thousand shots finally decide to stop using the lowest aperture setting. As we get more “serious” about photography, we buy more lenses (many of which are more expensive than the camera), but for many of us, the favorite lens becomes one that is not a zoom lens — but one that sees things the same way the human eye does. What starts as the race for the highest megapixel count, slowly transforms into the desire to have as many features at our disposal, then the ability to take complex pictures (shallow depth of field, crazy zoom like the macro shots of virtually everything that I make fun of my friend for taking), only to arrive at the desire to simply take pictures that express something (“Does it say anything” is a question I realized I should ask myself when deciding whether to keep a photo or not).

The cycles can be found elsewhere. Starting at regular light bulbs, we move on to energy-saving bulbs and lights with a gradation in the intensity setting (God I loved those when I first saw them in my neighbor’s flat when I was 8). We realize that our mood improves if we get full-spectrum lightbulbs. Finally, as we get older, we go outside, desiring natural light.

Sometimes I wish our future selves could tell us “don’t overcomplicate.” There again, the result is something we can only get to if we experience the journey ourselves.