I sometimes feel like I have gained a false sense of personal taste. When I look at my Pinterest home page or my TikTok For You page, I view it with pride as every piece of content is perfectly placed in the centre of the Venn diagram between something I would like and something I'm not creative enough to have come up with on my own. It's the perfect serving of aspirational inspiration. But then, as quickly as I can press save on an outfit that encapsulates both everything I am and everything I want to be, the realisation hits that this exact outfit has been served to millions of people just like me. Does this give it any less value as my personal taste? Does it make it less unique to me? I think that possibly it does.
There is an argument to say that digital feeds are in fact unique to us because of the exact combinations of content that make up each person's feed. But this allows us to maintain the laziness that is a 100% digital source of inspiration. It's not really good enough any more to rely solely on Pinterest to spoon-feed you content perfectly formulated to your taste. But was it ever even good enough? Is it even 'your taste' if it's been wholly curated by computing power and code?
One potential answer is a holistic approach to inspiration. By approaching life with the new lens of every experience being a potential source for it while allowing for more variety of inspiration (and inadvertently allows you to romanticise and enjoy your life more).
A meal at a restaurant can give you meal-prep inspiration, so you ask the chef how they achieved these flavours and you experiment at home. A building can give colour-combo inspiration for a future outfit, so you take a photo and add it to a dedicated album on your phone. Here, a holistic approach to inspiration is increasing your interaction with the people and spaces around you, allowing you to be more present, more in tune, and more sure of yourself.
The uncomfortable truth, though, is that this requires actual effort. And I don't mean effort in a gruelling sense. I mean the small, deliberate effort of paying attention and remembering to do it. When your inspiration has been delivered to your door for years, the act of going out to find it yourself feels surprisingly hard. It might be difficult to sit with things long enough to ask yourself why it's resonating with you. And who knows, asking these questions might even bring up something really emotional. This might feel weird but I think that's just the initial change in habits while you bridge the gap between being fed your taste and actually developing it yourself.
What I've noticed is that the inspiration you find this way tends to stick differently. When an algorithm hands you something, it's easy to save it and forget it as it blends into the hundreds of other perfectly matched saves and loses its edge. Without effort, there’s a lack of true self alignment and emotional connection to the art you see or the outfit you try to replicate. But when you clock something in real life like a colour combination on a stranger's coat, the way a café has laid out its shelves, it becomes yours in a way that a saved TikTok isn't. Nobody else was standing exactly where you were standing, noticing exactly what you noticed with the exact lived experience that brought you there. That is what makes it actually personal.
Inspiration doesn't have to always have an applicable end-goal. To be truly inspired is to be inspired simply to be inspired. Recognise, acknowledge, and appreciate the things in the world around you that spark joy and take a moment to investigate why or how that joy is being sparked. The algorithm can always be there to supplement or act as a platform to collate your ideas but see how you go with ensuring it stays as the supplement for your taste, not your whole diet.