I often eat tonkatsu or chicken katsu without sauce.
Not only tonkatsu — I basically don't add seasoning to ready-made dishes. In other words, I rarely do "flavor changes."
I often just like the default state.
Of course for meals a big part is that I'm not the type who finds much happiness in eating. I install lots of Chrome extensions, so it's not that I like the default for everything.
Still, more than average, I leave things at default.
Probably because inserting my own decision risks making things worse — and that scares me.
So unless something clearly improves efficiency, or is highly plastic, I go with the default.
Not only flavor changes: at McDonald's I order the same menu; I prefer places I've been over new ones.
I order the usual, not the limited-time new item.
I'd rather have a guaranteed passing grade within imagination than tolerate the risk of failure.
That said, I went to my usual hair salon the other day.
I've had the same person cut my hair for about three years.
I always say "like this today" and get it cut.
When they ask if it looks okay, I say OK.
This time, though, there was a part that always felt a bit off, so before I went I said, "Could you cut this part a little more?" Of course they were happy to.
The result was exactly what I wanted. Very satisfied.
Of course — I requested the ideal, so matching it should satisfy me.
A stylist can't read the ideal in a customer's head; if you don't say it, they won't know.
I'd never had that strong an ideal for my hair, so I'd always been satisfied without extra requests.
Separately, I've been learning creative work from an acquaintance lately.
During lessons they ask, "How do you want this part?"
Not a simple procedure — a point where taste diverges.
I always freeze. I don't know how to answer.
There's no objective "this is better" standard, so you need a decision based on subjective "I want this!" criteria.
I don't have that.
There's a past event I always remember around creative/art stuff.
In elementary school we freely painted and carved a wooden box with paints and chisels — making something "freely."
I'd been absent with a cold or something and fallen behind; later a few of us who were behind stayed after to finish.
I remember enjoying even the makeup session.
I was literally free — thinking patterns would be fun to add, and so on.
After finishing, the whole grade's work was lined up in the gym.
Seeing mine among so many, it was so incoherent and mismatched that I remember being quite shocked.
Nobody mocked me, but it was the first time I felt my lack of that kind of art sense — or "talent."
I liked craft itself. I'd make cardboard weapons from manga, Pythagoras Switch–like devices at home, draw manga — I thought I liked this kind of work. But seeing the finished piece next to others in the gym, I felt deeply embarrassed.
After the display I took it home, but the love I'd had while making it was gone; I soon threw it away.
Looking back: expressing your tastes by your own standards doesn't necessarily produce a satisfying result.
Sense, skill gaps, and expression ability all matter.
And as you grow up, exams and work mostly give you plausible objective numbers.
You can judge good or bad based on those metrics.
For deliverables too — say making ads — what survives A/B testing is correct, and I basically follow that. Even at submission, when performance is still unknown, I unconsciously check not "because I like it" but whether it holds up against other companies' examples and creatives in the world.
(※ I'm especially like this as a marketing specialist — "make something people empathize with" is a bad move; "make something that sells" is the theory.)
For the craft of making, with minimum production skill (tool use etc.) and direction ability, you barely need "sense" — I've felt that doing it myself.
Tune fonts, textures, colors and a few variables and you can hit about 70 points.
But almost no subjective judgment criteria exist there; consciously or not, you follow objective indicators.
So when cutting your own hair, making something yourself, making something not for selling/giving/showing — when asked for your value criteria, you get lost.
You fall into a sense of not knowing what you "like."
Even "I want this" sometimes follows "this seems less unnatural objectively" rather than "I like this."
If subjective and objective criteria blend, the objective ratio feels high.
Of course every judgment is shaped by past experience, so 100% subjective judgment is impossible — that's obvious.
Still, it feels like decisions grounded in my own tastes are decreasing.
Now that social media dominates, your tastes are easily shaken and denied.
Even for a novel that sounds fun, I check reviews before reading, and after reading I want to see everyone's reactions.
If a review points out contradictions or flaws in a work I liked, the liking doesn't vanish — but something catches in my chest.
Block information and new encounters get rarer. If I pick a book at a bookstore going "this is it!" by taste and it doesn't fit, it feels far worse cost-performance than when a recommendation fails.
That's weird.
I form fewer ideal images of what I "like" in my head — they're too blurry to rely on as decision criteria.
Those value criteria only get an outline through slowly deciding ideals, choosing yourself, succeeding and failing — but you stop being able to spend that time.
Technology is very useful for minimizing the labor of forming the outline of "like."
An outline of "like" built by training AI on your tastes will probably match one you labored over yourself.
So what's the difference? Saying "what you gain through effort is only the outline, and the experience along the way is what's wonderful" is too rough to sit right.
The goal isn't to reject technology. But "technology replaces everything" also feels intuitively off.
This blog is ending, but one quick thought: when there's a story of discovering it yourself, the love afterward is larger — you can keep liking it.
Songs I listen to a lot include recent finds, but the ones with deep attachment are mostly from when I rented CDs at TSUTAYA, struggled to put them on iTunes and a Walkman, and listened on repeat. When AI says "this is what you like!" I often go "yes, that!" — but the amount of love still feels larger for the former.
Of course how you assign meaning (how you hold love) can be worked out afterward — so try figuring out how to put love into things you discover. (AI — technology — isn't the harm.)
That's all.
(P.S. What I wrote this time is a familiar theme on this blog — and the feeling that writing similar things is bad cost-performance / that my thinking hasn't progressed may be the same kind of sensation.
And after finishing this post, asking generative AI for thoughts returns very interesting answers — almost certainly more insightful and structured than asking a human, with more takeaways. But feedback from people has a different kind of joy, and that's worth thinking about too.)
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