Hi,

Aaaaa today's letter is not long. I didn't have much time 😭 but ANYYYYYYYYYYYWAY, I've been thinking about taste. Do you actually know what you like? Not what Pinterest says looks good, not what the algorithm has shown you 47 times until you suddenly think you need it, not what everybody collectively decided was cool this month. I mean the weirdly specific things that make you stop. The ugly chair you'd absolutely put in your house. The colour combination that shouldn't work but somehow does. The shoes everybody hates but you think are incredible. That one song you will defend with your LIFE even though, objectively, it might actually be terrible.

I think knowing your taste is a strange little way of knowing yourself. And I wonder if that's becoming harder. We have access to the whole world now. I can be sitting in Cape Town and five minutes later I've seen what someone's wearing in Seoul, an exhibition in Tokyo, somebody's apartment in Copenhagen and a random woman making a lamp out of bread and suddenly I'm thinking, wait... do I need a bread lamp? There's SO much to see, which is incredible for creativity, but also... maybe terrible for it? How do you look at everything without slowly becoming everything you've looked at?

I don't think the answer is to stop looking. Absolutely not. I want to see EVERYTHING. Maybe the fun is figuring out what stays with you. What makes you curious. What you can't stop thinking about. What you love even when nobody else gets it. Maybe originality isn't about never being influenced. Maybe it's having the whole world available to you and still somehow choosing your own.

Anyway, that's where my brain has been while making Different Worlds. And now I want to know: what's something you genuinely love that everybody else seems to hate? Please tell me. I need to know how questionable your taste is too.

Okay bye. I told you this one was short 😭____________________

Until next time,
Esona