I originally started writing this blog post because I was tired of someone not taking me seriously because I watched a Drew Barrymore movie last night instead of a Japanese independent arthouse film you can only find on pirated sites. I like pop music, and although I’m not ready to vouch for Colleen Hoover just yet, I love a beach read. Sue me.
Pseudo-Intellectualism Is Killing You
There’s been a recent revival of pseudo-intellectualism as social media continues to play an ever-growing role in our society. Social media has made us all into performers. It’s now cool to listen to music artists with less than a million streams, read Russian literature, wear vintage designer, and tell people on the internet that you’re not like everyone else and that everyone who is like everyone else is disingenuous.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with liking these things. I wear Valentino glasses and have two books by Dostoevsky on my nightstand. However, there is a level of presentation that actively avoids liking anything publicly but this genre of refined taste. With the increasing sameness within culture and identity, there is a fueled need to set ourselves apart from the mainstream, and in doing so, we create an “elevated” community that, in reality, is not quite different at all, and subjects itself to a pretentious echo chamber of monotonous, diluted thinking.
“Name Five Songs”
There is a running joke I’ve heard for years, that when someone wears a band shirt, you ask them to name five songs by that band. This leads me to believe that we are aware of our pseudo-intellectualism. We now assume that wearing a shirt representing a music artist does not equate that person listening to said artist, but is a false presentation of someone who wants to appear like they do. Additionally, there is a strange phenomenon about gatekeeping your “good taste,” as if other people participating in and appreciating these underground works of art will destroy the image of yourself you have fabricated, and result in you, yes, disastrously, being just like everybody else. In defense, people will say they enjoy something “in a different and deeper way than other people.” Why are we allowing our souls to rot in favor of counterfeit identity?
Get Embarrassed
I hope I haven’t come off as anti-intellectual. I think it’s much better that we’re taking pictures of books we’ve only read the first chapter of and posting them to Instagram instead of burning or banning them (well, book availability remains monitored and censored, but that’s for another post).
I can’t tell you not to be pretentious, and I’m not telling you to stop liking what you like. But if you get embarrassed that your listening history includes Sabrina Carpenter or your Goodreads account shows you read and rated The Selection five stars a month ago, then you are contributing to the problem. If you’re only interested in films rated over 3.9 on Letterboxd, you are not any different than everyone else; rather, you are influenced by a more obscure mainstream that believes it ranks higher on this weakly constructed hierarchy. Hating pop music doesn’t make you deep. Read outside of the classics, get excited about art that is strange and uncomfortable and stop trying to be the reborn Basquiat or Didion. We need new, weird, progressive, ahead-of-its-time art.
Picasso once said, “The worst enemy of creativity is good taste.” We stifle our creativity by our formulaic and curated consumption. Please, I beg you, pick up a book you want to read but you’re embarrassed to read on public transport. Don’t let your appearance of taste taint your exploration of creativity. Try to listen to some Katy Perry today.
By Regan Roberts, Inscape Staff
Header image by Isabella Mercer, Inscape “Metamorphosis” art contest honorable mention (2025)
