Living First, Choosing Second (Autoethnographic Notes on Taste, Consumption, and Identity)

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how we build taste, how we decide what we like, what we buy, what we wear, and what we let influence us. These thoughts show up like tiny notifications, usually when I catch myself wanting something new for no real reason: a bottle, a pair of running shoes, a charm, something small but strangely urgent. At some point, I realized I wasn’t actually “choosing” anymore. I was reacting. So I started pausing and asking myself: Do I actually need this? Or do I want to feel like the kind of person who owns this? That question alone made me see something clearly: I’ve never been someone who owns a lot of things, just someone who collects small experiences for my someday junk journal.

The pace of the world had quietly taken over the speed of my mind. So I started slowing down on purpose. And that single shift changed how I consume, how I design, and honestly, how I understand myself.

When I look back to when I was 17–18, my relationship with buying things was simple. I bought what I needed, liked, or found pretty; wasn’t this internal pressure to signal a personality through every small choice. But now, I’m noticing how consumption of clothes, objects, media, even ideas has started feeling heavier. Personal style used to be a quiet cultivation of taste; now it often feels like branding. Consumption is no longer only about comfort, utility or liking. It’s about projecting an image, performing belonging, aspiring to a curated cool, and becoming a part of a bigger story I’m apparently supposed to be telling about myself.

Social media feeds and online shopping suggestions nudge us toward repeatable patterns of consumption, encouraging us to “add” bits of style until they accumulate into a recognizable whole. Yet I’m suspicious of the habits this creates. It’s easy to buy heaps of second-hand clothes from a thrift store simply because they were cheap. Over-thrifting happens when the act of hunt, share, and the validation replaces the slow work of deciding what actually suits you.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, I started asking myself a basic question: When did personal style become a performance rather than a lived expression?

Hi! I am Ishita, a designer, an artist, a creative person, and someone who observes how quickly aesthetics are changing. And more importantly, how these changes are affecting our mental models, our habits, and how we understand ourselves.

The Fastness of Everything

I don’t think buying things or trying new experiences is wrong. The problem is the instant nature of it. When everything is available immediately, the space between desire and decision becomes too small. The same thing happens with information. You can’t watch every film, read every book, listen to every podcast, or follow every trend. But the world doesn’t stop trying to convince you that you should try. Something that was considered “unique and personal” on Tuesday becomes “basic” by Friday.

And in that tiny space, we lose the ability to reflect on what we actually want.

There were days when I wanted to buy charms for a bag I didn’t even own yet. There were moments where I felt like I needed to play catch-up with a world that kept making new rules every week.

This constant pressure shapes our mental model without us realizing it. We start to think:

• “Everyone else is doing it, maybe I should too.”

• “If I don’t learn this now, I’ll fall behind.”

• “If I don’t own this, I’m missing out.”

But none of this actually comes from within. It comes from momentum.

Buying vs Becoming

One thing I’ve learned as I grow older is that there’s a big difference between Collecting is adding things and Curating is adding meaning.

You can buy running shoes in one click but you cannot buy the identity of being a runner. You have to earn it and I saw this in myself. Before I bought running equipment, I made sure I actually liked running. I ran in my old shoes, without any special clothes or watches. I wanted the identity to come from the action, not the other way around.

"Objects don’t create identity. Practices do."

The example I often return to in carrying history is Jane Birkin and her Birkin bag. People today obsess over Birkin: charms, miniature trinkets, cute additions, fast decorations. But for Jane, her bag wasn’t decorated in one day. It was a messy, human accumulation of years of life. Stickers from places she visited. Small objects that mattered. A bag that grew with her. This difference is important.

No judgement for people, having an immediate instinct to acquire it, but that rarely builds creative identity. Identity grows through interpretation, the way you absorb an experience and turn it into your own language. You can’t fit someone’s life long collection of memories in object with a same-day delivery experience.

It needs time, and it needs your life inside it.

What I See Changing

As a designer, this pace affects me directly, because design is deeply connected to attention and attention today feels split into a hundred tiny pieces. People no longer want design that lasts, they want design that adapts instantly to micro-identities changing everything.

Earlier, design followed a steady path: understand real needs, solve real problems, create something functional and meaningful. Now, design also has to consider identity signaling, aesthetics, novelty, social validation, and the need to appear curated. People today use objects not only for function, but also as quick identity indicators.

I feel this even more strongly because the creative process and the design thinking process require time. But when consumption becomes instant, creativity becomes shallow and you start borrowing taste. Designers and artists have always shaped the world but what is new is how heavily people now rely on objects to explain themselves. This shift affects how we design interfaces, packaging, clothes, digital spaces, even content and also what people expect from design.

Somewhere in this rush, slow, thoughtful, quietly meaningful kind of design has become harder to protect.

I think the biggest change happening right now isn’t just in consumption patterns, it’s in the mental models people are developing around taste. A mental model of taste used to be built from curiosity, exposure, introspection, lived experience and exploration. But now it is often built from algorithms, recommendations, what everyone is doing, comparison and the fear of missing out. This shift affects how people choose books, movies, music, clothes, hobbies, aesthetics, even careers. We are constantly absorbing so much that we don’t know what we actually feel drawn to.

Our taste becomes an accumulation of other people’s preferences making our identity fragile.

My System for Slower Consumption

This is what helped me the most:

1. I make a running list of things I want to consume.

Books, documentaries, movies, videos, articles, lectures, courses, be it anything.If it catches my interest, I write it down instead of consuming it instantly.

2. I group them by theme.

If I want to learn about psychology, philosophy, art, physics, fashion, AI, I group all the content under each heading helping me go vertical rather than horizontal.

3. I consume one cluster at a time.

This helps me make connections, see patterns, makes ideas stick, and build my opinion on it over time.

4. I take handwritten notes first.

Even if they’re messy, incomplete, and don’t make a lot of sense at the moment. Writing slows me down and help articulate better making my brain pick things more carefully.

5. I digitize them later.

This gives me another chance to reflect instead of just moving on.

6. I keep a visual dictionary.

Being a visual learner, I find an image, object, scene, or color palette interesting, I sketch it or save it into my curated library. I stopped saving images mindlessly because saving never made me remember.

7. I delay the decision to buy.

I ask myself simple questions:

• Why do I want this?

• Is it coming from curiosity or comparison?

• Would I still want this a month from now?

• Does this reflect who I am or who I want people to think I am?

• Can my current things do the job just fine?

• Is this an object I want to live with, or just an object I want to be seen with?

• Am I trying to fix a mood or a habit through a purchase?

Most impulses for consumption get filtered out very easily just through these questions. I don’t need to keep up with the world, I only need to keep up with my curiosity now.

Practical Habits to Slow Down Consumption

Over time, I found smaller habits that really help:

• Never buy on the same day you discover something.

• Screenshot, don’t purchase. Revisit after a week.

• Recognize the difference between wanting and wanting to want.

• Try the identity before buying the object.

• Observe patterns in what you repeatedly crave.

• Have “no-buy months” for categories you struggle with.

• Ask: if this didn’t trend, would I still want it?

• Notice how your body feels before buying - excited, stressed, pressured?

• Write down or know the story of why you want something. If there is no story, pause.

• My favorite one - Treat purchases like adding characters to your life, they need to earn their place.

These habits genuinely help me slow down and put an intention before taking any action.

Slowness Is a Creative Strategy.

Creative identity grows quietly through years of noticing, absorbing, journaling, sketching, and interpreting. It’s built on slow attention and not on trends. Some people believe fast aesthetics and quick buying can spark experimentation, and that’s true. I still believe in slow consumption, but what matters is whether a choice comes from you or from pressure.

The real tension, for me, is between consumption as identity and consumption as genuine support for how we live. Personal style now sits at the intersection of expression, habit and social signaling. The goal isn’t to moralize buying things, but to stay intentional so objects support our life instead of replacing it. If we build habits around what we genuinely want to embody, like running because it feels good or dressing for comfort and honesty, then consumption becomes a practical extension of living. In the end, whether this aesthetic world gives us freedom or traps us in performance depends on how consciously we move through it.

I’m neither trying to promote minimalism nor judging people who buy things. All I’m trying to say to myself and anyone reading this is that taste is a lifelong process. It cannot be rushed or be copied, and definitely not be built solely on the recommendations of algorithms. Taste comes from letting yourself live enough to have preferences that belong only to you. And in a world that rewards speed, slowness itself becomes a kind of rebellion.To me, everything comes back to one simple thought:

“I want to live first and choose second.”

When I slow down, I choose better and consume less which results into more understanding of the self, and with that I am able to create better.

That’s really the entire point.