If you only like things after they trend, you don’t have taste. You have a feed.

Preference gets shaped by exposure, and exposure is being chosen for you by systems that measure attention. The result feels like liking things when it is closer to being handed the same thing repeatedly until it is familiar. Taste requires something you went and found rather than something that found you.

Go looking this week for one thing from outside what is being served to you. An old record, a book nobody mentioned, a recommendation from a person rather than a screen. Whether you like it matters less than the fact that you chose where to look.