Money used to buy distinction. Now it buys delivery. A handbag, a watch, a Mediterranean villa for the weekend — the queue is at the door, the credit limit is the only friction. What remains scarce is taste.
The democratization of stuff
We live inside a logistics miracle. Anyone with a phone and a credit card can stage a life that looks expensive. The visual vocabulary of luxury — marble, monograms, matcha — is now a free filter. What that visibility has done, quietly, is collapse the value of the object and inflate the value of the choice.
Taste is the discipline of choosing well when nothing is stopping you from choosing badly.
Why taste cannot be downloaded
Taste is the residue of attention. It is years of reading the wrong novels, eating in the wrong restaurants, wearing the wrong shoes, and slowly noticing what makes you feel at home in your own skin. You cannot speed-run it. You cannot prompt it. You can only practice it.
That is what makes it, today, the last true luxury — and the one worth investing in long after the handbags are out of fashion.
