liking something, the laziest form of self-expression

About five years ago, I first listened to a record on my friend's turntable and it completely changed how I experienced music. It was an album I had heard countless times before and I knew the album from front to back. Yet, when I put his headphones on and listened, my mind was blown. The vinyl added shape and depth to the tracks and it sounded like I was in the room with the artist. The bass had more body, there was space around the vocals, everything just had an indescribable complexity in shape.

I've been collecting ever since. As time went on, the hobby inevitably became exponentially more expensive. Of course I need the HD600s, they have a flatter frequency response. Of course I need By the time I get to Phoenix on vinyl, I need to hear all that distortion and despair as they intended.

"It's all worth it though", I told myself after every purchase, "This is the truest way to appreciate music." I needed to catch every subtle detail. Yet sometimes, I would do things that would make me question this fact. Why do I get so happy when people point out a record? Why am I buying this record for such an absurd amount of money when I've heard it on streaming dozens of times? Why am I front-facing certain sleeves when friends come over? If this is really about the sound, why am I staging the object?

Am I still paying this much because of what I hear, or because of what it says? These questions didn't stop at vinyl. They kept spiraling. Do I really love this album, or do I want to be perceived as someone who does? And if it's the latter, what else am I doing that for? These questions sat with me for a while, and eventually led me somewhere I didn't expect. It was no longer just about records. At a certain point in time, the purpose of my collection had transitioned from raw utility into how I express myself and build my identity. This troubled me a lot, and led to the following thoughts.

Enjoying something is easy, there's nothing wrong with that. The gray area begins when enjoyment starts posing as an expression, when "I like this" becomes "this is who I am.".

It's so easy to stitch together a collection of borrowed tastes and mistake the patchwork for one's self. Endorsement is not authorship, and the distinction must be made. I look at my records, the culmination of thousands of hours of someone else's personal creation, and I catch myself front-facing their spines for visitors, as if my enjoyment and endorsement of these arrangements of albums said something about me. Why not create something on my own? Why do I represent myself with the creation of others?

In my view, there's a hierarchy of self-expression that hinges on two traits: risk and effort.

At the top is creation. You make something that didn't exist. An app you ship and stand behind, a research paper you co-authored, a book drafted over years. Regardless of the physical form in which it manifests, your creations are an extension of your ideas, your judgement, your very self. There's no fallback if it lands flat, you attach your name to it. Creation is your mind externalized; your inner choices acquire form, and that form can be accepted, ignored, or rejected. Your creations are an extension of who you are, and this makes you vulnerable. You're staking your time, your ability, and your judgment in public. Creation requires the highest risk and effort.

In the middle is interpretive work. You don't invent the raw material, but you add judgment and structure. A movie review, your thoughts on a recent assassination, justifying who you're voting for. Interpretation risks being wrong in public, but it isn't tied to your very being in the way creation is. You're accountable for your reasons, not for bringing the thing itself into the world. It's valuable, but it isn't the same kind of exposure.

At the bottom is consumption-as-signal. Enjoy, then wear the enjoyment as identity: the bumper sticker with the prewritten joke, the shelf of books staged for visitors, the labubu on the backpack. It's selection, not construction. Low effort, low risk.

To enjoy something is the laziest possible action. Anyone can enjoy. Enjoyment requires nothing. No skill, no vision, no vulnerability. The consumer didn't make the thing, didn't interpret it, didn't add anything to it. They simply experienced it and said "yes." And even that yes isn't original. It's a selection from a predetermined catalog of options that someone else created, marketed, and made available. The act of distinguishing what to enjoy from what not to enjoy feels like curation, like taste, but it's just sorting. It's choosing between premade identities and calling the choice one's own.

The curation of others' creations doesn't make someone unique. It makes them just that, a culmination of others' successes with none of their own. They become a walking endorsement, a poster board of other people's accomplishments. The irony is stark: the more someone leans on borrowed taste to signal who they are, the less of them there actually is. They've outsourced their identity to a roster of other people's art. And because it's all selection, it's completely replaceable. If the choice ages poorly, there's the retreat to "I'm just a fan." When the object falls out of fashion, the "self" gets swapped. It inflates identity by treating endorsement like authorship, but there's no authorship here. There's only alignment.

This isn't to say that enjoyment can't be a precursor for creation. Most people start as fans. Love can lead to imitation, which can ultimately lead to creation. Borrowing can be a transient state, a necessary step in finding one's own voice. The musician learns by covering songs before writing their own. Consumption becomes a problem only when it stays consumption, when the borrowing never graduates into something else. The difference is in the why. Are you selecting to understand something, to build toward something, to eventually make something? Or are you selecting to be seen selecting? The former is a foundation. The latter is a lazy attempt in making a person with no intrinsic value unique.

In a world where personal branding has become currency, this outsourcing of identity is bound to happen. Startups raise millions because the founder can run up numbers on Twitter.. Being interesting online can matter more than being competent offline. We're exposed to hundreds of curated personalities every day online, an amount of people our ancestors would never encounter in a lifetime. This constant comparison shrinks us. We feel the pressure to stand out, to be memorable, to be someone.

Some people achieve this through doing. This could be a startup founder raising capital, or it could be a drummer opening for Weston Estate. They've earned their distinction. Unfortunately, the truth is not everyone can differentiate themselves through creation or success. They still need to be unique though. The world demands it, even if they have little to offer. Therefore we outsource. If we can't be interesting, we'll at least like interesting things. We perform taste as a substitute for substance.

That isn't what I want, and it shouldn't be what anybody wants. What makes me valuable if all I can do is choose well? What do I offer the world beyond support? I have one life to create, and I've been spending it arranging other people's work. Recognition isn't the same as creation.

I still love vinyl. It taught me to listen. But my records will outlive me and won't remember me. Selections aren't a self; output is. What I've chosen says nothing about what I'm capable of. If I want to be known for anything, let it be something that didn't exist before I made it.