Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

when I started researching child ed, one of the first things to strike me was how much of children's time we wasted soon after came the distressing realization that a lot of people find this functional, discipline defined as an unconditional willingness to do nonsense work

it took me longer to realize why I found this so viscerally *creepy* people like @visakanv @auderdy @pmarca @micsolana @HeatherEHeying & many others led me to the conclusion that "taste" is a real + important thing, a kind of intuitive discernment that's trained over a lifetime

the "taste" I'm referring to is the thing that tells you that your circumstances aren't working and how you want them to be different this leads to all kinds of people, from maker-hermits to eccentric rainbow-clad extroverts to techies who become obsessed with making holograms

it's a bit like the daemons in His Dark Materials; you can certainly struggle to get along with someone whose taste is very different from yours, but the real battle is to protect all taste

taste admittedly introduces a lot of risk at the individual level and a degree of instability at the population level: progress of any kind is necessarily destabilizing, moreso when people disagree about what it ought to look like

when you are trained very young to allow your superiors to waste your time, you are learning that your taste isn't functional; it's a hunger that will only pain you or make you do bad things other people will tell you what matters and what needs to be done

children hear "that won't work" and "never give up!" all the time,* and unless they realize that these are deployed as needed to counter the internal sense that you should try something that seems fun or stop doing something that you're not enjoying, it only generates confusion