There's a particular satisfaction in being the person at dinner who wasn't impressed by the thing everyone else was impressed by. I have been that person more times than I'm proud of, and for a long stretch of my late twenties I mistook the satisfaction for taste.
A Confession
It isn't taste. Or rather, it can be taste, but far more often it's a kind of self-protection wearing taste's clothes — a way of pre-empting disappointment by declining to be moved in the first place. If you never let a thing impress you, it can never let you down. This is, I've come to think, a genuinely terrible trade.
Taste or Tiredness
The people I admire most are not the ones who are hardest to impress. They're the ones who remain, against all the evidence of their own sophistication, willing to be delighted — by a sentence, a piece of music, a stranger's small kindness on a train. Their standards haven't dropped. If anything, their standards are sharper than mine, because they've kept the muscle that actually notices when something clears the bar, rather than letting it atrophy into a permanent, protective shrug.
“If you never let a thing impress you, it can never let you down.”
The Return
I've been trying, this year, to let myself be impressed again — badly at first, self-consciously, like a language I used to speak fluently and now have to translate into. It is deeply uncool. I recommend it anyway. The alternative, I've realised, isn't sophistication. It's just a slower kind of numbness, with better posture.