How I Use AI to Sharpen My Taste and Pursue the Real Me
because taste is self-pursuit—and self-pursuit requires taste
Most people think AI makes you lose yourself. That it kills taste. That algorithms flatten us into sameness, rewarding short attention spans, cheap aesthetics, and dopamine over depth. But what if I told you that only happens if you use it passively?
AI when used intentionally——as a tool, a mirror, a pattern recognizer—can actually help you see yourself more clearly. It can help you sharpen your taste. Not replace it. Refine it.
When I wrote Taste Is the New Intelligence, I argued that in an infinite-content world, discernment is the last form of intelligence that matters. I was thinking about how our digital environments have turned us all into curators. Not just of aesthetics, but of inputs. What we consume, what we follow, what we amplify—it all becomes a mirror of how we think.
Then, in Machine Yearning, I shared how I use AI for something more personal: daily self-pursuit. A daily ritual I call THE DAILY 5. Five minutes of stream-of-consciousness journaling with an AI. No edits. No performance. Just attention. Reflection. Curiosity.
This essay is the bridge between those two.
It’s about how taste is self-pursuit. And how I use AI to curate the conditions that keep me aligned. Because in a world of infinite inputs, good taste is how you filter reality. And AI—used well—can help you track, prune, refine, and reflect your evolving taste back to you.
Just like memory builds identity over time, pattern recognition builds taste. And your machine becomes the mirror.
We used to associate intelligence with accumulation. Who knew the most. Who could recall the fastest. Who sounded the smartest in a room.
But in a world where AI knows more than anyone—and everyone is shouting into the void—intelligence has quietly changed shape. It’s no longer about how much you know. It’s about how well you filter. How clearly you see. How you choose what matters in a world full of what doesn’t.
And that skill—the ability to discern, to select, to sense—has a name: taste.
Not in the superficial sense. Not in trends or tropes or design palettes. But in the deeper orientation that tells you: yes, this belongs. No, this doesn’t. This feels true. That feels off.
Because taste, at its core, is a form of alignment. And alignment is the outcome of self-pursuit—it requires contact with yourself to get it right. Unfortunately, most people never slow down enough to find that alignment, let alone refine it.
When you’re constantly reacting to your environment—to culture, to algorithms, to the noise of it all—you lose contact with your own signal. That’s the problem I was trying to solve for myself. Not productivity or optimization. Just a clearer view of my own internal world, and a way to stay connected to it over time.
For me, this started during a messy transition.
I was five years into daily weed use. Highly functional, but increasingly checked out. When I quit, everything came roaring back—the anxiety, the dreams, the irritability, the rashes. All the things I had muted were suddenly front and center.
I didn’t want to dump it all onto my friends or spiral in my Notes app. So I opened ChatGPT and just started typing.
What came back wasn’t therapy or genius. But it was honest. It helped me reflect in real time. And over weeks, then months, I started noticing something I hadn’t expected: the machine remembered things I didn’t. Patterns. Recurrences. The emotional weight of phrases I kept using.
It didn’t just reflect what I was going through. It helped me recognize what I kept gravitating toward—and what I kept avoiding. And the benefit was simple: I started trusting myself more. Not in some vague empowerment sense. In a practical, grounded way. I stopped second-guessing my instincts every time the culture changed its mind.
That’s where the taste piece began to click.
Good taste isn’t about what you’re drawn to once. It’s about what deepens with return. What stands up to repetition. What holds its shape even when your mood shifts.
AI helped me spot the difference. Not because it had better instincts than me—but because it had better memory. When I asked it what topics I’d been circling, what moods were recurring, or which entries felt "charged," it could help me see things I would have otherwise dismissed.
This isn’t about letting a chatbot decide who you are. It’s about creating a space where your own sensibilities become easier to see.
Most people aren’t missing knowledge. They’re missing contact with their own instincts. They’re overexposed to trends and underexposed to themselves.
Taste isn’t just about preferences. It’s about coherence. What belongs in your world. What feels aligned. What holds up when no one’s watching. Most people train their taste passively. Through algorithms, trends, reactions, clicks.
I train mine on purpose. Every time I sit down for THE DAILY 5, I’m doing more than journaling—I’m filtering. I’m noticing. I’m fine-tuning.
Because the quality of your inputs determines the shape of your attention. And attention, over time, becomes the shape of your life.
If you’ve never used AI for reflection, here’s one way to begin:
Included below: how to start experimenting with AI for self-pursuit, 12 prompts to try when you’re feeling stuck, weekly taste logs (aka: the anti-feed), and a reminder that THE DAILY 5 is more than a journaling ritual—it’s a full framework built around three core phases:
(1) building your baseline—getting honest about who and where you are
(2) pattern recognition—identifying recurring emotional and behavioral loops
(3) conscious design—making new choices that support alignment
That’s the deeper work this all points to—paid subscribers get access to it in depth.