It’s not hard to criticize trendy-trends as foolish expenditures. “You fools! You bought into that stupid hype!” And it’s not new to suggest that humans follow trends. It’s not even particularly surprising to note that the ability to follow trends can incur a significant advantage to an individual in terms of status, or general assumed level of social fluency.

To make matters complicated, some trends have real substance. Unfortunately, we conceptualize real substance and empty trends the same way. If you listen to diamond experts, they can talk your ears off earnestly about how awesome diamonds are, how beautiful the most beautiful ones are. If you ask Scotch fans, they will detail all the beautiful points of an Islay compared to a Highland. Lagavulin. No, no, the mythical Lagavulin 21! Peated just so with seaweed, aged in the blah-blah casks¹. You get the picture.

I’d like to think I appreciate nice things. But it’s difficult to understand what I appreciate because it’s well-marketed versus what I appreciate because it’s good design.

It gets worse: the “fictive” enjoyment we get from things like diamonds, whose value (aside from price-fixing) was created by advertising agencies is actually real. We might convince ourselves that we’re above such frivolity, but not everyone we love will feel the same way. Yes, we could only choose friends and lovers without frivolous taste, but there are a thousand things to choose by, and a love of diamonds is hardly the litmus test for friendship.

Once we make that concession, we’re doomed to perpetuate it. If we believe the price of a woman’s love to be a diamond, we reinforce that by buying one. Not only in the “the more people do something the more accepted it is” sense, but the fact that the more people meet an expectation, the lower the bar is seen, and not “meeting’ that bar spikes the prior for you not having the right stuff.

II

It has a somewhat similar analogy to a college diploma. The cost of not having one rises as more people obtain it. Perhaps at some point a threshold is crossed, in which not having a college diploma is seen as avant-garde. In some places this no doubt works: one can swap or postpone a college cap for a credential of a different kind: a Thiel Fellowship, a startup, something awesome enough that I couldn’t point to an example of it.

All of these trappings - diamonds, diplomas, and a refined whisky palate - still depend on social context, because society dictates the rewards you get from acquiring them. Even if you wanted to distinguish good design from diamonds in most things we value, it would be impossible. We want social validation more than anything once we have food and shelter, and most well-designed objects therefore give us social validation as a primary benefit². The social validation doesn’t ever even have to actually occurr. Just owning an object, or belonging to an organization, or doing a deed that I believe would bring praise grants a benefit.

III

“Wow, what a downer, dude.” Sort of. I advocate a stronger form of individualism.

And here is the internet. It seems sometimes that everyone is shouting what to do, but this is the ruse. All you have to do is convince someone what to want, and feeding them what to do is simple. It’s not simple because people are dumb, but because they’re smart. If they know what they want, they’re find ways to make it happen. The catch is that convincing someone to want something is hard, especially when others are convincing them to want something else. It remains to be seen whether the plethora of online opinions will converge to some reddit-like front-page document of What to Want.

On the one hand, attaching numbers to readership, voting on comments, following a few prominent people on twitter, can lead to a mindless but intense focal point, like so many army ants devouring leaf after leaf in the infinite forest of ideas. But on the other, getting to secluded lagoons in the forest has never been easier, and finding a small group to go there with you is limited only by picking them out of the crowd.

It’s hard to be different, though. Not hard in the “wow, you’re such a tough cowboy, acting exactly the way a cowboy ought to,” that smirk-inducing “hard” when a celebrity takes a few hours to speak at a rally before flying home to party and everyone swoons and calls for more leaders to boldly take us into the mild³. It’s hard in the way of actual unpopularity, of never being cool until maybe you’re old, of not combing your hair, or combing your hair when you’re not supposed to. It’s hard because we want social validation, and because being different in a meaningful way will more often than not incur a social cost that will bring net detriment to your happiness if you still want the same things as everyone else.

In Office Space, one dude asks another “what would you do if you had a million dollars” and another responds with something like “dude, it’s a stupid question anyway, if everyone did that no one would work at the land fill”. In truth, people choose remarkably similar things, and that’s the real tragedy.

So why be different? Ironically, I’m suggesting we choose paths that are different because the more often we do, the better the benefit for society, even if it’s worse for you in the long run. This might sound a little bit like a kindergarten teacher explaining to the class that everyone should be themselves. Yes. But more than that, we should actively shape ourselves to want different things. There should be less “want what I want, or you’re weird” and more “please, don’t want what I want.”

It might be that the only way to distinguish good design from diamonds is to lower the compounding effect of social validation.