Life is short and things are expensive, so knowing how best to spend our attention and lucre is of the utmost importance. Unfortunately, there are far more things to choose from than there are hours in the day or coins in the purse. Thus, knowing how to judge a thing becomes a crucial skill.
Good judgment maximizes our chances of having a positive experience and helps us to glean cautionary lessons from the bad ones. But judging well is hard. Luckily, we have critics to help us make our decisions.
I have a lot of love for the professional critics of the world. They brave star-studded movie premieres and read reams of new books and binge twelve-hour Netflix series, all in order to tell us what to enjoy and what to avoid with our limited time and resources. They judge professionally.
It’s a job, sure, but it’s also a massive investment of effort and creative energy—not to mention all the other costs. When Pete Wells ceded his position as The New York Times’ restaurant critic, he wrote at length in his farewell column about the ill effects the position had on his health and waistline.
But more than calories counted or paper-cuts earned, I think the steepest cost comes in the form of a changed relationship between the critic and the object of their analysis.
I assume most critics get into the business because when they were young, they obsessed over whatever field it is they go on to work in professionally. Children, however, tend to love enthusiastically and wholeheartedly.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I suspect critics find it much harder to sit back and enjoy things the way they used to. Instead, I imagine that with “great taste” comes “great responsibility,” in the form of constantly weighing the pros and cons of a given experience. That sounds like an exhausting way to live, and to the extent it’s true I wouldn’t wish it on any of you.
Still, I think it’s important to emulate the critics a little, in order to learn how to judge things in your own life. Because again, our time and wallets and recommended daily caloric intake are all limited. So we owe it to ourselves to figure out the best way to navigate all of the choices life offers.
First, even if we remain amateurs, we have to identify what type of connoisseur we are.
For example, I realized a long time ago that I’m more of an appreciator than a true-critic. By that, I mean I prefer to find what works in some creation—any creation—rather than focus on what doesn’t.
You might have a friend who you can’t go to movies with anymore because he just has to find a way to talk about what didn’t work or how some other director would have handled it better. Perhaps friend is too generous a word for that person in your life…
Choosing the side of appreciation, however, doesn’t prevent me from trying to find the best possible things to appreciate.
To do that, the next step is to distinguish quality between matters of preference and matters of make.
By preference, I mean the content or experiences you like because they are them and you are you. For example, I don’t think I’ll ever get into the WWE. That’s not a knock against the WWE or the people who like it, the experience just isn’t my thing. Again, I think preference is what a lot of us typically call “matters of taste,” although here at Pound Foolish we look at taste a bit differently.
While someone could be pedantic, for our purposes let’s say there are no right or wrong preferences.
You may have heard someone say “don’t yuk my yum” in relation to criticism levied at another’s likes, but I think remembering this concept is especially crucial in a dehumanizing online era. So, while it should go without saying, I’ll shout once more from the rooftops that you not liking something does not mean the people who like it or the person who created it is bad. 95% of banal internet criticism would vanish overnight if people grasped this concept.
By make, I mean how well is a thing constructed relative to what it is trying to be. Here, I think you can place a piece more definitively on a scale between good and bad. If I’m trying to make a four-legged table and you end up with a three-legged stool, I have failed to make you a table, no matter how great the stool. Or if I burn my grilled cheese until it resembles a hockey puck more than a food product, then I have clearly executed poorly against the vision I set out to achieve.
I’ve forgotten most of freshman year philosophy, but I often think about said vision as the “Platonic ideal” of the thing, meaning in this example the perfect and unchanging version of a grilled cheese that my burnt sandwich is pretending to be. It’s not actually obtainable in the real world, but it is a reference point to strive towards and judge against.
“But wait,” you ask, “what if I like my grilled cheese burned like a hockey puck?”
Well personally, I think you’re wrong, but you are illustrating a good point. These two concepts of preference and make are in tension with each other. And in order to really become a good judge in your own life, you need to have a deep understanding of both your own preferences and the quality with which things can be made in order to match those preferences.
This is why I can enjoy a plastic cup of beer in a Wisconsin dive bar and a martini at Bemelmans. Those fine establishments are nominally both in the libation business, but are in fact trying to be very different things, and each of those things can be done poorly or done well.
I won’t list the places that have served me a bad martini, but it is a long list, especially for a drink that when made well is just cold poison with a twist of lemon.
This is also why a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese and the Red Hook Tavern burger are both excellent. Again, at face value they’re both cheeseburgers, but they occupy very different places in the market and offer you, the consumer, radically different things (at radically different price points too).
These categories of thing can also be highly personal. Hand an adult Frenchman a Lunchable and he will probably surrender refuse to eat it. After all, it’s primarily made of cardboard and red paste. But hand that same yellow box to a West Village girlie with nostalgic childhood memories of begging mom for one in the aisle of the supermarket and see if she doesn’t take a bite, Carbone be damned.
Personally, I think people should have a mix of high and low tastes in their lives, but regardless of what you like I hope you know why you like it and find the best version of it. Just don’t forget the best version for some categories comes from a vending machine in O’Hare.
Thanks for sticking around. I’ll see you on Friday for the Weekend Read.