I Think We Should Bring Back Being Particular

I think we should bring back being particular.

The best thing in somebody’s house is often the thing they refuse to replace.

A chipped mug that has somehow become the only acceptable mug. A lamp with a ridiculous shade. The good scissors, which everybody knows not to touch. A person can own an entire set of matching dishes and still reach for the one plate that doesn’t belong.

These things are not always beautiful. They are not necessarily expensive. Sometimes they are objectively a little ugly, and that is part of their charm. They suggest that a person has been living long enough, and paying close enough attention, to develop preferences that cannot be explained by a shopping link.

Not particular in the sense of making a server remake your drink four times. Not the kind that makes everybody else responsible for your comfort. I mean the lovely, mildly unreasonable business of knowing what you like, and not needing it to become everybody else’s thing.

The auntie who will not put a white tablecloth on the table because she says white makes the room look cold. The uncle who listens to an album from the first track to the last, because that is the order somebody made it in. The friend who can tell you precisely which corner store sells the good plantains. None of them has necessarily constructed an aesthetic around these opinions. They simply have them.

We have plenty of ways to announce a personality now. You can pick an aesthetic, assemble a mood board, and buy your way into its visual vocabulary before dinner. There is an entire internet prepared to explain what your shoes, candles, coffee order and preferred shade of beige say about you.

The trouble is not that any of this is fake. A mood board can be a wonderful place to discover yourself. The trouble begins when a preference has to look coherent to strangers before it feels legitimate to its owner.

Being particular is almost the opposite of being on brand. Brands are supposed to make sense at a glance. Actual people have contradictions. Someone can love severe black furniture and floral bed sheets. They can insist on a very specific perfume and then wear the same faded T-shirt for eleven years. They can be exquisitely discerning about music and completely indifferent to whether the dining chairs match.

A person is not a showroom. Thank God.

In a 2020 study of social media, researchers Johannes Paßmann and Cornelius Schubert argued that platforms do more than display tastes people already have; the acts of liking and interacting also help make taste. That is a useful distinction. What we repeatedly see, save and reward can begin to shape what feels desirable. It does not mean algorithms have made everyone identical. They can introduce us to wonderful, strange things. But it does mean that the line between finding something you love and being taught to love what is easy to find can become rather thin.

There is a certain intimacy in learning somebody’s peculiarities. You discover that they like their toast darker than seems advisable, that they cannot bear a particular kind of fabric, that their favorite song is not the artist’s most famous one. You begin to know them through the things they return to.

And sometimes you inherit those preferences without realizing it. You reach adulthood and find yourself folding towels a certain way, buying a particular brand of soap, or refusing to serve food in the pot it was cooked in. It may be years before you recognize whose voice is in the rule.

A person is not a showroom. Thank God.

Not every inherited rule deserves to survive, of course. Some were born of scarcity, anxiety, or an unnecessary concern for what the neighbors would think. Being particular should leave room to change your mind. Otherwise it is just stubbornness in a nicer outfit.

There is also the question of who is permitted to be exacting. A man who has strong opinions about watches or whiskey may be called a connoisseur. A woman who has strong opinions about how she wants her home arranged can be called difficult. A wealthy person’s eccentricity may be admired as taste; somebody else’s may be dismissed as fussiness. The same insistence can look charming or inconvenient depending on who is doing the insisting.

So perhaps the point is not that every preference deserves applause. It is that people deserve some space to have preferences without turning them into a performance, a diagnosis, or a shopping category.

I like the idea of a home with evidence of a person in it. Books that have not been arranged by spine color. A bowl reserved for the good fruit. Records kept because somebody remembers where they first heard them. The odd chair that is too low but belongs exactly where it is.

Not because mess is more authentic than neatness. Some people are particular about being tidy, and they deserve their flowers too. The pleasure is in encountering choices that were made for the person who lives there rather than for an imagined audience.

Maybe that is what feels so precious about a genuine preference: it has a history. It has survived other options. It has been tested against convenience, fashion, other people’s opinions, and sometimes good sense.

There is a kind of affection in remembering that somebody takes tea in a certain cup. And there is a kind of self-respect in knowing which cup you want, even when no one is watching.

Keep the odd lamp. Keep the good scissors in their drawer. Play the whole album.

Not everything that makes you you needs to be available in six colors.