IYKYK

The Diagnosis

You are not a snob. You just have standards. Very specific standards. Standards that are, coincidentally, impossible to pass on the first try. The band someone is excited about — you heard their first demo in 2019. The restaurant everyone's posting about — you were there when it was a pop-up with six tables. The show — you read the screenwriter's short story collection a decade ago and no, it's not worth lending out. It's not that you want people to be impressed. It's that you want people to catch up.

You don't share recommendations freely. A recommendation, to you, is a test. You give someone one obscure reference and watch to see if they come back with another. Most people don't. That's fine. You weren't really asking. You were checking. The people who pass get access to the actual recommendations, which you deliver with a careful, deadpan "you probably haven't heard of them, but..." — the setup that makes people want to throw you into oncoming traffic, and which you deliver with genuine, undiluted sincerity.

The truth is that taste, for you, is infrastructure. It's how you navigate. It's how you identify your people. A shared reference is more emotionally reliable to you than a declaration of love — if they know the deep cut, they're in, and if they don't, there's not much to talk about. You have been this way since you were fourteen and pretending to already know what a given indie band was. You have never once been wrong in your assessments of things, and this has made you insufferable, and you are aware of it, and you have not corrected it, and you will not.