I began, as many people of a certain professional generation did, with a faith in function. The world in which I started working, the world of IT, had a moral vocabulary of its own, and it was a vocabulary that preferred simplicity to splendor. One was expected to admire efficiency, clarity, reduction. Presentation, unless it could be justified as usability, was treated with a certain suspicion, as though elegance were merely ornament that had not yet been argued down by engineers.

This was not entirely unreasonable. The modern technology office, for all its utopian rhetoric, is not a particularly leisurely place. It runs on compression: compressed schedules, compressed attention, compressed emotional range. One learns to value what works because there is rarely enough time to contemplate why it ought to please. Under those conditions, taste itself can begin to look frivolous. You become fluent in function and, almost without noticing it, slightly illiterate in feeling.

What gets lost in that arrangement is not beauty in any simple sense, but interpretation. Not the object itself, but the manner in which the object enters life. Not only what something does, but how it arrives, how it is framed, how it persuades, how it flatters, how it consoles. In other words, branding, which in technology is often treated as a decorative annex to the real business, and in fashion is understood to be very nearly the business itself.

A watch is never just a timekeeping device, at least not once civilization has had its say. A coat is not merely a structure of cloth assembled for warmth. Entire industries have been built on this fact, that human beings do not consume utility in the abstract. They consume meaning, aspiration, mood, self-image, memory. The luxury world has always known this. The technology world, despite its pretensions to understanding human behavior through data, often behaves as if it has only just discovered it.

For a long time, I belonged, in instinct if not entirely in conviction, to the first world. I admired plain layouts, clean surfaces, the severe satisfactions of simplification. I was drawn to a certain austere visual ethic that was common among people who liked systems, code, and all the neat little tyrannies of order. There was a period in which I could genuinely believe that reduction itself was a form of truth, that the thing stripped bare was the thing most honestly seen.

This now strikes me as, if not exactly wrong, then at least incomplete.

My own correction came later than I might have expected, somewhere between 2016 and 2019, and it came not through argument but through exposure. I began going, with increasing seriousness, to galleries, museums, exhibitions. I became interested in fashion, at first perhaps incidentally, and then in a more sustained way. There were family influences, social influences, the quiet persuasions of environment. Certain friends, by taste or by temperament, enlarged the field of what seemed worth noticing. Tokyo, in particular, became important to this education. A city like Tokyo can make surface feel not superficial but civilizational. One begins to understand that refinement is not the enemy of seriousness, but one of its forms.

What I had previously dismissed as embellishment began to look more like intelligence.

Even when I was working at TikTok, I did not at first have much sympathy for the product category it represented. Short video, viewed on a small screen, seemed to me technically and culturally diminished. It lacked the fullness of a proper film, the informational density of a serious long-form video. I was not much of a social-media user myself, and I regarded the format with some reserve, perhaps even with a little hauteur. It felt, in those years, like a contraction of culture rather than an expansion of it.

And yet this, too, was a partial reading. What I had underestimated was the extent to which people are not merely seeking the most faithful transmission of reality. They are also seeking an arrangement of reality that is emotionally legible. A camera may record a face with perfect obedience, but a filter, by warming the light or softening the edges, can produce something people experience as more true to how they wish to be seen, or perhaps how they wish the moment to have felt. In that respect, the filter is not simply a falsification. It is an answer to a different human demand.

The lesson appears obvious once learned, which may be why those who learn it late feel the embarrassment of having missed something elementary. Human beings do not live by raw data. Memory itself declines to behave so mechanically. We remember selectively, tonally, with a private post-production. The past returns softened in some places, sharpened in others, lit according to emotional rather than documentary truth. It would be strange if our objects, images, brands, and environments were governed by a harsher standard than our own minds.

There is a detail from that period that remains vivid to me for reasons that are perhaps biographical and perhaps symbolic. In 2019, when I was working for Coinness in Beijing, Pop Mart occupied the floor directly above our office in Puxiang Zhongxin, in Wangjing. At the time, it was not yet surrounded by the later aura that would make its rise look inevitable. But something was already there, already gathering force. Looking back from 2025, after years in which collectible design and emotional consumption have only deepened their cultural authority, the proximity feels almost too neat. One floor above us, a company was participating in the formation of a new kind of commercial imagination. Downstairs, I was still in the process of admitting that I, too, had changed.

And I had changed. More than I would have predicted in 2015, certainly. The person who once found beauty chiefly in tidiness, reduction, and the cool confidence of plain structure now finds himself operating, quite literally, in the orbit of art and perhaps of luxury. This would have seemed improbable to my earlier self, who was inclined to trust the stripped-down version of things and to suspect surface as a form of compromise.

Now I think surface has been slandered by too many serious views.

By surface, I do not mean mere gloss, the cheap theatricality of status for its own sake. I mean the visible form of care. The shaping of impression. The difference between an object that functions and an object that enters life gracefully. The old technological instinct insists that performance should be enough. But people do not live inside specifications. They live in homes, in families, in memories, in fantasies, in social worlds. They want competence, certainly, but they also want delight, tenderness, glamour, reassurance, atmosphere. It is not childish to want these things. It is, in fact, extremely adult.

When I think about the last decade, what strikes me most is not that my preferences changed, but that my conception of seriousness changed with them. I used to imagine that openness meant tolerating different ideas. Now I think it also means tolerating new standards of beauty, new measures of value, new kinds of pleasure. It means recognizing that one can become more exacting without becoming narrower, more refined without becoming more sterile.

A friend of mine, Jim, once said to me, “keep it forward and flow.” It is not the sort of phrase one would ordinarily expect to carry philosophical weight, and perhaps that is part of its usefulness. I found myself returning to it repeatedly in 2025. There is, in it, a small instruction against rigidity. Keep moving. Keep receptive. Do not let one version of the self become a permanent government.

This note, left here on Christmas Eve, is partly a record of that admission.

Peace.