You Don't Actually Like Most of What You Like

I ordered the same coffee for eleven years. Milk latte, no sugar. Somewhere around year three it stopped being a preference and became a reflex - the words leaving my mouth before I’d consulted any actual desire.

I never asked myself if I still wanted it. The question felt absurd.

Of course I wanted it. It was my order.

Then one morning, distracted - think it was the song on radio - I accidentally said “black coffee” and the barista just... made it. I sat with this drink I hadn’t chosen in over a decade and realised: I liked it more.

Not dramatically. But noticeably. A small betrayal. I’d been performing a preference that had quietly died years ago, and neither of us had noticed.

This happens more than we admit.

We’re walking around with personalities composed largely of early drafts we never revised. The band you put on your dating profile is one you haven’t queued up since 2019. The author you cite at dinner parties sits unread on your shelf, pages still stiff. You say you love hiking but the last time you hiked was when someone else planned it.

These aren’t lies exactly. They’re fossils. The bones of who you were, still arranged in the shape of a living thing.

I think there’s a distinction worth making between choosing and not-unchoosing. Most of our preferences belong to the second category. We made a decision once - often young, often under pressure, often because someone we admired made it first - and then we simply never revisited. The decision hardened. Became load-bearing. Started holding up parts of our identity we didn’t want to disturb.

To question whether you still like your career is to threaten your entire twenties. To wonder if you actually enjoy your friend group is to unseat a decade of Friday nights.

Easier to just keep going.

The machinery of repetition is seductive. Say something enough times and it starts sounding true. Order the same drink, wear the same style, repeat the same opinions, and gradually the accumulated weight of consistency feels like authenticity.

This is who I am.

But is it? Or is it just who you were, plus inertia, plus the fear of appearing inconsistent?

What makes this harder to look at directly is we’ve confused preference with identity. To admit you don’t actually like jazz that much anymore isn’t just updating a playlist; it’s amputating part of the self you’ve presented to the world. You’ve told people you’re a jazz person. You have the tote bag.

The confession feels like fraud, even though the only fraud was the tote bag.

I’ve started doing this uncomfortable thing where I ask myself, about various fixtures of my life: If I encountered this for the first time today, would I choose it?

The job. The city. The hobbies. The aesthetic.

The answer is often a queasy silence. Not a clear no. Just... nothing. An absence where enthusiasm should be.

I can’t tell if I like these things or if I’ve simply accumulated too much evidence that I’m supposed to.

There’s a version of this essay that pivots to advice. Audit your preferences! Rediscover your true self! The unlived life is not worth examining!

But I don’t think that’s honest.

The truth is that genuine desire is rare and difficult to locate. We’re not buried treasure hunters who just need the right map. We’re mostly improvising, borrowing, assembling a self from available parts, and hoping it coheres. The alternative, some pure unmediated wanting that exists prior to culture, influence, habit, might not even be real.

We are, at least partially, the stories we tell about ourselves.

Even the borrowed furniture becomes ours if we sit in it long enough.

Still. There’s a difference between knowing you’re sitting in borrowed furniture and thinking you built it yourself. Between choosing to keep a habit because it serves you and keeping it because you forgot it was optional. The coffee order, the career, the personality - they’re not prisons. But they might be unlocked doors we stopped trying.

What survives the audit? I’m not sure yet.

Maybe very little. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe the point isn’t to excavate some authentic core beneath all the performance. Maybe there is no core, just layers, and the best we can do is notice which layers we chose and which chose us.

To hold our preferences a little more loosely.

To remember they’re not commandments, just guesses we stopped second-guessing.

I still order the milk latte sometimes. But now I pause before the words come out. A half-second of actual consultation. Do I want this today?

Usually no.

But the pause matters. It’s the difference between repetition and renewal. Between a self that’s discovered and one that’s merely inherited.

The honest answer is that I don’t know how much of me is me. I suspect you don’t either.

We’re all walking around in costumes we put on so long ago we forgot they weren’t skin. The question is whether you knew you were wearing them.