13 July 202610 min readTaste, Philosophy

The Feeling Doesn't Care How It Got Here

A song and a footballer I started following ironically both became things I genuinely love, with no moment I can point to where one became the other. That gap says something about what "authentic" taste even means.

I started listening to Odumodublvck's "Declan Rice" as a joke. Not even a joke, exactly. More like a performance of distance. The track is loud, blunt, built on a chant that doesn't let up, and the first time I heard it I put it on because someone I was with was playing it and I wanted to be in on the reference without being in on the sound. I was listening to it the way you listen to something when you want to be able to talk about it, not the way you listen to something because it does anything to you.

Except I kept putting it on. In the car, alone, where there was nobody to perform for. And at some point, maybe the fifth or sixth time, I caught myself nodding along in a way that wasn't commentary. It was just a head moving to a beat because the beat had found its way in. There was no moment I could point to where ironic became genuine. There was just a period where both labels applied simultaneously, and then a period where only one did, and it wasn't the one I started with.

The same thing happened, separately, with Cristiano Ronaldo. I followed the discourse about him the way you follow a character in a show everyone watches: half-engaged, half-ironic, mostly interested in the memes. The "SIUUU" celebration, the motivational clips, the relentless self-mythology of a man who genuinely seems to believe he's the protagonist of world football and also might be right. I was entertained by him the way you're entertained by something you're slightly above. And then one day, maybe after the hundredth clip of him doing something physically impossible at an age where it should no longer be physically possible, I noticed I was rooting for him. Not ironically. Just rooting.

Two unrelated instances of the same thing. And what I kept coming back to wasn't the feelings themselves, which are minor, but that I couldn't explain the transition. It was gradual in a way that made the whole category distinction between "ironic" and "genuine" feel less like a real boundary and more like a story I was telling after the fact.

The obvious explanations, stated honestly

The first thing anyone trained in psychology will say is: mere exposure effect. Robert Zajonc demonstrated in 1968 that repeated exposure to a stimulus is sufficient to make someone like it more, even when the person can't consciously remember seeing it before. Kunst-Wilson and Zajonc later flashed shapes too briefly for conscious registration and found people still preferred them afterward. The mechanism doesn't require attention, intention, or even awareness. It just requires contact.

That explains part of it. If I played "Declan Rice" enough times, some of the shift was probably just my auditory cortex deciding that familiar patterns are safe patterns, and safe patterns feel good. The ironic framing was a separate cognitive layer sitting on top of a process that was already running underneath, converting repetition into preference without asking for permission.

The second obvious explanation is cognitive dissonance, by way of Festinger: if you're repeatedly choosing to do something, playing a song, watching clips of a footballer, your brain needs to reconcile the behavior with a coherent self-concept. "I keep listening to this thing I don't actually like" is dissonant. "I keep listening to this thing because I like it" is not. The belief bends to accommodate the behavior, because the behavior already happened and can't be undone. Daryl Bem's self-perception theory arrives at the same destination from a different direction: you don't have perfect internal access to your own attitudes, so you infer them from your behavior, the same way you'd infer a stranger's preferences from watching what they do. If a stranger played "Declan Rice" six times in a row, you'd assume they liked it. When you do it, the same inference runs.

Both of these are real, well-documented mechanisms. Neither of them is the interesting part.

The interesting part is that it runs in reverse

Here's what I kept coming back to. The ironic-to-genuine transition isn't a one-way street. It has a mirror image, and most people have experienced the mirror image too: something you genuinely loved, unreservedly, that you now perform ironic distance from.

A song you played constantly as a teenager that you now describe as a guilty pleasure. A sports team you followed as a child with total devotion, that you now support with a layer of self-aware detachment you didn't used to need.

The same mechanisms are running. Exposure, this time to social ridicule or to a changed context rather than to the stimulus itself, shifts the affective register. Dissonance resolution works just as well in this direction: "I'm someone with good taste, and people with good taste don't sincerely love this thing" resolves the same way. You update the feeling to match the self-concept. And Bem's inference engine reads your own ironic performance and concludes, reasonably, that you must not really be into it anymore.

Same machinery. Opposite direction. Which means the question isn't "how does ironic appreciation become genuine?" The question is: if the same cognitive processes can push a feeling in either direction, depending on context, repetition, and social feedback, what exactly makes one starting point more "authentic" than the other?

The origin story problem

The intuition most people have is that feelings which arise spontaneously are more real than feelings that arrive through repetition or performance. Falling in love at first sight feels more authentic than growing into love through an arranged marriage. Liking a song the first time you hear it feels more legitimate than liking it after someone made you listen to it seven times. The spontaneous version gets a narrative privilege that the gradual version doesn't.

But this intuition has a problem, and the problem is that the spontaneous version has an origin story too. You just can't see it. The reason you liked a song "immediately" is that your prior exposure history, every other song you've heard, every rhythmic and harmonic pattern your brain has already filed as rewarding, primed you to respond to this particular combination of sounds. The mere exposure effect didn't start the first time you pressed play. It started with every other piece of music you've ever encountered that shares a structural feature with this one. Your "spontaneous" reaction is downstream of a performance history you've been running your whole life. You just weren't watching.

William James argued in 1884 that emotions don't cause behavior; behavior causes emotion. You don't cry because you're sad. You're sad because you cry. The James-Lange theory has been refined since then, but the core direction of the claim, that felt experience is downstream of physiological action rather than upstream of it, keeps showing up in different frameworks. The facial feedback hypothesis, Strack, Martin, and Stepper's pen-in-mouth study, later replicated with mixed results but confirmed as a small, real effect in a large 2022 multi-lab study, found that people who held their faces in a smile configuration rated cartoons as funnier, even without knowing they were smiling. The body tells the mind what to feel, and the mind mostly listens.

If that's true for facial muscles, it's harder to argue it's not true for repeated behavior more broadly. Listening to a song ironically is still listening to a song. Your auditory system doesn't know about the ironic frame. It processes the signal, builds the associations, strengthens the neural pathways, and sends the preference update upstream. The irony was a story you were telling on top of a process that was already deciding for you underneath.

The Sorites problem, applied to feeling

There's an ancient Greek paradox called the Sorites paradox, the paradox of the heap. One grain of sand is not a heap. Two grains are not a heap. At what point does adding one grain turn not-a-heap into a heap? There's no non-arbitrary answer. The boundary doesn't exist in the sand. It exists in the word.

The ironic-to-genuine transition has the same structure. Listening #1 is ironic. Listening #47 is genuine. At what exact listening did it change? It didn't — plenty happened, just nothing that draws a line. The category boundary between "ironic" and "genuine" is a label applied after the fact by a narrator, you, who needs a clean story and can't get one from the actual data.

Judith Butler made a version of this argument about gender: identity is something you do, and the doing creates the appearance of having it. Gender is, in her words, "always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed." Swap "gender" for "taste" or "fandom" and the structure holds. Your preference for Odumodublvck or Ronaldo is something you performed into existence, not something you discovered. That doesn't make it fake; it makes it the same kind of thing all preferences are, whether or not you were watching while the performance happened.

What Pascal knew and David Foster Wallace almost said

Blaise Pascal, in the seventeenth century, proposed something unusual for a mathematician and a believer: if you can't bring yourself to believe in God, act as if you do. Go to church. Pray. Keep the rituals. The belief will follow the behavior. He was not describing hypocrisy. He was describing the mechanism I'm describing, three hundred years early, with no access to Zajonc or Bem or fMRI, and he was right about the direction of causation. Practice precedes belief. The doing produces the being. The performance is the route to the real thing, not an obstacle to it.

David Foster Wallace, in "E Unibus Pluram," argued that irony had become a prison. That American culture had gotten so good at the knowing wink, the self-referential detachment, that it had lost the capacity for sincerity. And he predicted that the next real literary rebels would be the ones willing to risk being uncool, to treat "old untrendy human troubles and emotions" with reverence instead of distance.

Wallace was diagnosing a real condition. But I think he got the prescription slightly wrong, or at least incomplete. He framed sincerity and irony as opposites, with sincerity as the cure. What my experience with "Declan Rice" and Ronaldo suggests is messier than that. The irony was the door I walked through to get there, not a barrier to the genuine feeling. Without the ironic frame, I might never have engaged with either of them in the first place. The irony lowered the cost of entry. It let me interact with something I wouldn't have approached directly, and the interaction did the rest.

The fix for irony is duration, not sincerity. Stay in the room long enough, even ironically, and the room starts to change you.

The feeling doesn't know how it got here

I don't have a grand theory of authenticity. I have two minor shifts in taste that probably don't matter to anyone but me. But they taught me something I keep thinking about: the feeling doesn't know how it got here. The affection I have for "Declan Rice" doesn't carry a metadata tag that says "arrived via ironic exposure, discount accordingly." It just sits in the same place all my other preferences sit, built from the same materials, repetition, association, social context, neurochemistry, doing the same thing all preferences do, which is shaping what I reach for next.

The question "but do you really like it?" assumes there's a version of liking that has a cleaner origin story. I don't think there is. I think every preference is downstream of some combination of accident, repetition, social pressure, and retrospective narration, and the ones we call "authentic" are just the ones whose construction history we've lost track of.

Maybe the most honest thing I can say is this: I like "Declan Rice" now. I root for Ronaldo now. I could trace the route, and I did, and none of what I found along the way made the feeling less real. It just made "real" a less useful word than I thought it was.