November 20, 2024

We’ve basically made Personal Preference our new God. Not just like, “preferences matter” I mean we’ve literally made it our culture’s supreme moral authority.

Think about how often these phrases just end conversations dead in their tracks:

“Well, that’s their preference”

“Who are you to question someone’s preferences?”

“As long as that’s what they prefer…”

We treat these statements like a judge’s gavel slamming down from on high. They’re conversation stoppers. Final verdicts.

A thought experiment: imagine if we gave a kid complete control over their diet. They’d probably create a food pyramid made entirely of candy. They’d have reasons too, “It makes me happy!”, “It’s what I want!”, “I’ve thought about it a lot!” But we get something they don’t, Just because you prefer something doesn’t mean it’s good for you.

Yet somehow we’ve taken everything humans have ever used to make big decisions. Religious wisdom? Nah, preference beats that. Philosophy’s greatest hits, debated by history’s greatest minds? Sorry, preference wins. Cultural knowledge built over thousands of years? Preference says no. Biology’s basic drives? Preference doesn’t care. Your entire ancestral line? Preference shrugs.

And we’ve put all of it below “but what do you prefer?” The examples are everywhere once you start looking.

Take having kids. For basically all of human history (like, 300,000 years of it), making new humans wasn’t a “preference thing.” It wasn’t even really a choice thing. It was just… what humans did. Like eating or breathing. Now? “I prefer to focus on my career” somehow outranks every framework humans have ever developed around continuing our species.

Speaking of careers, how did we elevate professional achievement to this almost religious status? “I prefer to prioritize my career” now beats any expectation of family formation, community involvement, or cultural continuity. We’ve turned “work to live” into “live to work” and called it progress.

Marriage? Every society had clear frameworks about what marriage was, what it was for, and how it structured family and society. Now? “I prefer to define partnership my own way” trumps everything. We’ve redesigned one of humanity’s most fundamental institutions around personal preference from its purpose to its rules to what even counts as a partnership. Traditional marriage was about family formation, social stability, and continuing bloodlines. Modern partnership? It’s about what arrangement the individuals prefer. Another candy shop moment: We’ve taken an institution designed to serve deeper human/social needs and turned it into a preference based consumer choice.

Food choices? “I prefer to eat this way” is somehow treated as more authoritative than thousands of years of cultural wisdom about food.

Just like our kid in the candy shop, we’re using immediate preferences to make permanent decisions. We’re choosing what tastes good right now over what might actually nourish us (and our society) long term.

Here’s where it gets really weird, question any of this, and people immediately jump to “But people should be free to choose!”

Hold up. Notice what just happened there?

We haven’t just made preference our main decision maker, we’ve made it literally forbidden to suggest anything else might be more important than preference. That’s not just making preference important, that’s straight up preference worship.

Imagine trying to explain this to literally anyone from any other time in history,

“Yeah, we’ve decided that whatever individuals prefer automatically overrides every other way humans have ever made decisions.”

They’d think we’d lost our minds. It’d be like saying “I’ve decided my taste buds are smarter than all of human knowledge about nutrition.”

To be clear, this isn’t about whether any specific choice is good or bad. It’s about noticing that we’ve taken this one thing - individual preference - and secretly crowned it king of everything. Not just a factor to consider, but the ultimate authority.

Are we actually ready to bet that our preferences are better guides than every other way humans have ever made decisions? That’s a pretty wild claim when you think about it.

But hey, we don’t think about it. Because… we prefer not to.

P.S. If you’re getting ready to fire off an angry defense of preference based decision making, notice you’re about to argue that preferences should outrank other moral frameworks because… you prefer it that way. Might want to sit with that circular logic for a minute.