Disclaimer: if you can't handle bathroom pictures, click away. They are a bit dank, but nothing too horrifying.Where does bad taste come from?I see what I consider bad taste everywhere around me. Most of it is boringly bad. A random wardrobe that belongs in a cheap 2BHK rental right outside the washroom of a Third Wave Coffee outlet (which, in another turn of bad taste, serves second-wave coffee). I am in fact sitting in this outlet as I write this. The table is too tall, and the cappuccino's straw is at the level of my nostrils. Perhaps this coffee is meant to be snorted, and not tasted.Bathrooms with bad taste are a lot less boring. They are either totally neglected or overthought. A recent one I witnessed was in Konark, a 1985 outlet that's been serving solid food for three generations. They seemed to have had some kind of renovation a few years ago, as the interiors do not evoke 1985. More like 2018. The washroom had an interesting design. It's a small square with all three corners occupied by a urinal, an Indian toilet and a western commode.not a great picture to look at as I sip my coffeeI wonder how this came to be. Perhaps, there was only the Indian toilet to begin with, and someone thought that it would be fantastic to give consumers a preferred mode of excretion.It's not much better in newfangled posh restaurants. I was in Boteco the other day, a fairly expensive Brazilian restaurant, right under the BlackRock office. In the table next to mine was a classic uncle who had the appearance of someone named Nagaraj Byregowda sitting across two Koreans, all in suits. And he was speaking and gesturing to them in fluent Korean. The restaurant was papered with the typical piss-yellow overly ornate AI slop art.The bathroom is in a narrow passage, near a corner that also leads into the kitchen. People kept jamming themselves up against the waiters, while trying to get to the bathroom, only to realise that it's engaged. Inside, was some kind of faux-tokyo cypberpunk aesthetic that was nothing like the rest of the place. Black tiles, black commode, incense. No one lit it and there was no ventilation, so it smelled a bit farty. There was an emergency box with a wine bottle in it, and a sticker on it, which was some joke that I can't quite remember about breaking the glass in case of an emergency.The worst part was the tap. I didn't take a picture because I was already a bit irked, but I found a pictures online of this abomination called a "joystick mixer."It looks unassuming, but it took me two minutes to figure out how to turn on the damn thing. It's not particularly high on pressure either. It appeared to be a little annoying to clean for the staff, and there was already a bunch of municipal hard water sediment around the part where the water flows. Maybe that's why the "joystick" itself was so creaky and stiff, requiring a lot of force. Just looking at it, can you guess how to turn it on? How do you control the force?What likely happened here is that some interior designer sold a vision of luxury and sleekness to whoever operates the restaurant. It's definitely a bathroom that would look much better in pictures.Here's the thing though. In the large, I'm not too bothered about this. I think "bad taste" is a mostly unavoidable phenomenon in today's society. It happens when economic growth, technology, and creation of wealth outpaces culture, or specifically, knowledge of what feels like the right fit for human needs. Culture diffuses a lot more slowly, it can't handle the kind of acceleration that we see in technology or GDP. If we want to accelerate "good culture," it's important to figure out how to ground people and make them more observant of the world we live in.