A Lamborghini drove past me last week. Bright green, loud, impossible to ignore. My first thought was immediate: I would never drive that.

I've had that reaction for as long as I can remember. For anything designed to draw people's attention, my response was always the same. I like old things, things that last, things that quietly earned their place. Told myself this was taste.

Then I started wondering if it was.

Because every expensive thing I've ever dismissed was something I couldn't afford. I've never rejected a Lamborghini from a position where I could actually buy one. I rejected it from a position where the rejection cost me nothing. And a rejection that costs nothing might be a preference or a form of protection.

I know for certain I wouldn't drive a neon-green 2012 VW Golf with aftermarket rims and a loud muffler. I can afford that, and I don't want it. That's taste. The Lamborghini? I'm less sure. I think I wouldn't want it. But I haven't earned the right to say that with certainty because I've never stood in front of one with a thick enough wallet to get the keys.

Jordan Peterson made a point once that stuck with me, whether you like him or not. He said you don't get to call yourself peaceful if you're incapable of violence. Peace only means something when it comes from someone who could hurt you but chooses not to. Without that capacity, the word is just a comfortable name for something else.

The Lamborghini question is the same structure. You don't get to call it a rejection if you never had the option. The word "no" only means something when "yes" was available.

I started noticing this everywhere once I saw it in the car. "I don't care about money" sounds wise until you check whether the person saying it has ever had any. "I don't need a bigger role" is comfortable when nobody offers one. Each sentence sounds like a conviction, or it might be a consolation prize repackaged as a philosophy.

Growing up, success looked like high office buildings, corner offices, suits, and suitcases. That was the image served through 90s television, and I absorbed it completely. That was what making it looked like.

My first real encounter with corp was a telecom company that owned a kindergarten inside the building. They presented it as a perk. Sure it was useful, but it felt like an infrastructure for keeping people in the office longer. Then the startup era arrived with its own twist. Fruit bowls, beanbags, after-work beers, hoodies. I got into one with every perk in the book. Comfortable enough that the walls were easy to miss, but I knew the real price of those. A nicer cage is still a cage.

But here's where the Lamborghini problem shows up. I didn't leave after testing it and deciding it wasn't for me because I left before the test even started. My gut pulled me out at the point where I would have had to find out if the person I think I am can actually operate in that world. So I avoided two things. The corporate lifestyle, and finding out whether I could have made it work.

I've seen friends do it too. One said he didn't care about status, then got offered a board position and couldn't stop talking about it for a month. The indifference disappeared the moment the thing he said he didn’t want became real.

That's the part that's hard to sit with. Most of what we call values formed under specific conditions. You were broke when you decided money didn't matter or you were stuck when you concluded ambition was overrated. The values were created at the exact moment they were needed to make the situation bearable. That doesn't mean those are false, but you've never tested them from the other side.

The honest version of my taste starts where my budget stops being the reason. Everything below that line might be a real preference or might be a story I told myself so often it stopped feeling like one.

I still don't think I'd drive the Lamborghini, but I've stopped saying it like I know.