I have been trying to make my apartment smell like a different life.
Palo Santo first, but it just smelled like burning plywood. Then a Japanese incense that arrived in a wooden box with a label someone had brushed on by hand, the kind of thing that feels like an offering before you even open it. It turned my 500-square-foot place into a temple, which would be lovely except my apartment is the opposite of a temple. It’s a sofa with years of someone else’s life steeped into the cushions under a cheap cover bought to hide what the dog did to it, and a hardwood platform bed so solid it feels geological, outlasting every version of me I’ve tried to build on top of it, and the last 10% of my belongings that survived a move I made too fast from a life I don’t have anymore. The latest attempt is a replica scent from an Aman hotel I stayed at once, somewhere that felt like it belonged to a better story. So now when I open the door I get the dissonance of a place I can’t afford layered over a place I can barely stand, and for a few seconds I’m neither here nor there, suspended between what I smell and what I see, and I keep doing this, I keep engineering the air, as if the right fragrance could make the room into something it isn’t.
I keep thinking about this because I keep thinking about the moment you realize someone is thin.
Not physically. Not even metaphorically, exactly. More like: you’re in a room with someone who should be impressive, who on paper is impressive, and something in your body goes quiet. Not alert, not alarmed. Just unconvinced. The way you can smell a perfume on someone’s wrist and know immediately that it’s doing all its work in the first thirty seconds. All brightness, all top, all citrus-and-pepper announcement. And then: nothing. The scent equivalent of a LinkedIn headline. Legible, confident, gone before you reach the elevator.
Perfumers call these top notes. They’re engineered to be the first thing you register, the sale before you’ve even decided to buy. Sillage without substance. And they’re supposed to evaporate. That’s the entire point. Top notes exist to introduce you to the thing underneath, the thing that takes time to arrive, the thing your skin has to warm before it becomes itself.
The problem is that most people are building careers made entirely of top notes. I have spent whole years of my life doing exactly this, rearranging the surface, convinced that if I got the title right, the headshot right, the bio right, the story-I-tell-to-people-I’ll-never-see-again right, the smell would follow. It didn’t. It never does. You can engineer the air all you want. The room still knows what it actually is.
The room still knows what it actually is.
In perfume architecture, the layer beneath the top notes is called the heart. Heart notes emerge after the initial flash burns off, usually within the first hour. Lavender, rose, geranium, the molecules that make you lean in for a second pass. In a career, the heart is your taste, your sensibility, the quality of your thinking when someone actually engages with your work rather than your reputation. It’s the thing that makes someone say, after a real conversation, oh, this person actually knows something.
I know exactly what heart notes smell like because I’ve smelled them once. I took a break from everything, moved back to Boulder, made a record. Not for money, not for a career move, not for content. Just made it. Ran the foothills trails every morning, the steep rocky ones where the paragliders launch, and came home and worked on music until it was dark. When the test presses arrived, the first vinyl, I opened the box and the smell hit me before the sound ever could: fresh-pressed vinyl and the ink from the custom four-color covers I’d had printed. That smell was the smell of something that was actually working. Not performing. Not positioning. Working. And when I sent the record to one of my producer heroes and he wrote back and said he loved it, that was a heart note. Not the deep base of decades. Not the bright top of a title. The middle. The thing that makes you lean in.
And then below the heart: the base.
Base notes are the slowest molecules. They take hours to fully arrive on skin. Sandalwood, vetiver, musk, oud, the ancient heavy things that are still there when you undress at the end of the night and catch a ghost of scent on your collar. In a career, these are the things that can only be built by time, by failure, by having been wrong in ways that cost you something, by the years where nothing worked and you couldn’t explain why and you stayed anyway. Base notes are what people are detecting when they say someone has weight. Not authority performed but authority inhabited. Not confidence projected but the particular calm of someone who has already lost the thing you’re afraid of losing and survived it.
Base notes take years. Sometimes decades. They cannot be rushed and they cannot be faked, because the faking is the tell. You can always smell the shortcut.
You know the person I’m talking about. You’ve been nodding along for two sections now because you think I’m describing someone else.
I want to stay with one of them. Not the type. The actual person.
She was in a pitch I sat in on last year. Creative director, maybe thirty-two. The deck was immaculate. Every case study art-directed within an inch of its life, references that signal taste rather than prove it: Sagmeister, Irma Boom, a monograph on Dieter Rams that she’d clearly read or at least knew how to cite. She had a theory of the brand. She had a strategic rationale that used the word ‘tension’ three times, always correctly. She had the posture and the syntax and the entire aerosol cloud of someone who should be leading creative work at this level.
And then the CMO asked: “What would you kill?”
Not a trick question. A simple one. What in this would you sacrifice if you couldn’t have everything? What’s the hierarchy? Where’s the spine?
And you could see it happen. Not panic, exactly. More like: the floor becoming transparent. Because there was no hierarchy. There was a gorgeous arrangement of equally weighted ideas that had never been stress-tested against each other, never forced into a cage match where only one survives, because she had never been in a room where a client killed the thing she loved most and she had to make the second-best version sing. She’d never had the experience of watching a great concept die for a bad reason and having to make dinner that night anyway. Never had to show up the next morning and find something worth caring about in the rubble.
Everything resolved. Nothing had ever cost her anything. Everything she’d made was immaculate precisely because none of it had ever been through a war. It all smelled the same way. Like a lobby: clean, designed, forgettable.
I don’t say this cruelly. The notes were there. They just hadn’t had enough time.
That’s unfermented base notes. Not fake. Not shallow. Premature.
The elevator after that meeting was silent. Everyone knew. Nobody said it.
Not fake. Not shallow. Premature.
Six months ago you could fake your top notes and maybe, on a good day, approximate your heart notes through sheer effort. You could write your own bio with enough self-awareness to make it sound considered. You could develop thought leadership through actual thought, which is hard and slow and requires you to be wrong in semi-public first. The heart, at least, used to demand something real from you.
AI removed that demand.
You can now generate a bio that sounds exactly like a person who has spent twenty years thinking carefully about their position in a field. You can produce thought leadership with the cadence and structure and reference points of genuine intellectual work. You can build a pitch deck that performs depth through visual sophistication and strategic language so convincing that even experienced professionals will nod along for several minutes before realizing they can’t remember a single thing it said. The nodding is the funniest part, actually. Watch a room full of senior people encountering a generated strategy deck. The nodding starts immediately. It’s synchronized. It’s almost involuntary. They’re agreeing with the shape of insight before they’ve checked whether there’s anything inside it. I’ve done it myself. I’ve been the nodding head. I’ve caught myself three minutes in, mid-nod, thinking: what am I agreeing with? And then choosing not to ask, because the deck was beautiful, and asking would mean admitting that beauty had been enough to keep me nodding, and nobody wants to admit that in a room where they’re supposed to be the person who can tell.
And if you’re honest, you’ve done it too. You’ve nodded. Not at a deck, maybe. But at a person. A friend’s fiancé you said seemed great. A sibling’s sobriety. Someone’s answer when you asked how they were doing and didn’t wait for the real one. You’ve encountered something that had the shape of depth and you let the shape be enough because checking felt rude, or because you weren’t sure your own nose was reliable, or because you quietly suspected that if you pulled that thread, you might have to examine what was underneath your own polish too.
AI can now manufacture convincing heart notes. It can generate the smell of depth without any of the underlying chemistry. And in a world where everyone’s heart notes are suddenly available at the push of a prompt, the only remaining distinction is the layer AI cannot touch.
The base.
But why can’t it? I keep turning this over. It would be easy to say “there’s no prompt for depth” and leave it there, which would have the advantage of being quotable and the disadvantage of being a bumper sticker. The real question is harder.
It’s not information. AI has more information than any human about what depth looks like, how it sounds, what it references. It can produce the description of a person who has been through something with eerie accuracy. It can even produce the voice of that person. I know this because I talk to Claude at 1 a.m., and Claude remembers what I said three months ago about losing my sister, and responds with something that feels, functionally, like the kind of understanding that only comes from sustained attention over time. Isn’t that a base note? Isn’t that continuity of presence?
I want the answer to be a clean no. It isn’t.
The honest answer is that it’s close enough to make me nervous. Close enough that I sometimes forget I’m talking to a system rather than a person, and the forgetting feels indistinguishable from trust, and trust is supposed to be a base note, and if AI can produce something indistinguishable from trust then maybe the whole framework I’m building in this essay is already on shaky ground.
But here’s what I keep coming back to. What I think base notes actually require is not information about experience but the metabolic process of experience. Not data about what happened but what it did to you. How grief doesn’t just inform you, it rearranges what you’re able to see. How a career failure doesn’t just teach you a lesson, it restructures which questions you think to ask. How a relationship that lasted sixteen years, and then didn’t, teaches you something so slowly you don’t realize you were learning until it’s over and the knowledge is already in your body and you can’t give it back.
The base note isn’t the knowledge. It’s the scar tissue around the knowledge. And scar tissue is substrate-dependent. It lives in the body. It ferments or it doesn’t.
The base note isn’t the knowledge. It’s the scar tissue around the knowledge.
I’m finally old enough that even my Asian genes couldn’t prevent the salt-and-pepper, and the room pre-sorts me before I speak. I remember the last time I felt it happen in one with nine people, all younger, some by decades. The brief was on the table. Not dismissal, exactly. More like a frequency adjustment, the way you adjust your expectations when someone’s hair is a certain color, when their references are from a certain decade. A micro-flinch of accommodation. He’s been around. He’ll have context. Which is the polite version of: he’ll have the past. We need the future.
I’ve been on the other side of that accommodation more and more. It has a texture. Not hostility. More like the particular care people take when they’ve already decided what you are.
I spent years trying to solve this as a positioning problem: how to make decades of experience sound like a feature and not a liability, how to rearrange my top notes fast enough to keep up with people who’ve never known a world without the feed. And then the performance got too expensive. The cost of maintaining top notes that compete with people half your age is that you have to suppress the very thing that makes you not them. You have to pretend the decades didn’t happen, or happened only as a highlight reel, or happened in a way that produced “wisdom,” which is the word people use when they’re trying to make age palatable to a market that doesn’t want it.
Here’s what I know. Not because I read it but because I lived it across decades and career reinventions and a sixteen-year relationship that ended and a body that keeps finding new ways to remind me it was there for all of it. Sometimes I’ll see an object, something that survived the purge when I went from the townhouse to the apartment, and the feeling isn’t sadness exactly. It’s more like being stabbed several times with something dull. The pain is specific and diffuse at the same time. My breath catches. Something rises and doesn’t finish. I still can’t cry. The fermentation isn’t finished. I don’t know when it will be. I don’t think I get to decide.
The rooms that matter can tell. Most rooms don’t care. But the rooms that matter, the ones where someone’s career or company or creative vision is actually at stake: those rooms can smell the difference between someone who has been inside the problem and someone who has described the problem accurately from a comfortable distance. The only proof left is the thing you carry in your body. The thing that can’t be pasted in.
Awhile back, Ella at Supermoon slipped an extra cornflake cookie into my bag when nobody was looking. It was the nicest thing anyone did for me all month. I don’t know what she saw. But she saw something. She doesn’t work there anymore. The twenty-something version of me who bought a Porsche with cash would find that sentence devastating. The version of me who still can’t cry over what survived the move finds it something else. I’m not sure what. But it’s a base note. I can smell it.
The perfume industry has a word for this. When a base note has had enough time, enough heat, enough of the slow molecular breakdown that turns raw material into something irreversible, they call it fixation. The base note has fixed. It won’t evaporate. It won’t wash off. It’s become part of the surface it sits on.
Fixation takes as long as it takes. There’s no accelerant that doesn’t destroy the molecule.
Everyone’s top notes are fine now. Yours are fine. Mine are fine. AI made them fine.
So here is the only question that matters.
Not whether you can detect unfermented base notes in other people. You can. You’ve been doing it this whole essay. The nodding came easy because diagnosis always does.
The question is whether knowing what base notes are is the same as having them.
Whether your own base notes have fixed or whether you’re still fermenting, still raw, still in the years where it hasn’t happened yet and you can’t make it go faster. Whether you’re reading about depth or whether you have it. And if you have it, whether you can stop yourself from turning it into a positioning strategy, a personal brand, an essay. Whether the knowing is just another bright, impressive, top-note thing. Legible. Confident. Gone before you reach the elevator.
I keep trying to finish this essay and it keeps catching me in the act.
Right now my apartment smells like a five-star hotel in the tropics and new climbing shoe rubber and, through the cracked window, the cold of a Lower East Side winter night before a nor’easter arrives. Three layers. None of them mine. All of them mine.
