We are drowning in creators and starving for curators.
Any teenager with a phone can publish a song, a thread, a video essay, a product, a meme. The tools got so good that making stopped being special.
What became rare is the ability to look at ten thousand options and walk away with exactly seven that matter.
That skill is called curation.
And it is about to eclipse raw creation as the most valuable creative muscle of the decade.
The Great Reversal: From “Look What I Made” to “Look What I Found”#
Ten years ago status came from shipping.
Today status comes from filtering.
The best designers I know get more work from their “Inspiration” boards than from their portfolios.
The sharpest investors are followed for the deals they surface, not the ones they led.
The coolest people at parties aren’t the ones telling stories. They’re the ones who text you three perfect links the next morning.
Creation screams.
Curation whispers.
Whispers travel further now.
Why Curation Is Harder (and More Creative) Than Creation#
Making something from nothing feels heroic.
Choosing something from everything feels impossible.
Creation requires skill.
Curation requires taste + restraint + pattern recognition + timing + narrative instinct.
You can learn Figma in six months.
You can’t buy taste in six lifetimes.
Every act of curation is an act of destruction: for every link you keep, you reject a thousand. That rejection is where the art lives.
The Evidence Is Already Everywhere#
Look at who actually moves culture in 2025:
- The newsletter that sends one perfect link every Friday has 80 k subscribers and changes more lives than the daily newsletter with 300 k
- The anonymous Twitter account that only tweets screenshots of beautiful typography has 120 k followers and zero original images
- The Are.na channel with 47 blocks gets reposted more than most TikTok accounts with 47 videos
- The stashed.in profile with 11 public stashes and 112 links gets messages like “your taste is unreal” weekly
None of them make anything new.
They simply choose better than the rest of us.
The Neuroscience of Taste#
Your brain is a pattern-matching machine.
The more refined patterns you feed it, the better it gets at spotting refinement.
Curation is deliberate practice for taste.
Every time you decide “this belongs on my wall and that does not,” you train the muscle.
After a few hundred deliberate choices, your intuition becomes scary good.
After a few thousand, you become the person other people steal from.
There is no shortcut. Just repetition with standards.
How Curation Compounds Faster Than Creation#
A painter finishes one canvas every three months.
A curator can finish one perfect collection every three days.
One canvas might get 200 likes.
One perfect collection gets shared, restashed, bookmarked, screenshotted, and lived in by thousands.
Creation scales linearly.
Curation scales exponentially through other people’s attention.
I’ve watched brand-new stashed.in users go from 0 to 2,000 monthly profile visitors in under 90 days simply by making five tight, beautiful stashes and sharing them once.
No ads. No threads. Just taste on display.
The Three Levels of Curation Mastery#
Level 1 – Collector
Saves everything that feels good in the moment.
Result: digital hoarding.
Level 2 – Editor
Saves only what passes a conscious standard.
Result: clean shelves, occasional gems.
Level 3 – Director
Saves almost nothing, but everything saved works together to tell a story only you could tell.
Result: people use words like “taste,” “vision,” “signature.”
Most people never leave level 1.
The internet belongs to level 3.
The Tools Are Finally Catching Up to the Vision#
For years curation was punished by the tools.
Twitter hid links.
Instagram buried them.
Notion made them ugly.
Pocket buried everything in text.
Now the tools are flipping:
- Are.na channels look like galleries
- Orbit and Reflect added visual link timelines
- stashed.in lets you build Pinterest-style boards made entirely of links
- Even Notion quietly shipped rich web bookmarks because users screamed
The medium is finally learning to respect the message.
A Simple Framework to Start Curating Like a Pro Today#
You don’t need permission or a following. You need a blank wall and standards.
- Create one public stash titled anything true (“Things That Feel Like 2025,” “Design That Makes Me Jealous,” “Writing I Wish I Wrote”)
- Add exactly nine links. No more. Force yourself to choose.
- Spend real time on cover images. Crop, color, mood.
- Write a one-sentence plaque on at least five cards.
- Share the link exactly once — in one place you already exist.
- Every week: add one, remove one. Rotate forever.
Do this for 12 weeks and you will have a body of work more impressive than most creators’ entire output.
The Hidden Career Benefits Nobody Talks About#
Good curators get:
- Job offers from screenshots of their stashes
- Speaking gigs from a single shared board
- Collaboration requests from strangers who “just want to be around that taste”
- Consulting fees to curate for companies (newsletters, brands, funds)
I’ve seen it happen dozens of times in the last year on stashed.in.
The pattern is identical: taste → visibility → opportunity.
The Counterintuitive Truth: Less Is the New More#
The best curators I know have fewer than 200 total saved links total.
They delete more than they keep.
They leave empty space on purpose.
They treat every new addition like it has to justify kicking something else out.
Restraint is the signature of mastery.
Why This Matters More in 2025 Than Ever#
AI is about to flood the world with perfect mediocrity.
Essays written in seconds.
Images generated in milliseconds.
Videos synthesized from prompts.
The only thing AI cannot fake is taste.
A machine can make a thousand options.
Only a human can walk away with the one that matters.
That choice is the last creative frontier.
Your First Gallery Opens Tonight#
You don’t need a decade of taste.
You need one stash and one rule: only save what you would proudly show a stranger on the street.
Start with five links.
Then ten.
Then twenty.
Make it public.
Watch what happens when the internet realizes you have standards.
I’ll be watching from the sidelines with Stasha, stealing from the best walls.
The age of the curator has arrived.
Bring your taste.
→ stashed.in
