Bridge Experiences

I used to dislike soy milk.

I remember trying soy milk for the very first time when I came to Singapore back in 2016. I remember tasting its strange, beany flavor and feeling it clash horrendously with my preconceptions of what such a white, “milky” liquid ought to taste like. I really wanted to like it. Once I make the decision to try something I generally take pride in withholding judgement. However, in this instance, I just couldn’t bring myself to say that I enjoyed it.

Over the years I tried soy milk and similar products several more times, and I disliked them every single time. Eventually, I stopped trying. I’d had enough bad experiences with it. Somewhere along the way, the idea that “soy milk is not for me” had become part of my identity.

Recently, I had the opportunity to travel to China for work. One morning, my colleagues invited me to join them for a traditional Guangzhou breakfast. Hot soy milk with cheong fun (肠粉) and soy sauce. Perhaps it was the delicious smells wafting over from the kitchen or perhaps it was the distinct rumble in my stomach. I had brief moment where I felt “Okay, maybe I can try this again.”. So I decided to give soy milk another shot.

The moment I tasted it, it felt like something opened up inside me. Like something shifted in my brain.

“Hey! Wait a moment! This actually slaps!”

But identities don’t change so easily. I would have like to write the kind of story where this moment of revelation led to me drinking soy milk after, but that’s how this story goes. The experience did however leave a deeper impression on me than I recognized at the time.

Months later, I found myself back in China for work again.

I was ordering breakfast from a shop selling steamed bao (包子) when I noticed one of breakfast sets that included freshly made hot soy milk. Suddenly, the memory of that breakfast in Guangzhou came rushing back to me. Without thinking too much, I felt compelled to order it.

I was a little apprehensive before taking that first sip, probably because of the identity I’d built up around disliking soy milk.

But the moment I tasted it, it hit me like an electric current all over again.

This was good!

This soy milk was amazing!

Over the next few days, I had it for breakfast several more times. And that was when I finally had the realization:

“Hey… maybe I like soy milk now?”

I asked a few friends about it after that. I really wanted to understand what had changed. Was soy milk in China actually different from the soy milk you get in Singapore? Why was it that I suddenly liked it?

The answer, apparently, was yes.

Both times I’d enjoyed soy milk, it had been freshly made, which is much more common in China. The soy milk sold in Singapore, on the other hand, is often packaged or produced at a much larger scale, and the flavor can be quite different. Some friends also mentioned that soy milk in China tends to be more generous with sugar, while Singapore generally tries to reduce the sugar in these drinks.

I still had my doubts.

The soy milk I’d enjoyed in China wasn’t that sweet. It had a gentle sweetness that didn’t really stand out unless you drank it first thing in the morning, before your palate had tasted anything else. So I decided that when I got back to Singapore, I was going to try soy milk again.

One of the first things I bought was one of those NutriSoy soy milk cartons that you see everywhere in Singapore.

And…

I liked it.

Whoa.

Then I tried a few more from different places.

And I liked those too.

They weren’t quite the same, though. I could tell immediately. There was still a slightly strange flavor that I definitely would have noticed years ago.

But something had changed.

I could almost “see” the fresh soy milk from China in my mind—how good it could be. Somehow, the memory of that experience had changed the way that I experienced the soy milk forever. Even when it wasn’t as good as the one I tried in China, it was as though I could see the “potential” in all the soy milk that I tried after that point.

Bridge Experiences

After I noticed this idea I started to realize that I’ve experienced the same phenomenon before for different things. I’ve started thinking of these as bridge experiences.

I want to distinguish a bridge experience from what people usually call a gateway experience. A gateway experience happens when you’ve never really explored a category before. Maybe you’ve never listened to jazz, or never tried hiking or never drank coffee. Then one you stumble across one particularly accessible example that opens the door. Suddenly you’re interested in exploring the whole category.

A bridge experience on the other hand, happens after you’ve already formed the opinion that a category simply isn’t for you.

You’ve tried it several times.

You’ve given it a fair chance.

You concluded: “I just don’t like this”.

Then years later, on a random tuesday afternoon, your friend introduces you to an elevated version, or maybe even the best version in class. And then this version makes something click in your brain and suddenly, you cross from “I don’t understand why anyone enjoys this” to “Oh…that’s why everyone has been raving about this”.

The most remarkable part of this is that the bridge experience doesn’t merely change your opinion of that one experience. It also changes how you experience every future version of it.

The freshly made soy milk in China didn’t become my favorite soy milk. Rather, it recalibrated my expectations. After trying something that I genuinely enjoyed, I could suddenly recognize traces of those same qualities in the packaged soy milk back in Singapore. The beany flavor that once dominated everything became just one part of a much richer picture.

Perhaps every category has what we might call a canonical experience, which is maybe not the highest-quality version, but the version that reveals the category in the the way that feels good to most first time experiencers. It teaches you what people are actually appreciating. A bridge experience is what happens when you finally encounter that canonical experience after you’ve already decided the category isn’t for you. Once you’ve crossed this bridge, your entire frame of reference shifts and you begin evaluating every future experience against a richer mental model rather than against your earlier disappointments.

Once I recognized this idea and gave it a name, I realized that it’s shown up all over my life.

Guinness and Dark Beer

For years I thought that I disliked dark beers. Every stout that I had dried tasted heavy, bitter and unpleasant to me.

Then one day on a random wednesday night, I sipped a properly poured Guinness.

Was it the greatest beer in the world? Probably not.

But it was the first dark beer that made me understand what dark beer was trying to achieve. Suddenly the roasted flavors, creamy texture, and subtle sweetness all made sense. Since then I’ve found myself much more willing to explore stouts and porters that I would previously have dismissed immediately.

Watching Hamlet

For a long time, my image of stage plays came almost entirely from school productions and amateur performances. They often felt awkward, artificial, and constrained compared to film where you had the ability to introduce digital special effects and render in amazing stuff that practical on stage effects could never come close to.

Then I watched Benedict Cumberbatch perform Hamlet.

Watching Hamlet completely changed my perspective on what theatre was capable of. I was blown away by how much could be achieved through practical effects, lighting, staging, and exceptional acting alone. Even more impressive was the realization that every performance happened in real-time. There were no re-takes and no opportunities to edit around mistakes or “discover the movie in post-production”. There was only actors responding to what happened on stage and carrying the story forward.

After that, I stopped judging theatre by what it couldn’t do compared to film. Instead, I began appreciating what only theatre can do. Now, even when I watch much smaller productions, I notice things that would have escaped me before.

Music

For much of my early childhood, I thought I simply wasn’t a music person.

I had a complicated relationship with music as a child for various reasons best left unsaid. While my peers seemed to discover songs naturally and form deep attachments to their favourite artists, I never really had the chance to develop that relationship for myself. It was just easier for me to conclude that music wasn’t my cup of tea.

Then, when I was around thirteen or fourteen, I heard Fireflies by Owl City on YouTube.

I can still remember the moment. The song filled me an uncomplicated joy that was completely unfamiliar to me. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t thinking about whether I was supposed to like a piece of music or whether it fit into some idea of what music ought to be. I just liked it.

That one song became my bridge.

Afterwards, I started exploring music on my own. I listened to artists from every genre I could find, gradually piecing together a sense of what resonated with me. Most of those songs sounded nothing like Fireflies, but it wasn’t about this particular song. Hearing one piece of music that genuinely connected with me changed the way I listened to everything that came after it.

The Canonical Experience Hypothesis

I’m increasingly tempted by the hypothesis that every sufficiently rich domain has a canonical experience that may not necessarily be the objectively best version, but the one that takes newcomers from “why” to “whoa” as fast as possible.

The problem is that these canonical experiences appear to be distributed unevenly. Some people encounter them immediately. Others spend years sampling mediocre versions and conclude the whole category is overrated. From the outside, those two people look like they simply have different tastes. In reality, they may have encountered entirely different categories. I’m also almost certain that the specific canonical experience of a category is heavily influenced by your personality, experiences and other individual variations. My bridge experience could be very different from your bridge experience.

All this also makes me wonder how many things I currently believe I dislike are really just places where I’ve never found the bridge.

I’ve now become much more suspicious of some my own dislikes. Of course some categories are more open than others. For instance, I still don’t enjoy hard liquor, and perhaps I never will. But now, whenever I hear someone describe a food, a book, or a hobby with genuine enthusiasm that I don’t understand, I wonder whether I’m really rejecting the category, or whether I’ve not found the right bridge experience yet.

It also changes the advice I give other people. If someone tells me they don’t like coffee, Shakespeare, opera, or programming, I think a useful question may be: what was the version you tried?