It's almost as if he's having a go at the polite siennas and decorous burnt umbers of the drawing-room paintings he'd had to sell in the Hague and London.
One of the significant consequences of obsessive filtering is the emerging tendency to treat oneself as an object to be observed and valued, in the same way another person observes and judges from the side.
So that when future generations look back at this time, they will judge us not only by the decision that we made, but by what we made of that decision.
I am MBA trained, so I made a spreadsheet. I listed my jobs in the columns and the things for my criteria in the rows, and compared the companies, the missions, and the roles.