Public scenes of chaos and joy: Improv Everywhere

Pantless subway parties, blue t-shirt Best Buy crashers, black tie swimming and oh-so-much-more.

Absolutely LOVE this TED talk by Improv Everywhere founder and chief mischief-maker, Charlie Todd. Charlie started Improv Everywhere in 2001 when he moved to New York as performer with nowhere to perform. He began staging public missions with ‘undercover agents’ to disrupt otherwise routine situations.

I adore the idea of taking an everyday act – like riding the subway or shopping – and turning it into a shared experience or spectacle.  Besides being hilarious, Charlie’s missions are so interesting in that these random public acts create a sense of connection among strangers. 

Yes. Please.

Dan Gilbert's TED talk and sosticky ramblings

Really interesting talk on our ability to simulate happiness - and how not getting what we want can leave us feeling just as happy. 

"Our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown some we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience" - Dan Gilbert.

My fav part of this lecture is about 3/4 through when Gilbert describes a study he conducted at Harvard which illustrates how having too many options can make us unhappy.  Basically, students signed up to a photography course where they took 12 photos of some of their fav things at Harvard.  They were then asked to select two of them to blow up (working in the darkroom and developing them by themselves).   At the end of the project, the students were told to choose one photo that they wanted to keep; the other photo would be kept by the professor as proof of course completion.  NOW - the students were split into two groups. The first group was told they'd have four days to change their minds if they decided they wanted the other picture.  The second group was told that their decision would be irreversible - that the photo they didn't keep would be on a plane to "headquarters" in London and they wouldn't be able to change their minds.

Gilbert asked the students days later if they were happy with their decisions.  The students who had the four days to deliberate which photo they wanted were miserable. They went back and forth, back and forth, and even after the four days were over, they still thought they'd made the wrong decision.  The students in the "irreversible" group, however, were happy with their photos. 

The kicker is that, when given the option of having four days to decide versus having to make a final decision, 66% of students choose the four days, aka unhappiness.

I've actually been thinking about this a lot recently and how it applies to the plethora of choices and options we're given every day.  

I spent 20 minutes at K-Mart today buying a toaster. I hate being in K-Mart, but I couldn't decide, do I want the one that does bagels, the one with four slots, the one that will match the clock in my kitchen...? Which of these 20 toasters do I want? Really, I just wanted "the one" to fall off the shelf and land in my basket so that I could get the eff out of there.  I hardly toast things anyways.

As Gilbert says, "freedom to choose is the enemy of synthetic happiness". 

I realized it would have been much easier to just buy the thing online because I could have clicked on "most popular toaster," read two reviews and been done with it. The internet amplifies our choices by providing us with incredible amounts of information, entertainment, products, services, and people in an instant.  While this can be incredibly overwhelming, where it shines at is adding context.  My friend Matt Gierhart recently said to me, "I, like most people, will trust an honest stranger".  

Digital adds layers of information to help us make decisions, but I wonder if that made things better or worse for me in real life today as  I was standing in K-Mart, sans "honest strangers". 

Thoughts???