Here’s an exchange from an interview I conducted
1
with
PostSecret founder Frank Warren
in 2009, emphasis mine:
AVE: That actually raises kind of a PostSecret etiquette
issue. What should you do when you think a friend submitted a PostSecret that
was posted on the Web site; for instance, you recognize their handwriting? Do
you respect the anonymity and not say anything, or do you think it's okay to approach the friend?
FW: I would recommend
making the choice that makes your life more interesting. And sometimes I
get emails from people who would like to know where the postmark is on the card
so that it's more meaningful to them than on the Web, and that's what I
recommend to them. I say I can't reveal the location of the card, but please
believe it came from the place that makes your life more interesting.
It was cut from the
version
of the article that was published, which was really disappointing: that
sentence above was my favorite part of my conversation with Warren, and it has
stayed with me to this day. (I tried Googling to see if Warren has given a
similar quote in another interview but came up with nothing, so it’s almost
like this quote never existed—which is doubly disappointing.)
In fact, at my last job, I printed the quote out and pinned
it on my wall as a reminder to avoid getting sucked into a permanent routine.
And it actually worked—seeing that quote, day after day, and being reminded of
how often I didn’t make the choice
that would’ve made my life more interesting was like a daily self-administered ass-kicking that culminated in me leaving my job.
Obviously, “I would recommend making the choice that makes
your life more interesting” isn’t the best advice in every situation. A disastrous
heroin-fueled tailspin or a maniacal murder spree would certainly make for a
more interesting life, but neither is advisable, both for your sake and the sake of those
around you. Singing loud, unwanted karaoke on the bus or catcalling every woman
on the way to work might make your day less boring, but it’ll probably annoy
the hell out of a lot of people, and other people aren’t just props in your quest to
make your day more interesting.
That aside, though, it’s a good reminder of how often we choose—either
through our actions or our inactions—the less interesting choice. We stay at
jobs that fry our soul. We remain in towns that we find boring and uninspiring.
We hang out with the same old people, or new people that are a lot like the old
people. We keep our earbuds on instead of saying hi to the person who’s
carrying around a copy of a novel we’ve been really into lately.
I’m certainly not saying that we’re in complete control of
our lives; there are centuries of powerful political, economic, and cultural
forces that limit how much freedom any of us have. But I do believe we have
more control than we often realize, and whatever agency—however small—we can assert
over our lives should be recognized, valued, and exercised, even if that means
confronting the fact that we’re frequently choosing
the choice that makes our lives more boring.
And if that’s indeed your choice—if boring is your thing—that’s
completely okay. I understand how “pleasant and unremarkable” can be a luxury,
especially if you’ve had a life that’s been remarkably unpleasant.
For everyone else, though, when presented with options of
equal ethicality, it’s not a bad all-purpose rule of thumb to default to the
choice that makes your life more interesting. Interestingness is a pretty decent criterion by which to evaluate
options, and it’s often a lot better than the other criteria—like comfort or how other people will judge me—that we use.
The other quote that I thought was really insightful from
the interview actually was published:
AVE: Many fans of PostSecret say that the project has helped
them feel less alone. Do you think that we're more isolated and more alone
nowadays?
FW: Yeah, I think that's one of the paradoxes of modern life
- that there's never been a greater
number of people on the planet, yet at the same time, there's never been a
greater sense of loneliness.
There are probably plenty of
explanations for this phenomenon (smartphones! social media! no more harvest
festivals! neighbors who don’t say hi to each other!), but I suspect it’s
something similar to how you feel lonelier at a party with 70 people versus a
party with seven people, or how it’s easier to pick between three kinds of
cookies than 30 kinds.
I think it’s so weird that there
are nearly seven billion people on the planet—seven billion souls with feelings
and thoughts and fears and opinions as real and vibrant as my own—and we don’t
give it a second thought. If you do give it a second thought, though, it’s the
sort of thing that makes humanity seem so big and humans seem so small, and the
contradiction makes my brain do a bellyflop.
1This makes it sound
like I’m a journalist (I’m not) or that I interview cool people regularly (I
don’t). Warren was doing interviews for a PostSecret
book that had just been released, and, having recently been given a column
in the school newspaper, I was pretty eager to use my fancy new media
credentials2 to talk to interesting people. Plus, I’d long been a
fan of PostSecret—and, more importantly, a girl on whom I had a crush was also a
fan, and I was under the impression it’d be a cute, romantic gesture to ask
Warren to wish her a happy birthday to surprise her when she listened to the
MP3 of the interview3.
The interview went pretty well—Warren was exceedingly kind
and thoughtful, and he did indeed wish my friend a happy birthday—and I was
left with a ton of material that, sadly, went mostly unpublished. I probably
should have seen that coming; I was an opinion columnist (who was supposed to
write about politics, I guess?), and the format didn’t really lend itself to an
extended Q&A. I wound up writing a column about art and advertising that
was only tangentially about PostSecret.
I then started annoying the entertainment editor with emails
that basically said, “Hey, I know I don’t work for your section, and I know we
haven’t met, but here’s a ten-page transcript of an interview I did, so,
umm—inches, please!” The entertainment editor wound up running a
highly-truncated, seven-question version of the interview a month later, published
literally just to take up space.
2Such as they were; I mean, whenever I
requested interviews, I had to identify myself as a columnist with The Independent Florida Alligator, which
sounds pretty damn fake. In retrospect, I probably could’ve just said “the
student newspaper at the University of Florida,” but then I would’ve been
deprived of media relations people invariably asking me, “the Independent
Florida what?”—or, in one case, “Is
that a real thing?”
3I was wrong. It’s not.