“Appointments are always a no-no. Planning ahead is a no-no.”
Whiling away the long voyage from London to Philadelphia in 1726, a young printer named Benjamin Franklin conceived the notion of a notebook in which he would record systematically his efforts at self-improvement. Franklin aspired to thirteen virtues, including frugality, industry, sincerity, and cleanliness. His plan was to spend a week focusing on a particular virtue, in the hope of making it a habit, before moving to the next virtue, and the next, cycling through the virtues in an unending quest to become a better man. Each day he would reflect on his activities and every failure to live up to his own standards would be commemorated with a black mark in his notebook. The custom stuck with him his entire life. Fifty-nine years later, while writing his memoirs, Franklin lingered on the merits of his virtue journal longer than on any other topic, reconfirming his commitment to the habit.1
Franklin’s aims were ambitious, but his virtue journal was a success: the black spots in the notebook, initially numerous, became scarcer over time. Perhaps this is no surprise, since Franklin had a habit of doing whatever he set out to do. He lived one of the most celebrated lives in history. He charted the Gulf Stream; he invented bifocals, the lightning conductor, and the flexible urinary catheter; he was the first U.S. postmaster general, served as America’s ambassador to France, and was president of Pennsylvania. And, of course, Benjamin Franklin’s signature is on the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
Yet the great man had one weakness—or so he thought.
Ben Franklin’s third virtue was: Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time. Franklin never mastered this seemingly simple task. “My scheme of ORDER gave me the most trouble,” he wrote in frustration in his memoirs, adding, “my faults in it vexed me so much, and I made so little progress in amendment, and had such frequent relapses, that I was almost ready to give up the attempt.”
He was not exaggerating. One scholar wrote, “Strangers who came to see him were amazed to behold papers of the greatest importance scattered in the most careless way over the table and floor.”2 Franklin’s diary and his home remained chaotic, resisting sixty years of focused effort from one of the most determined men who ever lived. No matter how many disorderly decades passed, Franklin remained convinced that orderliness was an unalloyed virtue: that if only he could fix this deficiency in his character, and become less messy, he would become a more admirable, successful, and productive person.
Franklin was surely deluding himself. It is hard to believe such a rich life could possibly have been made still richer by closer attention to filing papers and tidying up. His error is no surprise. We are tidy-minded people, instinctively admiring order and in denial about the way mess tends to be the inevitable by-product of good things, and is sometimes a good thing in its own right.
What seems more surprising is not Franklin’s error, but his failure to keep his ill-advised resolution. This is a man who did almost everything he set out to do; why is it that he failed on this one occasion? Perhaps he realized, on some unconscious level, that disorderliness was no bar to success. Many of us have yet to make the same realization, in areas that define much of our daily lives: organizing our documents, tasks, and time; looking for love; socializing; raising our kids. Benjamin Franklin’s mistake is a mistake from which we can all learn, every day of our lives.
• • •
There is one bit of everyday wisdom in Franklin’s motto “Let all your things have their places.” As the psychologist Daniel Levitin explains in The Organized Mind, our spatial memory is powerful, so it’s easier to remember things when they are anchored to a particular location.3 Things such as keys and corkscrews have a tendency to wander about in the course of being used. That is why they are easy to lose. And it is no accident that computer filing systems use a spatial metaphor—manila folders nestled inside other manila folders—to help humans keep track of documents that are, in reality, chopped up and scattered across the surface of some hard drive.
Keeping things in their places will help you keep track of your keys and your corkscrew. Yet it will be much less help in dealing with your documents or your e-mail, because the system will buckle under not only the volume of incoming information but its fundamental contradictions and ambiguities.
Merlin Mann, a productivity expert, has skewered the desire to over-organize a list of tasks in a fast-moving world. Imagine you’re making sandwiches in a deli, says Mann. The first sandwich order comes in and you start spreading the mayonnaise on a slice of rye bread. But wait—the lunchtime rush is coming. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to stop and check whether any more sandwich orders have arrived? Gosh, yes: two more sandwich orders. Now, how best to organize them? In order of arrival, perhaps. Or maybe it’s best to segregate the vegetarian orders from those involving meat? Another possibility is to distinguish the toasted orders from the fresh ones. Hm. Let’s check to see if any more sandwich orders have arrived. Yes! Three more. Now there are six. So many ways to organize them . . .4
Mann’s point is not only that we are often too busy to get organized, but that if we focused on practical action, we wouldn’t need to get organized. Of course, some situations call for a sophisticated reference system (a library, for example), and some for careful checklists (a building site, an operating room). But most of us don’t work in a library or an operating room, and our faith in organization is often misplaced. Many of us share Franklin’s touching belief that if only we could get ourselves organized with some rational system, our lives would be better, more productive, and more admirable—but the truth is that Franklin was too busy inventing bifocals, catching lightning, publishing newspapers, and signing the Declaration of Independence ever to get around to tidying up his life. If he had been working in a deli, you can bet he wouldn’t have been organizing sandwich orders. He would have been making sandwiches.
Organizing things into categories is not as easy as it might at first seem. The philosophically irrepressible writer Jorge Luis Borges once told of the “Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge,” a fabled Chinese encyclopedia. This Oriental tome, according to Borges, organizes animals into categories thus: (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.5
This looks like a joke, but like other Borgesian jokes, it is serious. Most of these apparently absurd categories have practical merit. Sometimes we need to classify things according to who owns them; at other times we must describe their physical attributes, and different physical attributes will matter in different contexts. Sometimes we must be terribly specific—a cat is not a good substitute for a suckling pig if you are preparing a feast, and if we are to punish wrongdoing (whether breaking a vase or committing an armed robbery), we must identify the wrongdoer and no one else. But while each category is useful, in combination they are incoherent, and the encyclopedia sounds delectably unusable. Borges shows us why trying to categorize the world is not as straightforward as we like to believe. Our categories can map to practical real-world cases, or they can be neat and logical, but rarely both at once.
A widely used system of classification reduces Borges’s fourteen categories to three: filing in triplicate has become a byword for the tidily organized bureaucracy. Making three copies of correspondence and filing once by date, once by topic, and once by correspondent is a logical solution for a world in which we cannot predict whether we might need to look up all the letters sent and received late in October 2015, or all the letters about the faulty rumbleflange, or all the letters from a Mrs. Trellis. But the system still requires three times the space and tremendous time and energy to maintain. And where do we file the letter that’s a ransom note? What about a letter that has three topics rather than one? What about the letter that is a glowing endorsement, suitable for use in advertising? Borges was on to something with the category “etcetera.”*
For some organizations, filing in triplicate may be unavoidable. For most of us, such a system is a colossal waste of time, space, and energy. If you need to file physical documents, what about the following beautiful alternative, invented by Japanese economist Yukio Noguchi? Forget about categories. Instead, place each incoming document in a large envelope. Write the envelope’s contents neatly on its edge, and line them up on a bookshelf, their contents visible like the spines of books. Now the moment of genius: every time you use an envelope, place it back on the left of the shelf. Over time, recently used documents will shuffle themselves toward the left, and never-used documents will accumulate on the right. Archiving is easy: every now and again, you remove the documents on the right. To find any document, simply ask yourself how recently you’ve seen it. It is a filing system that all but organizes itself, and it has won many fans.
But wait a moment. Isn’t there something strangely familiar about the arrangement? Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman, authors of the exuberant book A Perfect Mess, offer the following suggestion: “Turn the row of envelopes so that the envelopes are stacked vertically instead of horizontally, place the stack on your desktop, and get rid of the envelopes.”6
After following those instructions, what have you got? Any old pile of papers on a messy desk. Every time you pull a document out, you replace it on the top of the pile. Unused documents gradually settle at the bottom. Of course this arrangement lacks the neat labeling of the Noguchi system, but it offers intuitive physical clues such as the thickness of a document, the shade of the paper, the appearance of dog-ears or Post-it notes. These signals are fallible, but they can be powerful.
This is not to argue that a big pile of paper is the best possible filing system. But despite appearances, it’s very far from being a random assortment. A messy desk isn’t nearly as chaotic as it at first seems. There’s a natural tendency toward a very pragmatic system of organization based simply on the fact that the useful stuff keeps on getting picked up and left on the top of the pile.
That’s the thing about a messy desk or a messy office: it’s full of clues about recent patterns of working, and those clues can help us work effectively. David Kirsh, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, studies the working styles of “neats” and “scruffies.” For example, how do people orient themselves after arriving at the office or finishing a phone call? Kirsh finds that “neats” orient themselves with to-do lists and calendars, while “scruffies” orient themselves using physical cues—the report that they were working on is lying on the desk, as is a letter that needs a reply, and receipts that must be submitted for expenses. A messy desk is full of such cues.*7 A tidy desk conveys no information at all, and it must be bolstered with the prompt of a to-do list. Both systems can work, so we should hesitate before judging other people based on their messy desks.8
Of course, it is intolerable to have to work in the middle of somebody else’s mess. But that is because the subtle cues that the mess contains are all irrelevant. They are signposts for somebody else’s journey.
But surely even our own mess, laden with clues about what to do next, must be less efficient than well-organized tidiness? That depends. As Borges taught us, tidying things into categories is not as easy as it might appear. And while the categories will sometimes help, it’s worth pondering whether the filing system will consume more time than it saves.
Academics who study workplace behavior sometimes make the distinction between “filers” and “pilers”—people who establish a formal organizational structure for their paper documents, versus people who let piles of paperwork accumulate on and around their desks. A few years ago, two researchers at AT&T Labs, Steve Whittaker and Julia Hirschberg, studied how a group of office workers dealt with their paperwork. Who hoarded the most paper? Who used their archives more actively? When an office relocation forced everyone to reduce the size of their archives, who coped best?
The answers surprised Whittaker and Hirschberg. “We predicted that filers’ attempts to evaluate and categorize incoming documents would produce smaller archives that were accessed frequently,” they wrote. But that isn’t what they found. The filers didn’t have lean archives full of useful and oft-accessed documents; they had capacious cabinets full of neatly filed paper that they never used. The filers were filing prematurely. In an effort to keep their desks clear, they would swiftly file documents that turned out to have no long-term value. In their bloated archives it was hard to find anything useful, despite the logical organization, because the good stuff was surrounded with neatly filed dross. The Borges problem made things harder—as one person told Whittaker and Hirschberg:
“I had so much stuff filed. I didn’t know where everything was, and I’d found that I had created second files for something in what seemed like a logical place, but not the only logical place . . . In some cases, things could legitimately be filed under the business unit or a technology. And I ended up having the same thing in two places, or I had the same business unit stuff in five different places.”
And because they were devoting so much effort to their filing systems, the filers became unduly attached to their archives and found it difficult to let go of things.
The pilers, in contrast, would keep documents on their desks for a while and sooner or later would pick them up, realize they were useless, and dump them in the recycling bin. Any archives were small and practical and frequently used. When the time came for the office move, the pilers had an easy job—they simply kept the top half of every pile and discarded the rarely used lower documents. (It’s that informal Noguchi system again.) The biggest disadvantage that the pilers suffered was that because their offices looked so messy, somebody else might sneak in and tidy everything up, a ruinous act of vandalism.9
The main filing headache in the modern world comes not from paper documents but from e-mail. How best to organize that? Borges rears his head again. Does this e-mail from the boss mentioning a performance review, the office party, and the Acme account go under Work > Human Resources or under Work > Boss or under Personal > Diary or under Work > Accounts > Acme? Or perhaps follow the file-in-triplicate tradition, and file copies in each folder? That’s easy to accomplish by tagging the file, and the triplicate e-mails don’t take up physical space. Nevertheless the triplication is a problem: each extra copy takes up space on the screen as you scan through the folder trying to find what you’re really looking for; it is more hay on the haystack the next time you’re looking for the needle.
And the folders themselves proliferate: one study found that people create a new e-mail folder every five days.10 For those of us who’ve been on e-mail since the late twentieth century, that’s more than a thousand folders. A thousand folders are manageable if they’re organized into folders of folders of folders. But these deep tree structures can create their own problems. And all this e-mail filing takes time—around 10 percent of all e-mail time is spent organizing e-mail, according to researchers at Xerox PARC.11
Still, it’s worth the effort, right? Wrong. A fine research paper with the title “Am I Wasting My Time Organizing Email?” by Steve Whittaker (again) and researchers at IBM Research concluded that, broadly, yes, you are.12 Whittaker and his colleagues got permission to install logging software on the computers of several hundred office workers, and tracked around 85,000 attempts to find e-mail by clicking through folders, or by using ad hoc methods—scrolling through the inbox, clicking on a header to sort by (for example) the sender, or using the search function. Whittaker found that clicking through a folder tree took almost a minute, while simply searching took just 17 seconds. People who relied on folders took longer to find what they were looking for, but their hunts for the right e-mail were no more or less successful. In other words, if you just dump all your e-mail into a folder called “archive,” you will find your e-mails more quickly than if you hide them in a tidy structure of folders.*
• • •
If carefully filing paper documents is counterproductive and carefully organizing e-mails is a waste of time, what should we conclude about the way to manage a calendar? There are two broad approaches to calendar management. One is that a calendar should be used only for noting fixed points—a doctor’s appointment, a flight, a business meeting. Most of the calendar should be left blank to allow us to do whatever seems appropriate in the moment. But an alternative view is that a calendar should be used to plan more carefully, blocking out time to work on different tasks.
Fortunately, we don’t need to guess at which approach works best: three psychologists, Daniel Kirschenbaum, Laura Humphrey, and Sheldon Malett, have already run the experiment. Kirschenbaum and his colleagues recruited a group of undergraduates to participate in a short course designed to improve their study skills. The students were then split randomly into three groups: a control group who were given simple tips on time management (for example: “Take breaks of 5–10 minutes after every ½–1½ hour study session”) and two groups who were given the time-management tips plus instructions as to how to plan their time. The “monthly plan” group was instructed to set out goals and study activities spanning a month or so at a time; the “daily plan” group was told to plan activities and goals day by day. The researchers assumed that the planners would be more successful than the control group, and that the daily plans, with their brief, quantifiable goals, would work better than the rather amorphous monthly plans.13
The researchers were in for a surprise. The daily plans were catastrophic. Students using them started by working 20 hours a week but by the end of the course they were down to about 8 hours a week. Having no plan at all was just as bad, although arguably it encouraged more consistent work effort: students began by working 15 hours a week and sagged to 10 hours a week later in the course. But the monthly plans were a tremendous success in motivating students to study—they put in 25 hours a week, and even studied slightly harder at the end of the 10-week course than at the beginning. These are huge effects—the monthly plan motivated about twice as much work as the daily plan. When the researchers followed up a year later, these trends had continued and were reflected in the students’ grades: the students with monthly plans were doing better than ever, the students with no plans were treading water, and the students with daily plans were sliding ever further down the scale of academic achievement.
Why was this happening? The researchers had two theories. First, that the daily plans took too much time and effort (many students soon gave up on them, although perhaps not soon enough). Second, that the daily plans sapped the motivation of students once they realized that they kept falling short of their own plans. Both of those speculations sound plausible, but they raise the question of why students weren’t able to follow their own daily plans.
The answer is that daily plans can’t adjust to unexpected events. Things come up: you catch a cold; you need to stay home for a plumber; a friend calls to say he’s visiting town unexpectedly. With a broad plan, or no plan, it’s easy to accommodate these obstacles and opportunities.
Some people manage to take this to extremes. Marc Andreessen is one of the first Internet wunderkinds: he cofounded Netscape in 1994, sold it for over $4 billion, and founded a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that invested in companies such as Skype, Twitter, and Airbnb. Besieged by invitations and meetings, Andreessen decided that he would simply stop writing anything in his calendar. If something was important, then it could be done immediately. Otherwise it wasn’t worth signing away a slice of Andreessen’s future. “I’ve been trying this tactic as an experiment,” he wrote in 2007. “And I am so much happier, I can’t even tell you.”14
Another example: Arnold Schwarzenegger insisted on keeping his diary clear when he was a film star, and even tried to do so when he was governor of California. “Appointments are always a no-no. Planning ahead is a no-no,” he told The New York Times. Politicians, lobbyists, and activists had to treat him like they treated a popular walk-up restaurant: they showed up and hoped to get a slot. This wasn’t some strange status play. Well, perhaps it was, a little. But Schwarzenegger had also realized that an overstuffed diary allows no flexibility.
Of course, it is much easier to make the world queue up to meet you if you’re a billionaire venture capitalist or a global star of film and politics. But even if we cannot emulate Andreessen or Schwarzenegger in a point-blank refusal to make appointments, we probably could benefit from nudging ourselves a little in that direction—making fewer firm commitments, and leaving more flexibility to adapt to circumstances. A plan that is too specific will soon lie in tatters. Daily plans are tidy, but life is messy.15
• • •
In the mid-1960s, some young Harvard students found themselves drinking and keeping each other company on a Saturday night, having failed to persuade any women to spend the evening with them. The dating scene was tough, they agreed. There were two ways to meet girls: blind dates or parties. To the students, both seemed unsatisfyingly messy. Blind dates were too random, parties too awkward (especially as the girls tended to focus on the more senior students). The friends agreed that there had to be a better way to get a date, and so they set up an impressive-sounding organization with the name “Compatibility Research Inc.”
Compatibility Research was a computerized dating agency, better known by the trading name Operation Match. For three dollars—about $25 in today’s terms—hopeful singles could fill out a questionnaire. It would be converted into a punch card and the all-knowing computer—an IBM mainframe the size of a bus—would do the rest. In those days, number crunchers would typically rent processing time on a shared computer, which tended to be expensive. The Operation Match team managed to buy cheap time on the computer by waiting until the early hours of a Sunday morning. Their venture was not solely aimed at making money: according to Dan Slater’s book Love in the Time of Algorithms, the founders of Operation Match were hoping for the first pick of the ladies themselves.16 But they had chosen a clever business. It turns out we are suckers for the idea that finding a date can be turned into a tidy, neatly quantified affair.
At the time, computers were mysterious and seemed almost omniscient. It was easy to imagine that they might produce brilliant results, especially armed with a long questionnaire to chew over. Some questions were simple and numerical: age, height, grade point average (this was Harvard, after all). Others sought responses to Cosmo-style provocations: “Is romantic love necessary for a successful marriage?” “Do you believe in a God who answers prayer?” “Is extensive sexual activity in preparation for marriage part of ‘growing up’?” And there were hypothetical scenarios (What would you do if sent on a blind date with an embarrassingly ugly person?) offering a multiple-choice format for answers. With all this information, how could a supercomputer fail to produce a perfect, quantified match?
“The computer had a legitimacy,” recalls Dave Crump, one of the company’s founders, and that was an idea they were keen to encourage. One advertisement promised, “Let a computer scientifically find the right date for you . . . during Singles Week.”
The truth was more prosaic, as Crump’s colleague Jeff Tarr later explained.
“The first thing we did was to make sure they were in the same area. Mostly girls wanted to go out with boys who were the same age or older, their height or taller, the same religion. So after we had these cuts, then we just kind of randomly matched them.”17
That’s it. So much for “compatibility research.” The IBM computer did what computers do very easily: found a match for zip code, religion, age, and height. Further sorting was usually unnecessary, and the implication of Jeff Tarr’s account is that most of the questions were there purely for effect.
The computer was simply figuring out who else was single and local. This is a perfectly valuable service, as Grindr and Tinder have since demonstrated. But Operation Match’s founders weren’t in a hurry to call attention to what their computer was really doing. The idea of scientific compatibility matching was just irresistible to everybody, especially the media—such was the curiosity that Jeff Tarr even appeared on a popular TV panel show. And aside from being good publicity, the computer made for a fine conversation starter, allowing people to spend their first date trying to figure out together why the computer, in its digital wisdom, had seen fit to pair them off. This idea that a computer algorithm could find the perfect match was so powerful that actually implementing any such algorithm was superfluous.
Surely algorithmic dating is more sophisticated today? That is certainly what most dating websites would have us think. Starting with the very names of popular sites (Match, eHarmony), the sales pitch is the same as ever it was: Give the computer your data and it will find you love. Online dating is now a massive business, and the promise of tidily quantified compatibility remains a key selling point. We seem convinced that if only the machines were powerful enough, and were fed enough data, they could find us a soul mate. OkCupid, a site with geek appeal and a witty, naughty tone, allows you to answer literally hundreds of thousands of questions: anything from “Do you like the taste of beer?” to “Would you ever read your partner’s e-mail?” Users typically answer several hundred such questions, as well as indicating what answer they would hope for from a would-be date—and how important they feel the question is.
But while modern dating websites are incomparably larger, there is little reason to believe that their algorithms work much better. In the summer of 2014, OkCupid published the results of a few experiments it had been running on the site’s users.18 One of these experiments deployed a kind of placebo matching algorithm: users were told that they were 90 percent compatible (what does that even mean?) when in fact the computer believed them to be barely compatible at all. It soon emerged that being told that the algorithm rated you as a good match was just as effective at promoting an extended online chat as actually being a good algorithmic match. Just as with Operation Match, compatibility was a placebo: believing that you were compatible was all that was necessary; the algorithm itself was worth very little.
This really should not be a surprise. Hannah Fry, the author of The Mathematics of Love, explains why OkCupid is fundamentally limited in what it can do: “Their algorithm is doing exactly what it was designed to do: deliver singles who meet your specifications. The problem here is that you don’t really know what you want.”19
The problem runs deeper than that. If we did know what we wanted, we still wouldn’t be able to express that desire to the computer. We can easily specify height, age, religion, location, and income. We can list hobbies and interests, too. But while these things matter, what we really want in a romantic partner cannot be tidily measured: “makes me laugh,” “turns me on,” “gets along with my friends,” or “understands me.” If the computer cannot pose the right questions for you, it is hardly likely to produce the right answers.
Searchable attributes such as location can help us find a partner. And they’re particularly useful for people with the kind of requirement that you can verify, such as an unusual sexual preference or dietary restriction. A site like “Positive Singles” will help people with a sexually transmitted condition such as HIV or herpes meet others in the same situation. If you have very specific needs of the sort that can be specified in a database, then Internet dating is a godsend. But what is strange is that even people with fairly generic preferences—to find a nice girl/boy with vanilla sexual tastes and a good sense of humor—have faith that, armed only with a list of our hobbies and the answers to a few pop psychology questions, a computer can find us the perfect match.
The experience of Chris McKinlay suggests otherwise.
Touted by Wired magazine as “the math genius who hacked OkCupid,” McKinlay—a computer science researcher in his mid-thirties—was looking for romance and created some software that slurped up information about twenty thousand women on the dating website OkCupid. This wasn’t easy: OkCupid blocks attempts to scrape data from its website, and so McKinlay had to program his own software to imitate human search behavior. He left it running around the clock in a quiet corner of the UCLA math department, and three weeks later he had the answers to six million questions.20
McKinlay then identified clusters of “types” of women he found promising. Armed with a deep pool of data, he was able to optimize his own profile, answering truthfully but choosing the perfect answers to emphasize. Finally he unleashed software bots to attract attention to his own profile. The result was a perfect dating storm: Chris was swamped by messages from interested women. The only trouble was that he then needed to date them.
First date number one—lunch—went nowhere. First date two was depressing. First date three produced nothing more than a hangover. McKinlay continued to watch the messages roll in and became ever more ruthless about squeezing in more first dates. Over the course of the summer, he managed fifty-five first dates—of which fifty-two flopped.
Before online dating took off, most people didn’t manage fifty-five first dates in their entire lives—and yet somehow people developed serious relationships and enjoyed happy marriages with no less success than they do today. Perhaps McKinlay was being picky, given that he was suddenly faced with more potential dates than anyone could manage. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that if the algorithms were any good at finding the right kind of woman, McKinlay wouldn’t have had so many disastrous dates.
McKinlay eventually had a date with someone whom he really liked, and who liked him back. Her name is Christine Tien Wang, and it wasn’t long before Chris and Christine had announced their engagement. McKinlay’s marathon dating season had ended, and ended happily. This wasn’t thanks to McKinlay’s hacking, however. Christine wasn’t a particularly good match according to his algorithm; she wasn’t in the top ten thousand matches in Los Angeles. And he didn’t find her; she found him. She searched for someone who was local, tall, and had blue eyes, and Chris McKinlay popped up.
Christine Tien Wang was Chris McKinlay’s eighty-eighth first date.
• • •
While few people have tested the limits of online dating as systematically as Chris McKinlay, many of those who continue to place their faith in the computer nonetheless admit to being somewhat disenchanted with the experience. A simple survey conducted by three behavioral scientists, Michael Norton, Jeana Frost, and the author of Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely, revealed that people were unhappy in three obvious ways. The first was that online dating itself was a mechanical drop-down menu experience, like trying to book a cheap hotel. The second was that online dating took too long—the typical survey respondent spent twelve hours a week browsing through profiles and sending and receiving messages, for 106 minutes of offline interaction in the form of a phone call or a meeting. And those 106 minutes, however they were spent, were a let-down: people tended to have high expectations before the dates they had arranged online, but feel disenchanted afterward. To adapt a Woody Allen joke: not only are the dates terrible, but there are so few of them.21
The problem with the tidy, checkbox-ticking approach to date finding, then, is not that it is less likely to find us an acceptable life partner than the traditional, messier tactic of initiating conversations at social events. It’s probably no better or no worse—but it promises far too much, sucks up time and effort, and then delivers a date no better than you might have found at random. Online dating seems to be just as much a waste of effort as painstakingly sorting all our e-mails into folders: the messier approach is at least as effective, and it’s much quicker.
A few years ago, Jeana Frost devoted her PhD research to fixing online dating. Gone was the search for a close match in a database, the algorithm that said that because you liked Johnny Depp movies and long walks on the beach, you’d be a great match for another Deppite beachcomber. Instead, Frost matched people up entirely at random.
Rather than rely on an algorithm to set up the perfect face-to-face date, Frost wanted to use the online environment to stimulate a conversation. She created a virtual image gallery in which people had a virtual date, represented by simple geometric avatars with speech bubbles. The images—from Lisa Simpson and Jessica Simpson to George Bush and John Kerry—were conversation starters. For example, this exchange was prompted by an image of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers:22
M: do you like to dance?
D: yes, waltz?
M: does that mean you like also disco freestyle?
D: haha . . . i don’t know how to disco freestyle
M: the big easy is a fun place to go to dance . . . you been there?
D: yes, i liked it. Would be fine too! What would be important to you, before you would go there with a chatroom acquaintance?
It’s not exactly the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, but it is a friendly and mildly flirtatious chat that nods toward the possibility of a proper date. People enjoyed these virtual dates, and a quarter of them exchanged phone numbers during the virtual dates, which isn’t bad for an entirely arbitrary match.
Two days later, the virtual dating experience was followed up with an evening of speed dating in which the experimental participants would have a series of four-minute chats, some with people they’d had virtual dates with, and others whom they’d gotten to know only by reading the regular Internet dating profile. The virtual dates showed promise: people who had enjoyed a virtual date together in the art gallery chat room also tended to like each other in person. The regular online dating profile generated no such affection. In short, it was better if you forgot the algorithm, and just tried to make random online dates more like actual dates.
Unfortunately, while we are starting to question the idea that a clever algorithm searching a tidy database can deliver magical results in our love life, we’re also trusting the algorithms well beyond their original role. The founder of eHarmony, Neil Clark Warren, wants to get into matching people with the perfect job or the perfect financial adviser or even the perfect friend. That may be good business, but you have to wonder whether this effort will work any better for recruiters and job seekers than it does for singles.23
Consider the tale of the Reverend Paul Flowers. Flowers, a Methodist minister, was chairman of the Co-operative Bank, a British institution that ran into serious problems after trying to snap up other banks in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. In 2013, he was asked to step down, and before long the story was less about the struggles of the Co-op Bank and more about the Reverend Flowers himself. At a Treasury select committee hearing, he seemed to lack the most basic grasp of how banking worked. For example, he guessed that Co-op’s assets were £3 billion; in fact they were £47 billion. Things took a further turn for the worse when a newspaper published photographs showing the Reverend Flowers buying drugs. Lurid text messages emerged in a subsequent court case, and he was eventually convicted of possessing cocaine, crystal meth, and ketamine.24
More important than the drug offenses is the fact that the “Crystal Methodist” was by all appearances grossly incompetent to be overseeing a bank. He had no meaningful banking experience or qualifications, but had risen to prominence within the unusual governance structure of the Co-operative Group, which is owned and run by members. Still—how did he secure the job of chairman? The answer eventually emerged: Reverend Flowers had aced a psychometric test, the recruiters’ equivalent of an online dating profile.25
No doubt such tests can play a role in sorting and sifting candidates, who are asked to agree or disagree with questions such as “I often get angry at the way people treat me” or “I really like most people I meet.” They can even help to correct some of the biases of face-to-face interview methods, in which unconscious racism and sexism can often play a role. But if we think that a tidy multiple choice test is a decent measure of a candidate’s suitability for a job, we’re making the online dating error all over again. John Rust, a psychometric expert at the University of Cambridge, sums up the problem: “Openness to experience is one of the big five scales in personality testing, and clearly one that Flowers may have scored highly on. But you would need to follow that with an interview that asked exactly what type of experiences he is open to.”26
Will we ever realize that there are some parts of life that the algorithms cannot improve? Perhaps not. The more the test sounds scientific and authoritative, the more we are likely to trust it. And we’ve been suckers for whatever looks like cutting-edge science for a long time—to the extent that the idea of algorithmic dating is actually far older than computers themselves. In 1924 the inventor and writer Hugo Gernsback declared in Science and Invention magazine: “We take extreme care in breeding horses . . . but when we come to ourselves we are extremely careless and do not use . . . the means that science puts into our hands.”27 These scientific means included the “electrical sphygmograph” (it takes your pulse) and a “body odor test” (sniffing a hose attached to a large glass capsule that contains your beau or belle).
When it comes to breeding horses, it’s reasonable to think we can arrange the qualities we’re looking for into a tidy list: temperament, strength, speed. When it comes to finding someone who can make us happy, or manage not to nearly bankrupt one of our venerable financial institutions, the qualities we want are altogether harder to define.
• • •
Algorithmic compatibility matching has promised so much for so long, yet it fails—and it fails for reasons that are easy to understand. Why, then, do we continue to ask the computers to lead the way for us? Perhaps it’s because we find an actual, unscripted conversation with a stranger to be such a frightening prospect. Even once the interaction does move to a face-to-face environment—which, for most romantic relationships, is part of the point—we often continue to rely on a script whenever we can.
In 1950, the mathematician, codebreaker, and computer pioneer Alan Turing proposed a test of artificial intelligence. In Turing’s “imitation game,” a judge would communicate through a teleprompter with a human and a computer. The human’s job was to prove that she was, indeed, human. The computer’s job was to imitate human conversation convincingly enough to confuse the judge.28 Turing optimistically predicted that by the year 2000, computers would be able to fool 30 percent of human judges after five minutes of conversation. He was almost right: in 2008, at an annual Turing test tournament called the Loebner Prize, the best computer came within a single vote of Turing’s benchmark. How?
The science writer Brian Christian had an answer: computers are able to imitate humans not because the computers are such accomplished conversationalists, but because we humans are so robotic.29
An extreme example is the “pickup artist” subculture, devoted to seducing women through prescripted interactions. On Internet forums, these men will swap ideas for “openers”—the Jealous Girlfriend opener, the My Little Pony opener, the You Guys Can Settle a Debate opener—which men can use to approach “sets,” or what you and I might call “groups of women talking to one another.” In this strange game, there seems to be little interest in paying attention to what the other player is doing: the pickup forums suggest a series of scripted follow-ups, regardless of how the woman responds. In one Internet forum, laden with ads for “Love Systems” and “Magic Bullets,” one man wrote that he tried the Jealous Girlfriend opener on a group of women and was mocked because they’d heard the same line before. He asked for advice. The response: “Eject. Find another set.” That makes sense—if you think all women are interchangeable.30
Another technique of the pickup artist is “negging,” firing off small insults. The theory behind negging seems to be that if a man undermines a woman’s confidence, she will be eager for validation, and that validation will come from sleeping with the pickup artist. But I wonder if the true secret of negging is that insults are very simple and elicit simple responses. It’s possible to get through a conversation full of little insults without ever really having to listen, or to improvise a response. If you needle a woman about her weight, you need never engage with the intimidating fact that she is another human being, someone who has her own story to tell, her own talents, friends, history, and hopes. No script could hope to deal with such messy complexity.
The “negging” technique is similar to a surprisingly compelling chatbot, MGonz, which fools humans simply by firing off insults: “cut this cryptic shit speak in full sentences,” “ah thats it im not talking to you any more,” and “you are obviously an asshole.” MGonz would never pass a Turing test with an informed judge, but it has drawn unsuspecting humans into abusive dialogues on the Internet that last for over an hour without its ever being suspected of being a chatbot. The reason? People in the middle of a slanging match share something with computers: they find it hard to listen.31
Even for those who aspire to more meaningful connections than the pickup artist, there are temptations to simplify and tidy by using scripts or algorithms. For an illustration of this, take a look at your smartphone. Start typing and see what it suggests. Composing a text message to my wife, I typed “Ju” into my phone and waited for the phone to suggest the rest, word by word. Here’s the message my wife received:
“Just wanted to let you know that I think you’re awesome.”
My contribution to that was two letters at the beginning and a full stop at the end. My wife seems not to have suspected that anything was amiss. After a delay, she wrote back:
“Thank you! Sorry have been busy! XXXX you are totally amazing! Xx”
Or at least I think the message was from her. But much of it may have been from her phone. The reason a smartphone is able to produce a plausible and indeed affectionate sentence is that we repeat ourselves. There is nothing wrong with a little formulaic chat from time to time—why else would we talk of “sweet nothings”? But as Brian Christian observes, our conversations are often surprisingly predictable exchanges of “How are you?” and observations about the weather, ending with “Let’s do lunch sometime.” Again, there is nothing wrong with this in itself, any more than there is anything wrong with the fact that a letter begins “Dear . . .” and ends “Yours sincerely . . .” But while a real conversation can have an automatic start and end, there should be something more interesting going on in between.
We can look to chess computing for a parallel. Computers have an opening “book”—a large database full of possible openings, responses, responses to responses, responses to responses to responses. They also have a closing book instructing them on perfect play in the endgame. Most chess games do not simply progress from opening book to closing book, because a book that listed the optimal move from any position would be far too large for any computer. But some chess games stay in book throughout, and a game of chess that never gets out of book is not much of a game. Similarly, a conversation that never gets out of book is not much of a conversation.
It is surprising how many of our conversations take this ritualistic format, even when we are desperate to make a human connection. It is easy to mock the pickup artists with their “openers” and their willingness to “eject” from an interaction that isn’t going well. But do the rest of us really do any better? Is this line, transcribed from a first date, delivered by a human or a computer?
“Dwight Owens. Private wealth group at Morgan Stanley. Investment management for high-net-worth individuals and a couple pension plans. Like my job, been there five years, divorced, no kids, not religious. I live in New Jersey, speak French and Portuguese. Wharton business school. Any of this appealing to you?”
It’s a trick question: these words actually come from the TV comedy Sex and the City. Still: it’s close to home. Even without the manipulative tactics of the pickup artist, first dates are often highly formal exchanges of useless biographical information because nobody wants to take the risk of saying something interesting. The behavioral scientist Dan Ariely once ran an experiment that combined online dating with something akin to Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. Participants in the experiment were given access to an instant-messaging system, which they used to chat online while discussing a possible first date. The system, however, forced them to pick from a choice of rather disruptive conversational moves—“How many romantic partners did you have?” “When was your last breakup?” “Do you have any STDs?” “How do you feel about abortion?” People loved the conversations that resulted, because instead of tidily moving through a rather ritualistic exchange, these questions put the conversation somewhere new, dangerous, and exciting.32 I can’t say whether Dwight Owens would have been more likely to get a phone number from his date, Miranda, if he had opened with “Have you ever broken someone’s heart?” but I can guarantee that both of them would have had a more interesting conversation.
Crazy as this might seem, there’s a long tradition of using courageous questions to get us out of our tidy conversational habits. One list of questions was made famous by the novelist Marcel Proust, including “What is your most treasured possession?” “What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?” “What is your favorite journey?” and “How would you like to die?” All of these questions beat “What do you do for a living?”
Brian Christian and his girlfriend answered Proust’s questions as part of an icebreaker at a wedding: “Reading that questionnaire was a stunning experience: the feeling, one of doubling in an instant our understanding of each other. Proust had helped us do in ten minutes what we’d taken ten months to do on our own.”
• • •
Dan Ariely’s provocative questions, and Jeana Frost’s PhD research, demonstrate that even a computer chat room can be used to start a very human process of conversation. But perhaps we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for the dating websites to popularize these messy approaches. After all, they want us to come back to the online environment again and again; a happily hitched customer is a customer no longer.
Similarly, social media sites have no incentive to act in ways that encourage deep and meaningful conversations among friends. Consider Facebook’s announcement, late in 2015, that it was increasing the range of one-click responses from the traditional “Like” to “Angry,” “Sad,” “Wow,” “Haha,” and “Love.” At first glance, it might have seemed that Facebook was expanding our conversational palate. As one newspaper reported, “Mark Zuckerberg hinted . . . that his site was looking to expand the Like button, making a way for people to communicate that they were upset by news.”33 But a moment’s thought reveals that this is nonsense. Facebook always offered people the option to communicate that they were upset by news—perhaps by typing, “I am upset by this news,” and adding some words of sympathy or advice. The new Facebook “reactions” tempt us not to bother with anything so human; a single click will suffice. The change is not for our benefit, but for the benefit of advertisers, who find it far easier to analyze one-click reaction data than to make sense of natural language. But there is little doubt that we will embrace the simplification, because given a tidy option, we tend to take it.
The sociologist Sherry Turkle recently started interviewing young people about the way they viewed old-fashioned face-to-face conversation, now that it was so easy to communicate through a text message or chat room. They told her that they found traditional discussions difficult, even frightening. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with conversation!” one high school senior replied. “It takes place in real time and you can’t control what you’re going to say.”34 It is hard to think of an expression more opposed to the spirit of improvisation that we saw in Miles Davis (“First-take feelings, if they’re anywhere near right, they’re generally the best”) or Martin Luther King (“It was astonishing, the man spoke with so much force”). This is a young man so obsessed with control that he is intimidated by the prospect of simply talking “in real time.”
But much as we might wish otherwise, life takes place in real time. Life cannot be controlled. Life itself is messy. And it isn’t just high school seniors who like to fool themselves about that. From Marco “Rubot” Rubio’s strange repetitive glitch, to the schwerfällig British generals outmaneuvered by Erwin Rommel, to the managers who try to tie performance down to a reductive target, we are always reaching for tidy answers, only to find that they’re of little use when the questions get messy.
Each year that the computers fail to pass the Turing test, the Loebner Prize judges award a consolation prize for the best effort: it is the prize for the Most Human Computer. But there is also a prize for the human confederates who participate in the contest: the Most Human Human. Brian Christian entered the 2009 Loebner contest with the aim of winning that honor. He understood that it was not enough simply to chat away as humans often do, because too much human chat is itself formulaic and robotic. His strategy was to make a mess.
First, he got off the script, out of “the book” of tidy, formalized exchanges, lunging for the question that might connect. “How are you?” is too safe. “Tell me about your first kiss” risks ending a conversation, but better that than never starting a conversation at all. Faced with irate customers, O2’s “How much for the bird?” quip was risky, too. We don’t have to be a genius like Keith Jarrett or Martin Luther King to make a risk pay off.
Second, he stepped away from the generic, always looking for the details of the world around him. Chatbots, automated phone menus, and pickup artists flourish in a sterile bubble, devoid of context and history. Human conversation works best when it is rooted in the subtleties of a particular moment. At one point in the 2009 Loebner Prize competition, two participants realized that they were both from Toronto and started geeking out about ice hockey. It was instantly clear that neither of them was a computer. When a Zappos customer service rep realizes that the customer is physically just down the street in Las Vegas, she proves she isn’t a computer, either.
Third, Brian Christian disrupted the conversation, because that is what real humans do. People don’t speak in complete sentences and wait for each other to finish. They um and ah; they interrupt excitedly; they finish each other’s ideas. In a text-message environment, replies will stack up; people often find themselves having two or three parallel conversations with the same person at the same time. The chaos of all this is quintessentially human. Brian Christian typed three times as much as his robot rivals, and talking in and over and through the judge’s responses, drawing meaning from hesitations and moments of confusion as much as from complete sentences. Isn’t that sort of animated cross-talk exactly what makes a truly human conversation?
Brian Christian’s risky, context-rich, and messy conversations earned him the title of the Most Human Human. Real creativity, excitement, and humanity lie in the messy parts of life, not the tidy ones. And an appreciation of the virtues of mess in fulfilling our human potential is something we can encourage in our children from an early age—if we dare.
• • •
Carl Theodor Sørensen, a landscape architect, designed playgrounds in Denmark in the 1930s. He had a problem: he noticed that while the adults who commissioned and paid for the playgrounds were perfectly satisfied with them, the local children didn’t seem to like them very much. Quickly tiring of swings and slides, they would endlessly be tempted to sneak into local building sites instead.
Sørensen decided that he would build a playground that was a building site, all sand and gravel, hammers and nails. It was an enormous hit with the children, who started to build dens and other structures, before tearing them down to build something else.
Sørensen’s playground opened in 1943 in Emdrup, a district of Copenhagen, at a time when Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany. Grown-ups had bigger problems to worry about than whether young Tomas accidentally nailed himself to the ramparts of his own fortified castle. But slowly, tentatively, the idea spread.
A similar playground, The Yard in Minneapolis, set up in 1949, initially seemed doomed, as children stashed the tools away, trying to monopolize them in the race to build the most spectacular structure. For a while it seemed like the adults would have to step in and tidy up both the playground and the rules of engagement; yet eventually that proved unnecessary. There was no Lord of the Flies descent into brutality. The children came together to figure out their own rules. What was at first an opportunity for creative expression became a catalyst for learning how to work together as a community.35
The same benefits come from playing messy, informal games (a pickup soccer game in the park, with sweaters for goalposts) as formal ones (a timed game on a marked pitch with a referee). In fact, the informal game may be far superior in ways that we tend not to appreciate. Recent research has found a correlation between playing informal games as a child, and being creative as an adult; the opposite was true of the time spent playing formal, organized games.36
Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College, points out that in an informal game, everyone must be kept happy: if enough players stop wanting to play, the game will end.37 That implies the need to compromise, to empathize, and to accommodate younger, weaker, and less skillful playmates; no such need arises in formal games, where those who are having a miserable time on the losing team are obliged to keep going until the final whistle blows. As different children arrive and leave, people must switch sides to keep things interesting, evening up the numbers and the skill levels: “them and us” is alien to informal play. No wonder the skills we learn from informal games stand us in better stead for many real-life situations than the skills we learn from formal ones.
The Yard and Emdrup are venerable examples of playground success, but another mess-pit of a playground, The Land, in North Wales, is just a few years old. It embraces similar principles with similar results and has become famous thanks to a documentary produced by Erin Davis38 and a feature article in The Atlantic by Hanna Rosin.
It is hard to exaggerate quite what a mess The Land is. It is a muddy scrap of ground with a few trees, most grass long since trampled into the muck. A waterlogged ditch runs through the middle of it. There’s a trash can over there; three tires piled together next to it; beside that, an abandoned bike with stabilizers, lying on its side. There’s an overturned chair, a large wooden spindle that looks like it once held industrial cable; another tire filled with indeterminate rubbish. And that’s just a random area of flat ground—the ditch is far worse, filled with random junk—a bike wheel, another tire, some kind of stool, bits of plastic and pipework. It quite literally looks as though someone took an undistinguished patch of scrubland, backed a truck into it, emptied a skip loaded with scrap metal and plastic, and then drove off before anyone called the police.
There is no sign that this is a playground: no bright colors, no shiny slide, no rubberized matting. There is a swing, of sorts—a large green segment of plastic pipe slung from a tree. It seems likely that the children made it themselves, as they made the trampoline built from grimy mattresses, the scrappy fortress made from wooden pallets, and the fire in the oil drum. Fire is a commonplace here—as are saws and nails and mad spinning rope swings. Nor are they part of some carefully supervised craft activity. There are adults at The Land, but they rarely intervene. One ten-year-old boy saws with frantic abandon at a heavy-duty piece of cardboard. His fingers are exposed; the saw slips and bends; he has no workbench or firm mounting; he’s in too much of a hurry to take care. It’s awful to watch, like the ominous opening to some gruesome public safety film. Nevertheless his fingers survive intact, and the cardboard becomes part of an extended polearm that he uses to swat at snowballs.
Writes Rosin:
“These playgrounds are so out of sync with affluent and middle-class parenting that when I showed fellow parents back home a video of kids crouched in the dark lighting fires, the most common sentence I heard from them was ‘This is insane.’”39
But is it? It is surprisingly hard to prove that places like The Land are any more likely to lead to grievous injuries than the sterile, prefabricated play spaces defined by the abbreviation KFC—Kit, Fence, Carpet—that schools and municipalities nowadays install in the hope of minimizing mishaps, and the lawsuits that might result. Tim Gill, a researcher and writer on childhood, estimates that the rubbery surface that has become standard in most playgrounds constitutes up to 40 percent of the entire cost of the playground.40 Yet it’s unclear that these expensive KFC playgrounds play host to fewer accidents. David Ball, a professor of risk management at Middlesex University, has been unable to find any indication that injury rates are falling in these sanitized playgrounds in either the United States or the United Kingdom.41
Recently, a team of fifteen academics tried to systematically review all the data they could find about risky outdoor play.42 The categories of risk were a catalogue of parental nightmares: great heights; high speeds; dangerous tools such as knives and axes; dangerous elements such as fire and water; rough play such as fighting; and the risk of getting lost. And yet, the researchers concluded, such play offers benefits: more exercise, improved social skills, reduced aggression, and reduced injuries. The researchers were cautious: not many good studies have been conducted, and so it is hard to draw firm conclusions. But it is quite possible that a space where children clumsily wield saws and set fire to things is just as safe as a space carefully designed by experts.
How could it possibly be that allowing children to play on a building site is as safe as—maybe safer than—letting them play on approved equipment with rubber-matted floors and carefully padded climbing apparatus? Hammers and hoists and open fires and trees and all the rest can actually be dangerous, after all. But it turns out that children adjust for risk: if the ground is harder, the play equipment sharp-edged, the spaces and structures uneven, they will be more careful.
Indeed, some play experts argue that standardizing playgrounds encourages children to become careless and may make them more likely to have accidents in other environments. Helle Nebelong, an award-winning playground architect, says:
“When the distance between all the rungs in a climbing net or a ladder is exactly the same, the child has no need to concentrate on where he puts his feet. Standardization is dangerous because play becomes simplified and the child does not have to worry about his movements. This lesson cannot be carried over to all the knobbly and asymmetrical forms with which one is confronted throughout life.”43
Learning to be alert to risk is a better preparation for self-preservation outside the playground than bouncing around like a pinball in a padded funhouse.
The benefits of messy play don’t end there. Grant Schofield, a professor of public health at Auckland University of Technology, has been running a research project in which schools opened up nearby unused land for primary-age children to roam free in during breaks. There were no more serious injuries than when the children played in their conventional playgrounds—indeed, there were fewer. And other results were dramatic: when they returned to the classroom from their feral wanderings, their behavior was better. They paid attention in class. Bullying fell to the extent that the school abolished a “time-out” room and halved the number of teachers on duty at playtime.44
Jared Diamond, author of The World Until Yesterday, makes much the same point about hunter-gatherer societies he studied in New Guinea, who “consider young children to be autonomous individuals whose desires should not be thwarted, and who are allowed to play with dangerous objects such as sharp knives, hot pots, and fires.” Though plenty of these kids grow up with physical scars, argues Diamond, they are the opposite of being emotionally scarred. Their “emotional security, self-confidence, curiosity, and autonomy” set them apart from children brought up by cautious Westerners.45
When we overprotect our children, denying them the opportunity to practice their own skills, learn to make wise and foolish choices, experience pain and loss, and generally make an almighty mess, we believe we’re treating them with love—but we may also be limiting their scope to become fully human.
James Scott, author of Two Cheers for Anarchism, points out that Emdrup’s playground was open and accommodating to the “purposes and talents” of the people who use it. Its designer, Carl Theodor Sørensen, was strikingly modest about how much he really understood about what children might choose to do. Whatever that might be, and however messy, the playground was open to the possibility. Jane Jacobs pointed out that only an arrogant man would try to anticipate all the uses to which a building might be put; the same thing is true of a playground.
This openness to mess is the same quality we found in MIT’s Building 20, in the provocations of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, and in the modular furniture of Robert Propst. Brian Christian’s risky, context-rich, and messy conversations earned him the title of the Most Human Human. Jeff Bezos and John Boyd sought to break away from tidy formulas, seeking an advantage through rapid improvisation despite its risks and their mistakes. Keith Jarrett and Miles Davis and Martin Luther King drew magic out of the unique challenges and atmosphere of a particular moment, stepping away from structure and control but gaining an indefinable energy as a result. We’ve seen, again and again, that real creativity, excitement, and humanity lie in the messy parts of life, not the tidy ones.
Most playgrounds are not open to the talents and purposes of the children who use them. A swing is for swinging; a merry-go-round is for merrily going around. But it is not only children who find themselves nudged and controlled as they wander curiously through life. A good job, a good building, even a good relationship, is open and adaptable. But many jobs, buildings, and relationships are not. They are monotonous and controlling. They sacrifice messy possibility for tidy predictability. And too often, we let that happen, because we feel safer that way. That is a shame.
Openness and adaptability are inherently messy. A playground such as The Land is profoundly disconcerting to adult eyes. It seems a dangerous, anarchic mess. That is why it’s fun to play in. And that is why it is a good preparation for a messy life.