Shimmering, right outside your window, is…tinkerbell.

At least that’s what it looks like.

You open the window and in a tiny voice, the fairy introduces herself as “Tink”.

She tells you that she’s the great granddaughter of Tinkerbell and that she’s a ‘social butterfly’. When you look confused, she explains:

“Well obviously I’m a fairy, but my job is ‘social butterfly’. It’s quite a cool role actually. I am supposed to improve people’s social lives by magically connecting them.

There are two ways I can do this:

The first way is by guaranteeing you 3-5 short chats per day. These are conversations with people you’ll see at least once a week. They will remember you and what’s going on in your life. If you go away for more than a week, they’ll notice. But none of them actually know much about you. They don’t know what you care about, what you’re struggling with in life (etc.). They just know enough to say “you look well!” or “how was that film you mentioned you were going to see?”. Friendly small talk I suppose you could call it.

The second way is to guarantee you one long “DMC” (Deep Meaningful Conversation) per week. The DMC will be at least an hour long. It will be with a stranger who you will never see again. It will go to places like:

• The scariest moments in your lives

• Your first loves

• Where each of you draw inspiration from

• The issues that make you most angry

Neither of these options are replacements for the rest of your social life. They’re just add ons.

So, would you like to choose one of these options?

Full disclosure, I’m working with a university to find out which kind of interactions make people happier. We think there might be some differences between introverts and extroverts, those that live in cities and those that live in villages, etc etc…

The university is crunching the numbers, I’m providing the magic!”

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:

1. Which option do you gravitate towards? Why?

2. Which do you think would make you happier in the long run?

3. Do you think most people will choose option one or option two? Why?

4. Do you think ‘introverts’ and ‘extroverts’ are likely to pick different options, as Tink suggests?

5. What do you think of the saying “you can’t have quality without quantity” (referring to interactions with other people)?

SOURCE: BA, THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS IN PUBS Group Member

2 ANIMATE

Many people make inanimate objects come alive.

Poets, writers, storytellers, film-makers, instagram creators…

I’m going to give you four examples, but if you prefer a shorter thought experiment, you can skip to the last sentence.

4 EXAMPLES

1) In Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, the household objects come to life, sing and dance (Trousdale & Wise, 1991).

(Cotton, 2024)

4) In the poem “Everything Is Waiting For You”, David Whyte encourages us to see everything around us as alive and present:

“Your great mistake is to act the drama

as if you were alone. As if life

were a progressive and cunning crime

with no witness to the tiny hidden

transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,

even you, at times, have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

out your solo voice. You must note

the way the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

The stairs are your mentor of things

to come, the doors have always been there

to frighten you and invite you,

and the tiny speaker in the phone

is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the

conversation. The kettle is singing

even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots

have left their arrogant aloofness and

seen the good in you at last. All the birds

and creatures of the world are unutterably

themselves. Everything is waiting for you.” (Whyte, 2022)

This Thought Experiment is simple:

Imagine all ‘inanimate’ objects are animate.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:

1. How would your experience of the world change?

2. Would it improve?

3. Would you feel comforted or disturbed by this new reality? In what ways?

4. If you could speak to objects, would you?

5. If you could feel what it is like to be objects, would you?

6. Does the idea of developing personalities for the objects around you feel delightful or weird?

7. Why do you think this is such a common trope in art/fiction (see examples)?

SOURCES:

BA, THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS IN PUBS Group Member

Cotton, S. [@samcotton]. (2024). “Rest.” [Video]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cw_ce8CPvHK/?hl=en

Steinbeck, J. (1961). The winter of our discontent. William Heinemann Ltd.

Trousdale, G., & Wise, K. (Directors). (1991). Beauty and the beast [Film]. Walt Disney Pictures.

Whyte, D. (2022, May 26). Everything is waiting for you. The On Being Project. https://onbeing.org/poetry/everything-is-waiting-for-you/