Novelty Acts

This summer, for the first time in my life, I was the — recipient? beneficiary? some (not me!) would say victim — of a surprise birthday party. It was a delight through and through, but the thing I keep marveling at is how genuinely surprising it all was, from the guest list to the menu to the activities. I knew ahead of time only the time and the place, and so was treated to the rare experience of nearly 24 hours of pure discovery. I arrived for the celebration full of anticipation but without expectation, an agenda-free participant in the unfolding of the day.

It is so easy to research, plan and curate every millisecond that it almost seems irresponsible not to. You can virtually tour a hotel room before you book it, try on a jacket before you buy it, discuss a parenting technique before you endeavor it. If it’s purchasable, rentable, consumable or conceivable, you can find a review of it. I’m not complaining: The very fact that one can watch a video of a surgeon performing a procedure before scheduling a consultation is pretty incredible. I’m so accustomed to over-investigating everything I buy or book that I rarely stop to consider the toll.

Remember not knowing? I barely do. I was telling a Gen Z friend recently about finding my first apartment in New York City. “You used to line up to get the Village Voice rental listings when the paper came out on Tuesday nights,” I rhapsodized. “Oh, and The Voice published photos of the places with the listings?” my friend asked. No, I told him, there was just text! And not much of it! You had to call to find out when you could go see the place! No way to send photos to anyone else for validation, no easy way to research the landlord or the neighborhood. I felt like I was describing steering a ship by celestial navigation. But somehow, even without this information, I found a perfect, semi-affordable jewel box of a one-bedroom that I lived in happily for 15 years.

It’s easy to sentimentalize minimal-information living. A recent piece in The Times described restaurants that hold back details about their establishments in an effort to “revive a long-lost spirit of romance and adventure.” Some of these restaurants have deliberately cryptic websites, or no website at all. Others decline to publish their menus unless a prospective guest requests it. I love the idea of going into a dinner knowing as little as possible, but I’ll admit it’s handy, if not essential, to consult a website to see if one’s dietary restrictions can be accommodated, or to get a sense of the restaurant’s prices before committing to a reservation.

But the idea here, that less information might make for a better experience, is one I want to pursue. We’re careful to avoid spoilers for books and movies, but we don’t tend to think about other pre-received information in the same way. We know that novelty is key to happiness, but we’re researching the bejesus out of our lives and any possibility of surprise is eliminated.

I wrote recently about how my brain’s hard drive seems to be at capacity. Much of its space is packed with discovery and due diligence, space that could, theoretically, be used to store memories of unscripted adventures. Surprise parties are occasional things, and typically elaborate — that kind of novelty isn’t the stuff of everyday. But it might be interesting to engineer a surprise morning, a surprise hour, to deliberately not research the thing before you try it. I’ve had this fantasy since childhood of going to the airport and just buying a ticket for the next flight to the first location that sounds appealing. This extreme pursuit of novelty might be unrealistic, but going to dinner at a restaurant without looking at the menu ahead of time seems pretty low-stakes, and it might be enough to yield at least a tiny bit of accidental delight.