I’ll be honest, I just wanted to see how many of you would open this.
It’s not that I was trying to asses your level of interest in such an image. It was a matter of sleepless curiosity as to how a schema violation would alter your behavior.
Put simply, a schema is a model you have for how something should exist or operate in the world. A schema violation is an event in which that model is broken and reconfiguration or creation of a new schema is required. We talked a bit about this when we discussed the Zeigarnik Effect in Open Loop Magic, an open loop is a mini-schema violation.
Now I’m not saying you should use the subject line “my dick pic”. Not because it’s inappropriate, but rather because—for anyone reading this—it wouldn’t be a schema violation the second time around. It’s been done before and isn’t new.
Reading that last paragraph, many of you just let out a disgruntled sigh and lamented about how “everything has been done before.” The opposite is true. The key thing to focus on is the modifier “for anyone reading this” as it highlights the abundance of possibility.
- not everyone has seen, or experienced, everything
- old things can be seen as new when put into different contexts
- people receive and interact with the world differently at different times
Schema violations help you to think critically and more creatively. The more you push yourself out of your comfort zone, the more likely you will experience something that alters your expectations of the world. If you’re looking to tap into your creativity, something many of you have brought up in discussion, then start violating schemas.
Wear underwear on your head, walk through a door backwards, or twirl like a ballerina every time someone says the word “lamp”. Your mission, break a schema today and break someone else’s in the process. Explore new conversations and create new paradigms.
And when you tell me what schema you violated, please… no dick pics.