Tearing into that Kinder Surprise (überraschung-ei) foil as kids—that violent unwrapping—reveals more about our neural wiring than any calcified LinkedIn post about “embracing uncertainty” ever could. That moment before discovery isn’t cute; it’s fucking primal. Our adult brains chase that same hit through increasingly desperate channels: promotions, purchases, porn, whatever gets our synapses to twitch like a junkie’s fingers.

We’ve calcified our lives into productivity systems and five-year plans, yet still secretly hope a chocolate egg with a sad plastic toy inside will save us from the crushing boredom of knowing exactly what comes next.

wine-ding rewards

When my grandfather drove to Norway with wine-filled tubes snaking through his car—veins of contraband cabernet pumping against the walls of his old fiat—he wasn’t being alcoholic. He was planning spontaneity. He was engineering the spine-tingle that made ancient humans explore caves that might contain either food or predators. The Norway mountains eventually turned his iron stomach inside out, painting the roadside with his poor choices. Even the hardest stomach breaks against sufficient chaos.

This isn’t just drunken nostalgia. The research confirms our addiction: random rewards hijack our dopamine pathways more effectively than predictable ones. Casinos built billion-dollar empires on this. Social media perfected it. You’ll suffer through 47 mediocre TikToks for the one that makes you genuinely laugh because your brain craves the gamble, not the guarantee.

Studies show preschoolers given surprise treats for drawing maintained their passion while kids with guaranteed rewards stopped giving a fuck once the candy pipeline dried up. Random isn’t just more fun—it’s metabolically different. It’s why the slot machine gets more action than the vending machine, despite both dispensing disappointment 90% of the time.

the humble surprise lover

But here’s what’s truly fascinating: the morning after surprise visits, we bulldoze its existence from our narrative. Like the lover who was almost caught and would have collapsed the marriage, surprise gets hushed out the back door of the adult mind. We retroactively impose logic on chaos, insisting we “knew it all along” or “should have seen it coming.”

Dreams operate the same way—intense and real in the moment, then evaporating with the morning light. We forget 95% of dreams within minutes of waking. Why? Because they’re experiences we can’t successfully narrate, can’t fit into our need for a consistent world view. We’re serial cheaters on our own coherence, having nightly affairs with randomness, then pretending it never happened.

Surprise, like your dream lover, doesn’t demand credit. It doesn’t need monuments built to its contributions. While we’re engraving our names on every “altruistic” accomplishment like Roman emperors, surprise remains humble—changing us without demanding recognition.

stop beating the beaten path

Every time you swipe right on chaos, you’re dating an unactualized version of yourself—the you-who-could-have-been that escaped your five-year plan. The bass player, the nomad, the person who actually separates their laundry. Each interaction with these shadow selves is unpredictable: sometimes toxic, sometimes revelatory.

Yesterday, brain clouded with snot, I pulled an Oblique Strategies card reading “give the game away.” I panicked, realized I couldn’t identify what “game” I was even playing, and confessed to being high during user research. Classic trickster move—using honesty as sabotage?

But what if that’s the point? What if the trickster isn’t sabotaging success but undermining our artificial definitions of it? Jung called this archetype “both subhuman and superhuman”—the chaotic force that doesn’t just break loops but breaks us open.

These unactualized versions are Trojan horses, wheeled innocently through the city gates of our identity before spilling their dangerous cargo into our orderly lives. We should be terrified. We should be grateful.

flower fullness

Let’s distinguish two approaches to creativity and productivity:

Flour fullness: The recipe-following approach where everything is measured, sifted, and controlled. Two cups of inspiration, level tablespoons of effort, baking at exactly 350 degrees for exactly 40 minutes. You know precisely what you’ll make. You know exactly how it will taste. Predictably edible, predictably forgettable.

Flower fullness: When your inner child picks roses for you unexpectedly. Unplanned beauty, surprise encounters with your own imagination. It’s what Germans call “querfeldein”—cutting across fields rather than following beaten paths. The flowers might wilt by evening, but the moment of discovery remains metabolically distinct.

Most “productivity systems” promise flour fullness while our souls crave flower fullness. The problem? We can’t remember or measure flower fullness on quarterly reports, so we bulldoze it from our professional narratives, pretending our successes came from careful planning rather than serendipitous detours.

expectation detox

Here’s what I’ve learned: we don’t beat the beaten path by beating it. We don’t even beat it by walking beside it. We beat it by questioning why we believe paths need beating at all.

The “head-heart-hands” framework for understanding procrastination isn’t cute kindergarten nostalgia—it’s triage for our relationship with action:

• Head: If your brain’s unconvinced, no productivity hack will save you.
• Heart: If the activity drains rather than fills, discipline becomes self-violence.
• Hands: If you lack tools, skills, or environment, stubbornness becomes stupidity.

When I procrastinate on building my beta-tester community, it’s not laziness—it’s my body mounting an immune response to misalignment. Rather than crushing this resistance under my heel, I stare at the nut until it cracks, releasing cognitive omega-3s into the rushing current of my bloodstream.

norway mountain confession

So here’s my roadside vomit confession: I’m not actually interested in productivity, or randomness, or even creativity. I’m interested in feeling alive while doing work that matters. Sometimes structure delivers this. Sometimes chaos does. Most often, it’s the conscious movement between them—the dance with both partners—that generates actual aliveness.

The truth is, we can’t systematize surprise any more than we can plan spontaneity. But we can create conditions where it’s more likely to emerge. We can wheel Trojan horses through our city gates on purpose. We can date our unactualized selves with the lights on.

Or maybe that’s just another calcified LinkedIn excuse for never finishing anything substantial. Maybe the Kinder Surprise was always empty, and we just convinced ourselves the sad plastic toy was worth the chocolate.

But I keep unwrapping anyway. The spine-tingle before discovery still beats knowing exactly what comes next. And maybe that’s the point—not what surprise delivers, but what it awakens in us along the way.