In a story out of a house party in Brooklyn, NY, a detailed and in-depth study among four of your friends suggests that real secrets are never actually as exciting as hearing someone say, “I have a secret.”
26-year-old Kaia Johnson is on the ground floor of this discovery, as she just experienced the absolute adrenaline rush of being teased with a forthcoming secret, followed by the relative let-down of learning something she doesn’t especially care about.
“When my friend Jade came up to me and said in a sing-song voice, ‘I have a seeecret,’ obviously I was in immediate ecstasy,” Kaia says. “My mind was racing with all the possibilities of personally life-changing news I might receive, or at the very least highly juicy and classified gossip about a high-profile elected official and/or Kardashian.”
“It turned out that the secret was simply that our friend Nate has a crush on other friend, Ibrahim,” Kaia adds. “Really this is borderline rude to tell me, if you’re not going to at least also let me know about someone who has a crush on me. Plus, Jade made me promise not to tell Ibrahim, so I don’t even get the joy of telling an actually fun secret to him.”
Despite being totally stuck with a boring-ass secret that she can’t even turn into good drama, Kaia has managed to see the good in a fairly mediocre situation.
“In a freshman year philosophy class, I learned that Søren Kierkegaard had this theory that anticipation always exceeds the intensity of the actual event you’re anticipating, whether that’s pleasure or dread or whatever,” Kaia says. “I was also pretty annoyed when I read this because it’s like, duh, I could have told you that; he just had the good luck to be born a couple centuries before me and have the chance to write it down first. But anyway, in a Kierkegaardian sense, and in a me sense, I guess the felt pleasure of anticipating a secret isn’t degraded by the letdown of hearing a secret that’s not even that good.”
“God, I have philosophical insights as deep as this yet no one has a secret crush on me?” Kaia adds. “The world makes no sense — sorry!”
At press time, we told Ibrahim that we knew a secret about someone having a crush on him and his eyes totally lit up even though we know he’s going to be disappointed because he only likes Nate as a friend.
