Ten Little Missions

I found this old list somewhere—a collection of weekend missions, each one more ridiculous than the last, each one supposedly mandatory. Join a Berlin-only social network that’d be a ghost town by next month. Watch a porn star documentary, then stick to amateur videos with your heavy-set friend. Watch the Lana Del Rey SNL performance with the sound off—please God, with the sound off.

Go make fake gold bracelets from plastic bangles and show up to Fashion Week like you know someone. Hack some websites if you’re feeling anarchic about it. Burn something. Participate in a shitstorm against whoever, or buy some nice shoes instead—the list was equal parts thoughtful and completely indifferent to consequences.

Mixed in with the chaos was actually good advice that I still think about: read more, go see your best friend, specifically kiss her. The post warned this might land you in jail, which I appreciated. Not bothering to pretend the suggestion was safe, just acknowledging it as a risk worth taking. Either the best night of your life or a prison cell—no gray area.

What got me was how much it refused to choose. Not motivational quotes, not a life-hack list. Not pure anarchic nonsense either. It was both at once—genuinely useful advice tangled up with absurd, impossible, or dangerous suggestions, all presented with the same deadpan severity. Burn something and read more belonged in the same list, weighted equally.

The consequence for failure was always the same: you’d never come back, forced to read something else forever. I don’t know if anyone actually did these things. But I like that this list existed. The specificity of it, the mixing of the real with the ridiculous, the casual cruelty of the goodbye threat—it feels like something you’d actually want to be part of, even knowing you’d probably fail.