Ten Missions for People With Nothing to Lose

One: squeeze yourself into your fifth-grade Sailor Moon costume and bring love and justice to the subway. Two: launch your own private TV channel and broadcast S Club Party on a twenty-four-hour loop. Three: sing your national anthem in all the wrong places—the church, the doctor’s waiting room, outside the kebab shop on the corner. Attention is guaranteed. Four: show up to a colleague’s house party in a full black ski mask, bring drinks and snacks, act completely normal, give nothing away. Five: plant yourself on a busy street and hold up a large piece of cardboard on which you’ve written in thick marker: "Honk if you have a small penis."

Six: track down the B-listers who once posed naked for Bravo—Germany’s beloved teen magazine that ran actual full-frontal celebrity shoots alongside sex-ed diagrams—and call them to ask how life’s going and whether they fancy a coffee. Seven: when ordering pizza, insist firmly that they leave off the bees because you’re severely allergic, and never stop mentioning it. Eight: sign other people’s books, magazines, and train tickets uninvited, then say: "Don’t mention it—always a pleasure." Nine: steal a sack of potatoes from the supermarket and claim that Hitler personally ordered you to. Ten: eat and drink only white foods. If anyone asks why, look briefly baffled, then yell: "Dude, don’t you watch the news?!"

There’s a specific pleasure in designing a task that serves no purpose, disturbs no one in any lasting way, and forces a small confrontation between the person doing it and whoever happens to be watching. That’s the whole game. No lesson at the end.