There’s a part of the Purim playlist where everyone starts singing along — v’nahafoch, v’nahafoch, v’nahafochu. We jump, we clap, we shout gleefully about turning everything upside down. Meanwhile, most of our lives are very right-side-up. Very normal. Very let’s just do what everyone else seems to be doing and call it a day.
One day a year, we turn things upside down. The rest of the year proves why we need to.
In the 1970s, millions of people bought pet rocks. A rock. In a box. With a care instruction manual. Something you could have picked up from your backyard, people lined up for because everyone else was buying one. Around the same time, people were walking invisible dogs: a stiff leash attached to an empty harness, nothing at the end of it. Two million of those were sold. For a dog that wasn’t there.
A few decades later, people filmed themselves stacking milk crates onto a staircase, climbing up, tumbling, often ending up in the ER. Millions watched and thought, I should try that too.
And then there was the ice bucket challenge, where half the planet dumped freezing water on their heads because… well, because everyone else was doing it. The ice bucket challenge at least raised money for ALS. The milk crate challenge raised awareness for… gravity and health insurance.
We follow.
It’s what we do, even when it makes absolutely no sense.
Ever bought something just because everyone around you had one, and three days later thought, why did I buy this?
Ever said yes to something because everyone else was doing it and immediately wished you hadn’t?
Ever looked around and realized you’re living a life that looks a whole lot like everyone else’s?
Psychologist Robert Cialdini calls it social proof — the idea that we look at what everyone else is doing and treat it as evidence that it must be the right thing to do. We default to the crowd, especially when we’re unsure.
In one study, hotels tried to get guests to reuse their towels. The signs that said help save the environment barely moved the needle. But when they changed the message to most guests in this room reuse their towels, people started doing so more often. Not because they suddenly cared about the planet, but because everyone else was doing it.
This next one is pure gold. In a social experiment on the National Geographic show Brain Games, researchers filled a doctor’s waiting room with actors. A woman walked in for an eye exam. Every time a beep sounded, all the actors stood up and sat back down. No reason. No explanation. By the third beep, she was standing up too. Then the actors left one by one until she was the only person in the room, and she was still standing at every beep. Then a new person walked in, saw her standing, and asked why. Her answer? Everyone was doing it. I thought I was supposed to. Next beep, he stood up too.
At least the woman in the waiting room didn’t know the beeping was meaningless. What if you followed the crowd even when you could clearly see they were wrong?
In the 1950s, Solomon Asch put a person in a room with a group of strangers and showed them a line on a card, along with three comparison lines next to it. All they had to do was say which one matched. It was obvious. A child could have gotten it right.
But here’s the catch — everyone else in the room was in on it. They were actors, and they all gave the same wrong answer. On purpose. One by one, each person confidently pointed to a line that was clearly not the right one. And then it was the participant’s turn.
You’d think people would just say what they could see with their own eyes. But over and over again, they didn’t. 75% of participants went along with the group at least once, choosing an answer they knew was wrong simply because everyone else had. They didn’t trust themselves over the crowd, even when the crowd was clearly, obviously, undeniably wrong.
If you think that wouldn’t be you, there’s a famous clip from Candid Camera that might change your mind.
A person walks into an elevator where everyone else is facing the back wall instead of the doors. No one says a word. And within seconds, the person turns around too. Every time. They don’t know why everyone is facing backwards, but it doesn’t matter. If that’s what everyone else is doing, they do the same.
It’s funny to watch. It’s less funny when you realize we all do this every single day.
We teach our kids, just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean you should too, and then you find yourself clicking buy now on Amazon for an Owala water bottle. (Full disclosure: I originally wrote Stanley Cup here, but my 16-year-old daughter informed me, Ma, that’s so 2020. It’s the Owala now. Which I had never heard of. So apparently, I’m not even good at following trends.) You’re not thirsty. Your old water bottle is still working. It’s sitting right there on the counter, judging you. But because everyone else now has an Owala, you feel weird not having one.
That’s how we end up with coats that cost more than rent, $900 sneakers that come pre-scuffed, a sweatshirt with a rainbow stripe that costs more than your weekly grocery bill, and enough Alo and Lulu to open your own boutique.
You ARE the everyone else you just warned your kids about.
And it’s not just about what we buy, it’s how we live. We do this with how we treat each other.
If everyone around us is speaking lashon hara, it starts to feel like it’s just how people talk.
If nobody seems to take kibud habrios seriously, we don’t either.
When most people show up late, being on time starts to feel weird, not respectful.
Everyone checks their WhatsApp in the middle of a conversation, so looking at your phone while someone is talking feels normal, not rude.
And when everyone is venting about shadchanim, jobs, and families, it no longer sounds wrong and starts being standard programming.
We let things slide because everyone else is. And once everyone is doing it, it stops looking like sliding. It just looks like normal. That’s how we would never slowly becomes everyone does.
Jiddu Krishnamurti summed it up perfectly:
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Which is a great way of saying: if everyone’s running in the wrong direction, being the fastest runner isn’t really a win.
There’s a name for people who don’t just go along with a crazy normal: healthy deviants. People who choose what’s genuinely good for them, even when it’s not what everyone else is doing.
We’ll sing v’nahafochu again this year, volume up, kids sticky with candy, adults pretending we’re not into it as much as we are. And then real life will slide back to its usual setting: very right-side-up, very normal, very let’s just do what everyone else seems to be doing and call it a day.
Unless, when we’re about to buy something or do something just because everyone else is, we do v’nahafochu and instead do what actually makes sense for us.
Everyone’s following the script.
Let’s be the healthy deviants who rewrite it.
Happy Purim.
I text lol about 40 times a day and actually laugh…maybe twice, if I am lucky. My phone thinks I’m hilarious. My nervous system is unconvinced.
Which brings me to the word of the week: cachinnation (kak-uh-NAY-shun) — loud, uncontrollable laughter.
Laughter that makes you snort and say, Stop, I can’t breathe, while also very much not wanting to stop.
I love this word because it is way too dramatic for what it’s describing. Most of our laughs are tiny and polite: air out the nose, maybe a small chuckle. Cachinnation is the opposite. It sounds like something that should require a doctor and a waiver. It’s the laugh your neighbors can hear and feel in your ribs the next day.
We think something is funny, and then we laugh. Simple. Neuroscientist Robert Provine disproved that. He studied people in everyday situations, in offices, on sidewalks, in lunch lines, and heard them laughing after lines like, I should get going, or Anyway…yeah. Not exactly peak comedy.
Which raises the obvious question — if we’re not laughing at jokes, what on earth are we laughing at?
Everything. Nothing.
Your brain thinks a random thought at the wrong moment, or catches some tiny thing, a facial expression, a weird sound, an awkward silence you find funny, and out of nowhere, you start to laugh.
And once that first laugh escapes, the contagious part kicks in. Our brains are copycats. One person starts, the other person goes, Oh, we’re laughing? Great, we’re laughing,before they’ve even decided if anything is funny. Then it becomes a loop: you laugh, which makes them laugh harder, which makes you laugh harder, until you’re both completely gone over absolutely nothing.
That also explains why you can watch something hysterical alone and barely exhale, but watch it with someone and suddenly you’re wiping tears. By the end, you’re not laughing at the original thing at all. You’re laughing at each other.
Babies are great at this. They have no idea what’s going on, yet before they can talk, they already know how to do that full-body laugh that makes everyone around them start laughing too. They don’t understand funny. They just understand joy, and their bodies handle the rest.
I love this story from a girls’ school in the 1960s in what’s now Tanzania. It started with three girls who began laughing and couldn’t stop. Over the next weeks it spread through the dorms until about 95 out of 159 students were having attacks of laughing and crying that could last hours, sometimes on and off for days. The staff couldn’t teach, the girls couldn’t concentrate, and after about a month and a half the school literally shut down. When they sent the girls home, it didn’t end — it spread into their villages, eventually affecting hundreds of people and forcing a bunch of other schools to close too. All of that, from one fit of giggles that caught on. If cachinnation means loud, uncontrollable laughter, that’s it.
Physically, a good laugh is basically a pressure valve. Your muscles tense, then release. Your breathing changes. Your whole system does a quick reset. Nothing outside you got easier, but inside there’s suddenly a little more room. It’s not that laughter makes life light. It makes it slightly less heavy to carry.
Norman Cousins, a journalist who got so sick in the 1960s he could barely move, checked himself out of the hospital and treated himself with funny movies and vitamin C. He claimed ten minutes of real belly laughter bought him two hours of pain-free sleep. Doctors were skeptical, then interested. Did it cure him? Depends who you ask. Did it help his body cope with what was happening? Clearly.
Maybe laughter is the best medicine, if only because no one ever said, sorry, your copay for cracking up is $75 and your insurance doesn’t cover snorting. Also, there are no harmful side effects, and you can take as many refills as you need.
The next time you laugh uncontrollably, you can say, I laughed so hard I snorted, or you can be fancy and say I went into full-on cachinnation.
