Enlightenment from My Favorite Thinking Place

They always say that the best ideas come to you when you’re on the toilet. At the risk of offering TMI, I would tend to agree. In the bathroom, it often seems easier to reach that supernatural, cosmic state where ideas are free-flowing. Maybe it’s the feng shui of the nearby water, or the soothing smell of Pantene and cucumber melon body wash. Perhaps the taste of minty toothpaste triggers a Pavlovian response, telling our brains to fire on all cylinders. Whatever it is, time spent in the bathroom is always productive. Deciding what outfit to wear, how best to solve that work problem, or what arcane topic to blog about today? Take a trip to the bathroom. Revelation. Decision made. Done.

However, not all bathrooms can lead to the same result. We inevitably have an intimate relationship with our personal bathroom. We’ve picked out our own furry mats and bathroom literature. We’ve hugged our own toilet after an unfortunate night out. We are far more likely to come up with great ideas on the can at home than in the graffiti-lined cesspool that characterizes most public restrooms. Instead of serenely contemplating a solution to global warming, we are probably too busy hovering, or worrying that someone will tip over our porta-potty.

In fact, we can map out the hierarchy of good ideas per bathroom, like this:

Where good ideas come from: Your bathroom at home > Bathroom at work/school > Public restroom > Porta-potty > Airport bathroom

(Airport bathroom barely beats out porta-potty because of the many bad ideas that have occurred at 30,000 feet in our friendly skies. I’d argue that doing anything other than taking care of business in an airport bathroom is a bad idea… After all, it’s a 3×3 box that smells like sterility. Why risk the turbulence?)

In conclusion, I hope this post will start a weighty discussion about bathroom-generated innovation and the inequities of a toilet hierarchy. Do those who share a bathroom come up with fewer ideas than those who have their own? Are frequent users of porta-potties psychologically stunted? How should we best position our vanilla-scented Air Wick?

The ultimate moral of this story, though, is: when you need a good idea, take a trip to the bathroom first. If I had spent more time there tonight, perhaps this post would have been slightly more substantive… but just slightly. Because even though the bathroom may help generate ideas, it’s not a miracle maker.  In the end, you’re still stuck with your own BS.  Literally.