For a few years now, I’ve liked to take photos wearing funny or unexpected hats. Some people would describe them as “silly hats”, and I would agree; that is, after all, the point.

My former manager Cezary – bless his soul, as just two weeks after being promoted to Director of Security a vote was held within his own team which resulted in his headcount going from 10 to .. 0, due to every subordinate voting to leave his team – didn’t like silliness. At the time, I needed a way to be silly, but in a way that he couldn’t complain to HR and have anything meaningful happen to me. I came up with the idea of simply wearing… hats at the office.

A different hat every day; of different absurdness. So that’s what I did, and he was not happy; it was inappropriate, not proper workplace etiquette! Outlandish. But what could he do, go to HR and say “Josh is wearing hats in the office!” – of course not. I persisted for a week, and ran out of new hats – until others around me in the office started to give me theirs to wear. Because those people were fun: they saw such joy in something so meaningless as wearing stupid hats that they joined in the fun for themselves.

Me, wearing a hat, talking with Cezary (whose legs are apparently doing the twister)

What is the charge? Being silly

This silliness caught on, and ever since then, when I have the opportunity to snap a quick picture in a silly hat, I take it. This is despite the fact that generally speaking, I don’t think I look very good in hats.

My coworkers joined in on the fun of wearing hats too. The President of Opera liked it:

A private message of myself and my Opera coworkers, with President Krystian Kolondra, giving his stamp of approval

I extended this a bit to other articles of clothing.

Wearing not only a helicopter hat, but also a flamingo shirt in an EXTREMELY important meeting

You don’t have to always buy the hats either; you can just make your own.

Tin-foil hat, boo yeah

I’ve extended this to other workplaces, too.

Wearing hats, convincing fun people to turn into puffer fish

Or business trips.

A cowboy hat at another very important share-holder meeting

There’s been a whole range of hats over the years.

A children’s whinniy the poo hat	Wearing a zebra hat at Opera

Wearing a helicopter hat at a party	One of these AWESOME russian hats

At a party	Swapping a mario hat with a santa hat at a party

Wearing a beekeeper’s hat, visiting a friend’s beehives	Felt cute might delete this later

Wearing a floral hat	This HUGE woven hat

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As far as my lens of the world goes, it’s most important to be silly when it makes sense to be, and serious when it … makes sense to be – not when it’s appropriate. Appropriateness is just another term that people use to stifle creativity and different ways of thinking – or at least different from what they are used to.

Selective innocence is perhaps one of the best qualities anybody can have. Innocence towards the world means you have few conscious or subconscious prejudiced thoughts, so you are able to experience things as they are, without judging them through the lens of “the way things always are”. I quote the (visually) amazing film The Fall (2006):

Roy Walker: All right, close your eyes. What do you see?

Alexandria: Nothing.

An imagination that hasn’t been corrupted by the oppressions of a constrained reality. “We don’t do that” – why? By “selective” innocence, I mean having the ability to be aware when your decisions are made up of potentially flawed preconceptions – and instead apply an “innocent” eye to the situation.

So many people are afraid of change; or rather not change itself, but of something different. But for those who dream of truly living a life rather than merely existing as spectators to the world around them, there must be a willingness to think differently and to live differently, but also the ability to fight against those who wish to hold you and the world around you back. Sensibilities mean nothing; “we do it because that’s the way it’s done” means nothing.

If somebody is not able to look past something “silly” to focus on what really matters, then they are simply too preoccupied with appearances to recognize substance.

Or in other words, it seems to me that those who cannot see beyond “silly appearances”, and who confuse the form of an expression with the substance of the thought behind it, lack the capacity to judge an idea independently of convention. Their opinions, consequently, may say more about their conditioning than about the thing they presume to judge.

Cezary never really cared about the hats. What bothered him was that somebody had treated the rules about what an office looks like as optional; the people who started handing me their own hats had worked out the same thing, just from the other side. The hat is stupid on purpose. What somebody does when they see it is the actual test.

Being weird is the whole point