We live in a world that counts on our predictability. Digital tycoons have devised systems of surveillance that collect information about everything we say and do in order to target us with advertisements. Even while we sleep, a new generation of smartwatches track us for signs of restlessness, correlating every toss and turn with the likelihood that we will soon buy products and services for the sleep deprived. The idea behind these lurking enterprises is that people are easy to understand, with simple minds and urges that are easy to foresee.
When the emotion of caprice comes along, it reveals the lie hidden within the prediction machines of digital data mining. Caprice is the sudden, spontaneous urge to abandon one’s routine and do something dramatically… else. If you leave your workplace on a Tuesday morning and head to the beach, that’s caprice. If you pack up your things and move to another city over the weekend, that’s caprice.
Caprice takes spontaneity a step further, not just taking a single isolated action, but showing the willingness to sacrifice what we have become attached to, what has been expected from us. People can form lasting attachments on the basis of a spontaneous impulse, but caprice suggests that no attachment can be counted on in the long term.
Some people think caprice is a vice to be avoided. They worry that it makes us flighty, liable to be shifted by the slightest wind.
Then again, who would not like to take flight?
Caprice is a reminder that we are more than our habits. We contain within us to become something more than what the algorithms of Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon can calculate.
