Friday, August 13, 2010

Flight or Invisibility?

I was listening to a story today on NPR, on the program This American Life, about choosing superpowers--would people choose to be invisible, or to fly, if given the choice between the two?

Since I was a little kid, I have wanted to fly--it's something of a passion of mine. I love flying and things associated with flight. So if anyone ever asked, I could answer without any hesitation or thought. And then I would wonder why anyone would want to be invisible?

It was kind of disturbing, actually, to hear people talk about being invisible. One person at the end said that everyone, if they were practical, would choose invisibility so they could sneak into movies and in other ways cheat society. One man talked about listening to what people said about him behind his back, and watching women take showers. (Yeah, seriously.)

But apparently, according to the lady who said that everyone would choose invisibility if they were honest, described people who would choose flight as having some kind of mythic/heroic complex. The contrast between flight and fading was also described as being related to people's "guile." So if they had guile, they would want to be invisible. And that people who wanted to fly wanted to be heroes or to show off or something. And apparently women tended to answer "invisibility" more than men, who tended to answer "flight."

I'm not sure about drawing too many conclusions about someone based on their answer to the question, but I do find the trends interesting. Any thoughts? What would you choose?

3 comments:

Sayf said...

Flying, hands down. I grew up watching too much Dragon Ball Z.
=D}

Amy Terlaga said...

Flying. Absolutely. Flying would be so awesome. My husband and I agreed on this.

KdoeSkie said...

flying of course...but would there be too much human traffic in the sky if flight was an option for all humans?? lol...
Some people become really sad depressed and even suicidal from feeling invisible to the world kor loved ones, so why would you choose that???