Hi, my name is Frank, and I collect secrets.
It all started with a crazy idea in November of 2004.
I printed up 3,000 self-addressed postcards, just like this.
They were blank on one side, and on the other side I listed some simple instructions.
I asked people to anonymously share an artful secret they'd never told anyone before.
And I handed out these postcards randomly on the streets of Washington, D.C., not knowing what to expect.
But soon the idea began spreading virally.
People began to buy their own postcards and make their own postcards.
I started receiving secrets in my home mailbox, not just with postmarks from Washington, D.C., but from Texas, California, Vancouver, New Zealand, Iraq.
Soon my crazy idea didn't seem so crazy.
PostSecret.com is the most visited advertisement-free blog in the world.
And this is my postcard collection today.
You can see my wife struggling to stack a brick of postcards on a pyramid of over a half-million secrets.
What I'd like to do now is share with you a very special handful of secrets from that collection, starting with this one.
"I found these stamps as a child, and I have been waiting all my life to have someone to send them to.
I never did have someone."
Secrets can take many forms.
They can be shocking or silly or soulful.
They can connect us to our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet.
(Laughter) Maybe one of you sent this one in.
I don't know.
This one does a great job of demonstrating the creativity that people have when they make and mail me a postcard.
This one obviously was made out of half a Starbucks cup with a stamp and my home address written on the other side.
"Dear Birthmother, I have great parents.
I've found love.
I'm happy."
Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas, of frailty and heroism, playing out silently in the lives of people all around us even now.
"Everyone who knew me before 9/11 believes I'm dead."
"I used to work with a bunch of uptight religious people, so sometimes I didn't wear panties, and just had a big smile and chuckled to myself."
(Laughter) This next one takes a little explanation before I share it with you.
I love to speak on college campuses and share secrets and the stories with students.
And sometimes afterwards I'll stick around and sign books and take photos with students.
And this next postcard was made out of one of those photos.
And I should also mention that, just like today, at that PostSecret event, I was using a wireless microphone.
"Your mic wasn't off during sound check.
We all heard you pee."
(Laughter) This was really embarrassing when it happened, until I realized it could have been worse.
Right.
You know what I'm saying.
(Laughter) "Inside this envelope is the ripped up remains of a suicide note I didn't use.
I feel like the happiest person on Earth (now.)"
"One of these men is the father of my son.
He pays me a lot to keep it a secret."
(Laughter) "That Saturday when you wondered where I was, well, I was getting your ring.
It's in my pocket right now."
I had this postcard posted on the PostSecret blog two years ago on Valentine's Day.
It was the very bottom, the last secret in the long column.
And it hadn't been up for more than a couple hours before I received this exuberant email from the guy who mailed me this postcard.
And he said, "Frank, I've got to share with you this story that just played out in my life."
He said, "My knees are still shaking."
He said, "For three years, my girlfriend and I, we've made it this Sunday morning ritual to visit the PostSecret blog together and read the secrets out loud.
I read some to her, she reads some to me."
He says, "It's really brought us closer together through the years.
And so when I discovered that you had posted my surprise proposal to my girlfriend at the very bottom, I was beside myself.
And I tried to act calm, not to give anything away.
And just like every Sunday, we started reading the secrets out loud to each other."
He said, "But this time it seemed like it was taking her forever to get through each one."
But she finally did.
She got to that bottom secret, his proposal to her.
And he said, "She read it once and then she read it again."
And she turned to him and said, "Is that our cat?"
(Laughter) And when she saw him, he was down on one knee, he had the ring out.
He popped the question, she said yes.
It was a very happy ending.
So I emailed him back and I said, "Please share with me an image, something, that I can share with the whole PostSecret community and let everyone know your fairy tale ending."
And he emailed me this picture.
(Laughter) "I found your camera at Lollapalooza this summer.
I finally got the pictures developed and I'd love to give them to you."
This picture never got returned back to the people who lost it, but this secret has impacted many lives, starting with a student up in Canada named Matty.
Matty was inspired by that secret to start his own website, a website called IFoundYourCamera.
Matty invites people to mail him digital cameras that they've found, memory sticks that have been lost with orphan photos.
And Matty takes the pictures off these cameras and posts them on his website every week.
And people come to visit to see if they can identify a picture they've lost or help somebody else get the photos back to them that they might be desperately searching for.
This one's my favorite.
(Laughter) Matty has found this ingenious way to leverage the kindness of strangers.
And it might seem like a simple idea, and it is, but the impact it can have on people's lives can be huge.
Matty shared with me an emotional email he received from the mother in that picture.
"That's me, my husband and son.
The other pictures are of my very ill grandmother.
Thank you for making your site.
These pictures mean more to me than you know.
My son's birth is on this camera.
He turns four tomorrow."
Every picture that you see there and thousands of others have been returned back to the person who lost it -- sometimes crossing oceans, sometimes going through language barriers.
This is the last postcard I have to share with you today.
"When people I love leave voicemails on my phone I always save them in case they die tomorrow and I have no other way of hearing their voice ever again."
When I posted this secret, dozens of people sent voicemail messages from their phones, sometimes ones they'd been keeping for years, messages from family or friends who had died.
They said that by preserving those voices and sharing them, it helped them keep the spirit of their loved ones alive.
One young girl posted the last message she ever heard from her grandmother.
Secrets can take many forms.
They can be shocking or silly or soulful.
They can connect us with our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet again.
Voicemail recording: First saved voice message.
Grandma: ♫ It's somebody's birthday today ♫ ♫ Somebody's birthday today ♫ ♫ The candles are lighted ♫ ♫ on somebody's cake ♫ ♫ And we're all invited ♫ ♫ for somebody's sake ♫ You're 21 years old today.
Have a real happy birthday, and I love you.
I'll say bye for now.
FW: Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
(Applause) June Cohen: Frank, that was beautiful, so touching.
Have you ever sent yourself a postcard?
Have you ever sent in a secret to PostSecret?
FW: I have one of my own secrets in every book.
I think in some ways, the reason I started the project, even though I didn't know it at the time, was because I was struggling with my own secrets.
And it was through crowd-sourcing, it was through the kindness that strangers were showing me, that I could uncover parts of my past that were haunting me.
JC: And has anyone ever discovered which secret was yours in the book?
Has anyone in your life been able to tell?
FW: Sometimes I share that information, yeah.
(Laughter) (Applause)
It's 2008, and I'm just finishing my first year of design school.
And I'm at my first year-end review, which is a form of ritual torture for design students, where they make you take everything you made over the course of the year and lay it out on a table and stand next to it while a bunch of professors, most of whom you've never seen before, give you their unfiltered opinions of it.
So it's my turn and I'm standing next to my table, everything neatly lined up, and I'm just hoping that my professors can see how much effort I've put into making my designs practical and ergonomic and sustainable.
And I'm starting to get really nervous, because for a long time, no one says anything.
It's just completely silent.
And then one of the professors starts to speak, and he says, "Your work gives me a feeling of joy."
Joy?
I wanted to be a designer because I wanted to solve real problems.
Joy is nice, I guess, but it's kind of light -- not substantial.
But I was also kind of intrigued, because joy is this intangible feeling, and how does that come from the stuff on the table next to me?
I asked the professors, "How do things make us feel joy?
How do tangible things make us feel intangible joy?"
They hemmed and hawed and gestured a lot with their hands.
"They just do," they said.
I packed up my things for the summer, but I couldn't stop thinking about this question ...
and this launched a journey -- one that I didn't know at the time would take me 10 years -- to understand the relationship between the physical world and the mysterious, quixotic emotion we call "joy."
And what I discovered is that not only are they linked, but that the physical world can be a powerful resource to us in creating happier, healthier lives.
After my review, I thought, "I know what joy feels like, but what is it, exactly?"
And I found that even scientists don't always agree, and they sometimes use the words "joy" and "happiness" and "positivity" more or less interchangeably.
But broadly speaking, when psychologists use the word joy, what they mean is an intense, momentary experience of positive emotion -- one that makes us smile and laugh and feel like we want to jump up and down.
And this is actually a technical thing.
That feeling of wanting to jump up and down is one of the ways that scientists measure joy.
It's different than happiness, which measures how good we feel over time.
Joy is about feeling good in the moment, right now.
And this was interesting to me because as a culture, we are obsessed with the pursuit of happiness, and yet in the process, we kind of overlook joy.
So this got me thinking: Where does joy come from?
I started asking everyone I knew, and even people I just met on the street, about the things that brought them joy.
On the subway, in a café, on an airplane, it was, "Hi, nice to meet you.
What brings you joy?"
I felt like a detective.
I was like, "When did you last see it?
Who were you with?
What color was it?
Did anyone else see it?"
I was the Nancy Drew of joy.
(Laughter) And after a few months of this, I noticed that there were certain things that started to come up again and again and again.
They were things like cherry blossoms and bubbles ...
swimming pools and tree houses ...
hot air balloons and googly eyes -- (Laughter) and ice cream cones, especially the ones with the sprinkles.
These things seemed to cut across lines of age and gender and ethnicity.
I mean, if you think about it, we all stop and turn our heads to the sky when the multicolored arc of a rainbow streaks across it.
And fireworks -- we don't even need to know what they're for, and we feel like we're celebrating, too.
These things aren't joyful for just a few people; they're joyful for nearly everyone.
They're universally joyful.
And seeing them all together, it gave me this indescribably hopeful feeling.
The sharply divided, politically polarized world we live in sometimes has the effect of making our differences feel so vast as to be insurmountable.
And yet underneath it all, there's a part of each of us that finds joy in the same things.
And though we're often told that these are just passing pleasures, in fact, they're really important, because they remind us of the shared humanity we find in our common experience of the physical world.
But I still needed to know: What is it about these things that makes them so joyful?
I had pictures of them up on my studio wall, and every day, I would come in and try to make sense of it.
And then one day, something just clicked.
I saw all these patterns: round things ...
pops of bright color ...
symmetrical shapes ...
a sense of abundance and multiplicity ...
a feeling of lightness or elevation.
When I saw it this way, I realized that though the feeling of joy is mysterious and elusive, we can access it through tangible, physical attributes, or what designers call aesthetics, a word that comes from the same root as the Greek word "aísthomai," which means, "I feel," "I sense," "I perceive."
And since these patterns were telling me that joy begins with the senses, I began calling them "Aesthetics of Joy"; the sensations of joy.
And in the wake of this discovery, I noticed something that as I walked around, I began spotting little moments of joy everywhere I went -- a vintage yellow car or a clever piece of street art.
It was like I had a pair of rose-colored glasses, and now that I knew what to look for, I was seeing it everywhere.
It was like these little moments of joy were hidden in plain sight.
And at the same time, I had another realization, that if these are the things that bring us joy, then why does so much of the world look like this?
(Laughter) Why do we go to work here?
Why do we send our kids to schools that look like this?
Why do our cities look like this?
And this is most acute for the places that house the people that are most vulnerable among us: nursing homes, hospitals, homeless shelters, housing projects.
How did we end up in a world that looks like this?
We all start out joyful, but as we get older, being colorful or exuberant opens us up to judgment.
Adults who exhibit genuine joy are often dismissed as childish or too feminine or unserious or self-indulgent, and so we hold ourselves back from joy, and we end up in a world that looks like this.
But if the aesthetics of joy can be used to help us find more joy in the world around us, then couldn't they also be used to create more joy?
I spent that last two years scouring the planet, looking for different ways that people have answered this question.
And this led me to the work of the artist Arakawa and the poet Madeline Gins, who believed that these kinds of environments are literally killing us.
And so they set out the create an apartment building that they believed would reverse aging.
And this is it.
(Laughter) (Applause) It's a real place, just outside Tokyo.
I spent a night there, and it's a lot.
(Laughter) The floors undulate, so you don't end up walking around so much as kind of bouncing around the apartment, and there are bright colors in every direction.
I'm not sure I left any younger, but it's as if, by trying to create an apartment that would make us feel youthful, they ended up creating one that was joyful.
And yes, this is a bit much for everyday life, but it made me wonder: What about the rest of us?
How do we bring these ideas back into the real world?
So I started finding people who were doing just that.
For example, this hospital, designed by the Danish artist Poul Gernes.
Or these schools, transformed by the non-profit Publicolor.
What's interesting is that Publicolor has heard from school administrators who say that attendance improves, graffiti disappears and kids actually say they feel safer in these painted schools.
And this aligns with research conducted in four countries, which shows that people working in more colorful offices are actually more alert, more confident and friendlier than those working in drab spaces.
Why would this be the case?
Well, as I started to trace back our love of color, I found that some researchers see a connection to our evolution.
Color, in a very primal way, is a sign of life, a sign of energy.
And the same is true of abundance.
We evolved in a world where scarcity is dangerous, and abundance meant survival.
So, one confetto -- which happens to be the singular of confetti, in case you were wondering -- (Laughter) isn't very joyful, but multiply it, and you have a handful of one of the most joyful substances on the planet.
The architect Emmanuelle Moureaux uses this idea in her work a lot.
This is a nursing home she designed, where she uses these multicolored spheres to create a feeling of abundance.
And what about all those round things I noticed?
Well, it turns out neuroscientists have studied this, too.
They put people into fMRI machines, and they showed them pictures of angular objects and round ones.
And what they found is that the amygdala, a part of the brain associated in part with fear and anxiety, lit up when people looked at angular objects, but not when they looked at the round ones.
They speculate that because angles in nature are often associated with objects that might be dangerous to us, that we evolved an unconscious sense of caution around these shapes, whereas curves set heather68@example.net.
You can see this in action in the new Sandy Hook Elementary School.
After the mass shooting there in 2012, the architects Svigals + Partners knew that they needed to create a building that was secure, but they wanted to create one that was joyful, and so they filled it with curves.
There are waves running along the side of the building, and these squiggly canopies over the entryway, and the whole building bends toward the entrance in a welcoming gesture.
Each moment of joy is small, but over time, they add up to more than the sum of their parts.
And so maybe instead of chasing after happiness, what we should be doing is embracing joy and finding ways to put ourselves in the path of it more often.
Deep within us, we all have this impulse to seek out joy in our surroundings.
And we have it for a reason.
Joy isn't some superfluous extra.
It's directly connected to our fundamental instinct for survival.
On the most basic level, the drive toward joy is the drive toward life.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you.
Thank you, thank you.
(Applause)