black swan? black toilet.
an encounter with a public toilet and the collapse of all certainty
Jun 10, 2025
there are few moments in life that stop you dead in your tracks. a car crash. a proposal. a surprise black toilet in a public bathroom.
i don’t mean a vaguely dark toilet. i mean black as the void, as if someone glossy-painted a porcelain abyss and said, “yeah, this belongs in an airport chili’s.”
this toilet broke my brain.
because here’s the thing: you can’t tell if it’s clean. there’s no visual evidence. a white toilet may be disgusting, but at least it lets you know. it’s an honest fixture. the black toilet is a liar. it hides what you need to know under a cloak of luxury minimalism.
and this is when david hume bursts into the stall like the ghost of skepticism past.
why you can’t trust your butt’s gut
hume’s problem of induction goes like this: just because something has always happened in the past doesn't mean it will happen again. the sun rising. apples falling. sitting on a toilet and not catching a rash. none of these are guaranteed.
our brains like to take shortcuts. “every toilet i’ve sat on before has appeared clean, and i survived. therefore, this one is clean. i will survive.” inductive reasoning. lazy, useful, dangerous.
but the black toilet strips away the evidence that makes that shortcut possible. it’s not just that you don’t know it’s clean; it’s that you can’t. the color has obliterated the observable criteria. no stains, no shine, no suspicious spots. just a void. a pit of unknown probability. a schrödinger’s seat.
hume would have squatted and wept.
the false promise of color
black has long been the color of mystery, power, and upscale design. black coffee. black turtlenecks. black credit cards. but a toilet? it betrays the basic contract between sitter and seat: show me the danger.
we associate white with cleanliness not because it is clean, but because it can’t hide when it’s not. it’s functional transparency. it signals honesty: “what you see is what you sit.”
the black toilet weaponizes design against information. it’s aesthetic gaslighting. it says, “trust me,” while simultaneously obscuring every reason you would.
this isn't a toilet. it’s a philosophical dilemma squatting in the hygiene aisle.
cleanliness as performance
let’s zoom out.
what is “clean,” really? is it a state of being or a performance of perception? if no one sees the grime, does it matter? public bathrooms thrive on the illusion of sanitary order. bleach smell = clean. shiny tile = clean. no eye contact = safe.
but a black toilet disrupts that equation. it’s a luxury object pretending to be functional. it’s a status symbol from the dark dimension of interior design. and in doing so, it reveals how much of our sense of cleanliness is not about hygiene, but about signal. white tells us it’s safe because it makes danger visible. black says nothing at all and expects you to trust it anyway.
this is not unlike the internet. dark mode everything. hidden metadata. a clean, frictionless interface disguising the chaotic sludge underneath.
the black toilet is the dark web.
a toilet, a thought experiment
so what do you do? you’re standing there, pants half-down, facing the mystery throne.
you can’t know if it’s clean. you have no tools for certainty. all past experience is irrelevant. you are trapped in a moment of unknowing, and the only way forward is faith, instinct, or highly risky empiricism.
this is pascal’s wager with less theology and more bacteria.
hover and your quads burn. sit and you gamble. clean the seat with a wad of toilet paper and realize you're now trusting that the toilet paper is clean. it’s epistemological turtles all the way down.
and somewhere, david hume is laughing. because the whole point of the black toilet is that you don’t know—you can’t know—and yet you must choose.
like all good philosophy, it’s both utterly useless and urgently practical.
the final flush
the black toilet is more than a color choice. it’s a paradox in porcelain. a sensory and epistemological prank. it invites us to confront what we believe about the world and how much of that belief is just habit, hope, and hygienic theater.
will i sit on one again? probably. i’ve made worse decisions with less philosophical justification.
but i’ll never trust it.