On the absurdity of life.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
— Albert Camus.
I used to have this little fantasy.
I’d go to a bookstore and order an espresso. I’d browse around the displays and imagine my book up at the front, plastered in blurbs.
It’s been a good ten years since I used to…
You don’t need school.
I was a terrible student.
My kindergarten teacher told my parents I would end up working in a strip club one day. She didn’t know the average stripper probably earned a lot more than she did, and was probably a lot happier.
Most of my teachers hated me, because I…
It’s time to slow down.
In late 2019, I had a premonition.
I was walking around one of those palatial grocery stores after reading an article about the sixth great extinction we’re in the middle of. It was the kind of store with a sushi bar, a Starbucks, and a deli that sold rotisserie chickens…
We don’t want to be special.
There’s zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.
— Susan Cain
One night my friend told me to shut up.
He said it just like this:
“Would you shut up? I mean, Jesus...”
He went on to explain how painful it was to hear me…
At least, not how we think.
My grandpa was a war hero. He drove a tank during WWII. Nazis tried to kill him, but lung cancer finished the job. My grandma died before I was born, from a blood clot. I never really got to know either them.
It was my grandpa’s second wife who screwed…
An essay about help and privileges.
Here’s something I’ve noticed:
Self-help authors tend to overlook or downplay the help they’ve gotten. Or they write about the importance of help, with the assumption that it’s always going to be there for them.
I remember reading Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis. Like millions of women out…
The price of complacent optimism.
I’ve got an uncle who throws trash on the road. He laughs about it. He thinks it’s funny. “It’s like a free road map.” He sincerely believes he can recognize his own trash, and use it to navigate back roads where he lives. …
Meet the world’s most liquid asset.
There’s one thing worth more than any form of money.
It’s more valuable than any kind of asset or commodity. If you live in the developed world, you never think about it.
You take it for granted.
We’re talking about the one thing we can’t survive without, and yet we…
It will be our undoing.
We suck.
I’ll give you an example:
Today I read yet another article about coronavirus variants that keep popping up, each one with mutations that let them escape immunity and reinfect people. Every article includes a variation of this:
“It’s not an immediate threat.”
This is the interesting thing about…
It sounds pretty good these days.
When I was a kid, there was this famous motivational speaker named Matt Foley. When you did something wrong, he showed up to give you life advice. If you didn’t get it together, you’d wind up like him:
Living in a van down by the river.
There’s this one sketch…
