A simple life
I’ve been sad lately. It seems every day I’m bombarded with reminders of how ugly the world can be.
The older I get, the more I see how frivolous the things we worry about everyday — work, money, what celeb is dating who.
I often think about the times I was rich but felt poor.
I often think about the times I was poor but felt rich.
On my days off, I sometimes do absolutely nothing. I watch some Youtube. I chat with my wife. I lounge around. And it’s glorious how very little those things above mattered.
In times like this, I just want to disappear from the world and wander in my own little bubble.
Away from the need to document every little thing I’ve deemed cool on Instagram, in the hopes it will get me new customers.
Away from the endless arguments on Twitter (Sorry, X) and threads.
Away from the feeling I have that I need to keep up with celebrity, fashion trends, and what slang kids 30 years younger than me are using.
I would wake up without an alarm and have a slow morning. I’ll throw a cashmere coat over my hoodie and head out for coffee and a croissant.
Sometimes I’ll walk it back home. Sometimes I’ll sit there for 2 hours.
I’ll spend the day walking around, observing the world. I’ll sit with my sketchbook and fountain pen, and record the feeling I see in the form of a drawing.
I’ll come back home and walk my wife through my illustrated day.
We’ll make dinner and invite friends over.
Sometimes the dinner will last an hour. Sometimes we’ll all sit around for 4.
When everyone is gone, we’ll curl up on the couch and fall asleep to some nostalgic horror movie.
On days when I’m sad, I try to remember how little I really need to make me happy.
Gratitude
I want to write so much about my Paris trip but I think I need more time to process.
I do want to share something I wrote in my journal today about it:
“I'm so happy that I get to do this for a living. I want to remember to practice so much gratitude for things I get in my life.
I keep trying to remind myself that life is so so short, and people rarely get to experience the things I get to experience.
And that it's such a rare rare rare thing to get everything you want in life.
And I feel like I constantly get it.
My person. My work. My success. I'm so lucky.”
It’s easier to be honest
My wife has been watching the Bernie Madoff doc on Netflix. The bit that stood out to me was his confession. It became too much to keep up the scam.
I can only imagine the level of stress and anxiety that comes from being a fraud.
It reminds me of that saying, “If you tell the truth, you only have to remember one story.”
It’s just so much easier to be an honest person. (And much more peaceful.)
For Phil
My wife and I passed by a house with flowers tied to the fence on our walk home yesterday. As we got closer, my wife started tearing up.
They were condolences for a man named Phil.
I’ve known Phil for the past 5 years but didn’t realize it.
He was the nameless old man my wife talked about whenever she came back from work or one of her daily walks.
He sat outside his brownstone on his chair, striking up conversations with anyone that walked by.
His chair was still there.
Sat atop it a bouquet of flowers and a card that read “For Phil.”
Another bouquet of flowers tied to the gate had a card with a child’s handwriting on it. It read:
“Thanks for all the toys you gave me.”
The rest of our walk home we talked about what it means to be a human.
What kind of impact are we having around the people we interact with.
What kind of impact does the work we do have?
Phil seemed to have it figured out.
Easy mode
“Exoneration” was one of my favorite takeaways from Phil Stut’z book “The Tools.”
There’s a tremendous desire in our culture to be exonerated. We think we can reach a point where we’re famous or rich enough to not have to work on ourselves anymore and everything will be perfect. This is an insane joke. There are three laws of the universe: there will always be pain; there will always be uncertainty; and life will always require effort. Anybody that says you can be exonerated from these laws is lying.
It reminded me a lot of something I used as a kid called “The Gameshark.” (A successor to the 8/16-bit era Game Genie.)
It was a device you would plug into your Playstation that would allow you to “hack” any game with cheat codes.
Hate running out of bullets? Give yourself unlimited ammo!
Stuck on a level? Skip to the end!
Tired of dying? Now you have infinite health.
I wanted exoneration from the struggle of the game.
But after a few weeks, The Game Shark started collecting dust.
It turns out making video games extremely easy also made them extremely boring.
Funny, isn’t it?
On avoiding the algorithm
I've been using social media again after a break and it reminded me of this quote:
“Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared he's supposed to be.” - Duncan Trussell
Pick your hard
The grass is always greener where you water it.
You can rent a huge house in Ohio for the cost of a NYC studio. (But then you’d miss out on exhibits at The MET, the best shopping in the world, diverse people cooking diverse food, bodegas, and bodega cats, among a few things.)
Marriages are challenging. But so is being single and constantly going on first dates.
A lot of my friends complain about their jobs while I tell them “Having a job is so much easier than running your own business.”
The truth is, everything is hard.
The trick is finding the hard you’re willing to put up with.