It was only fairly recently I came to the realisation that I was chronically lonely. Granted, there are a few of you out there that I do consider friends that I have met online, but I’ve never had many real life friends. Those that I organically picked up through school or college now have lives of their own and drifted away.
As a defence mechanism for more than a decade I convinced myself I didn’t need people anyway.
The importance of having something that you can fully focus on and forget the world for a bit is becoming more and more obvious to me. Perhaps it is because the world sucks and the moment, and there is always some kind of bad news just around the corner. Or maybe it’s just that I am struggling more than I ever thought possible, but I just need to switch off for a while and not feel bad about it.
Starting this post took longer to work out than almost any post I have written. Where do you start when the subject you want to talk about is so devastating, but still important to think about. I guess fair warning, this post could upset some people as it discusses children passing away.
I can’t even imagine the feelings that our friends feel every year their little boy’s birthday comes around. They have suffered the worst thing to happen to any parent and had two of their children pass away.
Seth Godin writing about things being good:
Not that good for who? If you mean to say, “I don’t like it, it doesn’t appeal to me,” then that’s what you should say.
If, on the other hand, you have enough expertise and domain knowledge to say, “I understand what has appealed to the audience you’re trying to serve, and this isn’t going to work.”
Weird that this post should come up when I am consuming more tech reviews than I think I have ever done.
When I was younger, I had to go with my grandad to church. He was, what I used to think of as a hardcore Christian, that was until I had been exposed to Americans. He never missed a service, and I hated going.
All the excuses I could think of were saved up for the weekend to try to get out of it. I honestly despised going with every fiber of my being.
I guess one of the things you realise when you have kids, or you’re around a lot of them, is that they all have weird obsessions. You expect the usual superheroes, or horses or fire engines, but my daughter is obsessed with shoes!
She just loves them, and I have no idea where it has come from. Granted, she is disabled, but since she could crawl around, she always had a shoe nearby.
Since moving to a new domain and trying to put all the things I create together online, I’ve been feeling a bit of pressure. Granted, completely self-imposed, but a very real tinge of anxiety to be better at what I publish there. A noble pursuit but one that’s made me feel down.
Before I discuss these worries, let’s take a step back a bit and be honest. I’m playing pretend. In a world of writers, photographers and all around publishing masters — I’m not even small fry and the framing of this is important when discussing these types of worries.
There is no getting away from my love of photography and cameras. My favourite thing in the world is going somewhere, anywhere, and just wondering around pointing my lens at things. The simple act of doing so is like mediation to me, and nothing thing else comes close.
Occasionally, I shoot loads, sometimes I don’t. Occasionally, I get things I am happy with, more often they all go in the bin.
Damon Beres writing for The Atlantic:
In a market generally defined by boring hunks of plastic, Apple gained an edge through impeccable design that was actually less functional than most of the competition.
The iPhone got its foot hood in the market because it was Apple. They designed and presented it in a way that was theirs, and no one else could come close to the pull they had.
Each year, when the new iPhone is released, I feel the same emotions that I experienced the year before. The iPhone takes up a weird position in my life where I both want it and don’t want it at the same time. Unfortunately, I can’t open a box and remove the device from its unknown position.
I first observed this with the iPhone 12, but the new iPhone 14 pro has taken this to a whole new level.