March 6, 2022
Today I woke up at 9 am. I went on a jog right away. It was super beautiful out. Super sunny and warm, just lots of wind. The beach was full of people, I guess partly because it’s also Sunday. I got home and started making coffee. I went to the couch to read, only to find that I was getting a call and that it was from Owen! I thought maybe he might’ve made a mistake or something, since he hadn’t reached out to me like that in years. He said that he was house sitting in the neighborhood and asked if I wanted to meet up for coffee. I said sure, so we met up and grabbed a coffee then went down to the beach and sat. Then I gave him a tour of my place before going over to where he’s staying and hung out there for a while.
It was nice seeing him. It felt different than every other time, and I sorta get the feeling that that’s more to do with me. I’ve just felt a bit more comfortable in my skin lately. I don’t feel threatened as much I think. It’s the kinda thing I didn’t really notice I was doing before. It’s only lately that I suddenly notice the difference in myself, which sorta highlights just how different I felt before. I think there’s a few factors to do with this. One may just be that I’m a little bit older, another being that I saw and talked with Miranda at the Fox and that totally took a weight off my shoulder. Another factor might be to do with the website. I think that’s had a big impact on me. It’s sorta amazing the things I feel I’ve learned just by building it. At first, it was just cool to kinda be able to see like a digital analogy of myself. Because everything is organized by date, it does an interesting job of showing your development over time. It feels slightly more true than cherry picking what you want people to see. The other thing is that since the majority of what’s actually on the website is things I've made, versus day to day updates, it gives an idea of where my head was at, and what I was interested in. It’s sort of a way of being able to see the inside of my head. So that was really cool. It gave me this feeling of having a stronger sense of my identity. I could see the bigger picture of my life. I could get a really quick snapshot of who I am.
That was sorta just the beginning, because the next step was fine tuning all the little things, like fonts, buttons, placements of buttons, etc. This is the stuff I thought would just take a day or two, and once it was done I could go ahead and start focusing on the content.
What I soon found, however, was that when I did decide to spend some time on things like fonts, it had a pretty profound difference on the way I FELT while using the website. It didn’t necessarily make it any easier to navigate, but it absolutely had an influence on how I felt while using it. So that totally opened up a rabbit hole. The more I took it seriously and the more time I spent considering the feeling, the more I found that I was learning about myself and what it means to be human! I’ve been forced to REALLY consider why, say, a button is over here and not over there. It forces me to actually think about it, and not to decide until I have a reason that I can articulate. It’s getting to the point where someone can point to any section of the website and I can explain exactly why it’s the way it is.
That has turned out to be a pretty powerful system. It doesn't only apply to my website, I’ve found. It can apply to every and all aspects of my life. And it’s quite fun. It’s essentially the idea that before you start anything, you have a very solid foundation. I’ve been thinking of skyscrapers, and how every tall building needs an absolutely rock solid foundation from where everything else is built upon. The only way in which this analogy doesn’t quite fit, is that in life, you might want this foundation to be malleable. You might want it to be very good at adapting. It should work in the dimension of time, and with time comes change. So you don’t want it to be the sorta foundation that is enormously difficult to make changes to. You might want it to be built out of very strong rubber, or maybe even something like Lego bricks. Lego bricks are super strong, but they’re also super easy to reconfigure when necessary. I was also thinking of those floor matts that connect to one another like a jigsaw puzzle. In other words, the ability to change is built into the foundation from the very beginning. The ability to change and be nimble is given just as much consideration as the ability to be a strong and steady foundation for everything built on top.
So anyways, Owen and I talked about a lot of things, including were we kinda felt we were at, emotionally. I told him that the biggest anxiety in my life these days has to do with my physical location in the beaches. I have this incredible location and this amazingly cheap rent. I’m just so nervous that I’m robbing myself of interesting experiences by living so far from where things are happening.
His anxiety was sorta similar, in that he’s got a good job, a girlfriend, his health, but there’s this feeling of monotony beginning to creep in. He said it’s all just starting to feel kinda repetitive.
When we were at his place it was really interesting to talk about design. I showed him my website and asked for some advice. That’s the kinda stuff he’s super interested in, and the world that he works and goes to school for. One thing that I really took from that conversation was the idea of having that very solid foundation at the beginning of any project. He talked about how at his work, the very first thing they do when they get a client is write up a super detailed brief. He said it’s almost like interrogating the client, and that it’s super important that everyone knows the direction and the desired destination. It also just helps the creators tremendously, because they have this document that they can always refer to. Again, it reminds me of having that beautifully simple and clear instruction manual that comes with every Lego or IKEA product.
I find the idea of entrusting the job of assembly to the consumer to be powerful and beautiful. It’s such a subtle thing, but it checks so many boxes for me. For one thing, it’s super practical. Lego and IKEA can ship their products in smaller boxes, because they don’t need to figure out how to package the finished thing. They just package all the components. It also says something about how they feel about their customers. To me, it says that they trust their customer. They see them as being smart and intelligent. They believe that the consumer can accomplish perhaps the most important stage of the whole process, which is the final assembly. It’s a subtle thing, but it totally makes me feel, as a consumer, that I’m being treated with respect and that I’m not being talked down to.
Owen clearly spends a lot of time in that world, because he already knew all of this stuff and could articulate it really well right back to me. The part that he found a bit problematic, the thing most people have mentioned, is that at the end of the day the website doesn’t really communicate what its purpose is. People don’t really know what the point is. In some ways, that means I’ve succeeded, because up until now I kinda wanted people to have that feeling. I wanted people to find it beautiful, easy to use, and super straightforward but I also wanted them to be left with this sense of ‘what’s the point?’
The reason I like that is because to me it’s the feeling that I almost always arrive at when I look at the world around me. It sometimes feels like the harder I look, the more I pay attention and study the world around me, the more I see this beautiful complexity and variety that appears to be built upon a foundation of meaninglessness. I don’t mean that in a cold or depressing way. It just seems sorta confusing. And regardless of how it makes me feel, I figured that I should try to instill that feeling in the website.
So yah it was nice to talk about that stuff with Owen. It’s made me really wanna write down what I want this to be about.
The other thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is the bigger picture of all of this. I don’t want to do this just for me. I want other people to be able to experience what I’ve learned. It’s interesting to kinda learn how important it is to me that I have some sort of legacy. I want to leave an impact on the world. For most of my life I figured I would try to do that in the realm of art. I wanted to make stuff that last for hundreds of years. I wanted to be like a Leonardo Da Vinci. The only problem is that I also like leaving something behind that can actually help people in a more tangible way. For example, I sometimes wonder about the feelings that architects and engineers must feel after they’ve designed and built a bridge and they see the thousands and thousands of lives it impacts every day. That must be an incredibly powerful feeling. I remember watching a documentary about the original World Trade Center where the construction workers talked about the pride they felt knowing that they were building something that was important and was meant to stand for hundreds of years. They also talked about how when they fell, it was a bit like losing a child.
So anyways, that’s all to say that I like the idea of taking what I’ve learned and turning it into something that people can use. It would be similar to Lego, in that there’s a pretty clear destination, but you have to do all the assembly. It’s meant to be like a sort of education. You learn about the value of having values, and at the end of it, you actually have something you can use. The part I really love, the part that does not apply to Lego, is that everyones finished thing would look different. I was thinking about the human body, how at first glance we all look more or less identical. Two arms, two legs, a head, two eyes, etc. But once you get a little closer and do a little digging you suddenly find that we’re all different in unimaginable ways.
So I feel like something in that area could really satisfy me. I get to be artsy, since it deals with design, but I also get to offer something to the world. A tool that people can use to basically design an analogy of themselves, all the while discovering themselves in the process.