Capitalism pushes us towards private affluence. We aspire to acquire our own things. Shared things are seen as second best, something of an inconvenience.

All of these obstacles are your life, and it would be a shame to not be happy while experiencing each of them.

Insane wealth doesn’t insulate children from the harshness of the world around them. Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean your life is going to be good, or even easy. The key to making any relationship last is making an effort. What does making an effort look like? Remembering things about people, reaching out to them regularly, letting them know you care. I’ve become a big fan of phone calls.

For myself, when I read this many years from now. I woke up and Miranda had decorated the kitchen with giant 3-foot shiny golden balloons: 40! There was an incredibly lovely cake from Sparrow Bakery and cards that made me cry both from her and from Ruby. Ruby is just 2 years old. She’s so […]

you will learn that your dad is an optimist, and I know you are reading this from a better moment.

Today I realized this day that caused me pain for all of my life is now a day of celebration. I feel relieved. I feel happy.

Thank you for 2^21 subscribers. Store: http://3b1b.co/store ↓↓Links to things discussed below ↓↓ The Bit Player https://thebitplayer.com/ The Idea Factory https://amzn.to/325PY6W The Information, A History, A Theory, A Flood https://amzn.to/2QhfUtR You can read about Lorenz in "Chaos", also by James Gleick https://amzn.to/3tcXtVF Anthropocene reviewed https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/anthropocene-reviewed Hardcore history https://www.dancarlin.com/ The Numberphile podcast https://www.numberphile.com/podcast Recent Quanta article on the eigenvector discovery https://www.quantamagazine.org/neutrinos-lead-to-unexpected-discovery-in-basic-math-20191113/ Channel supported by http://3b1b.co/thanks ------------------ Animations on this channel are largely made using manim, a scrappy open source python library. https://github.com/3b1b/manim If you want to check it out, I feel compelled to warn you that it's not the most well-documented tool, and it has many other quirks you might expect in a library someone wrote with only their own use in mind. Music by Vincent Rubinetti. Download the music on Bandcamp: https://vincerubinetti.bandcamp.com/a... Stream the music on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/1dVyjw... If you want to contribute translated subtitles or to help review those that have already been made by others and need approval, you can click the gear icon in the video and go to subtitles/cc, then "add subtitles/cc". I really appreciate those who do this, as it helps make the lessons accessible to more people. ------------------ 3blue1brown is a channel about animating math, in all senses of the word animate. And you know the drill with YouTube, if you want to stay posted on new videos, subscribe: http://3b1b.co/subscribe Various social media stuffs: Website: https://www.3blue1brown.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/3blue1brown Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/3blue1brown Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/3blue1brown... Patreon: https://patreon.com/3blue1brown Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/3blue1brown

Running is the simplest of sports: right foot, left foot, right foot. But the simplicity opens up complexity. I traveled to the Philippines to bury him. In his bedroom, I found a poem I'd written in the second grade about watching him run down the Queensboro Bridge. Perhaps his praise was an attempt to reverse the way his father had treated him. Still, what more can a child ask than that their parents have faith in them? Sometimes I think that everything in life would be easier if I just put my shoes away. But more often I think the opposite. With a stressful job, it's helpful to have just a little bit of time where you force yourself to go outside and breathe. And I've come to believe that discipline in one part of my life makes it easier to have discipline in another part of life.

I never asked her what she gave up to drive me, or how her day was before this chore.

I honestly don’t know. All I know is that once an estranged parent dies, there’s often little left but second guesses. My life in many ways has been defined in opposition to my father. It’s a story I’ve heard from others with an estranged parent.

What comes to mind when you read the word “graph”? Graph paper? Graphing calculator? High school math homework? Unfortunately, the word is overloaded with meaning, and none of the above are what a mathematician usually means when they say “a graph." They mean something like this.

kids just take it in stride. They’re constantly collecting new and surprising information, processing it, and promptly moving on with their new reality. ​ But being asked to explain each change to a 3 year old helps me feel ready to move on with each new reality.

Two diametrically opposed perspectives of the world. And both were both true.

This past year has been spent trying to figure out how to stop chasing things endlessly – in work, in accolades, in likes, in what others have that I also want but that maybe I can’t quite explain why I want. To be confident in knowing that whatever comes, will come.

and I’d tell them stories about Jane. I pictured her scooping them into her arms. “She’d have eaten you up like English muffins,” I told them. ​ They showed Jane the photograph—she couldn’t really see by that point, but Denise says she knew, she knew, she saw, she knew, she heard, she smiled—and then she died. She knew, she heard, she knew.

And the cat went back to being our pet. ​ and cats and books were my best friends when I was growing up. ​ These questions—along with that of how the cat beat us home—are still unanswered. Another memory of my father is this: ​ I should explain a little about my father’s background. ​ Things he never could have written in his letters, or they wouldn’t have made it past the censors, he put into the form of haiku—expressing himself in a symbolic code, as it were—where he was able to honestly bare his true feelings. ​ Yet he must have felt a compelling need to relate the story to his son, his own flesh and blood, even if this meant that it would remain an open wound for both of us. ​ is breathe the air of the period we live in, ​ I understand all the more now why he closed his eyes and devoutly recited the sutras every morning of his life. ​ Still, that solitary raindrop has its own emotions, its own history, its own duty to carry on that history. Even if it loses its individual integrity and is absorbed into a collective something. Or maybe precisely because it’s absorbed into a larger, collective entity.

A story about the distances technology fails to bridge.

I’d put something on my weekly to-do list, and it’d roll over, one week to the next, haunting me for months. ​ In a marked shift from the generations before, millennials needed to optimize ourselves to be the very best workers possible. ​ I took piano lessons for fun, not for my future. ​ We didn’t think our first job was important; it was just a job and would eventually, meanderingly lead to The Job. But these students were convinced that their first job out of college would not only determine their career trajectory, but also their intrinsic value for the rest of their lives. ​ Things that should’ve felt good (leisure, not working) felt bad because I felt guilty for not working; things that should’ve felt “bad” (working all the time) felt good because I was doing what I thought I should and needed to be doing in order to succeed. ​ And when we don’t feel the satisfaction that we’ve been told we should receive from a good job that’s “fulfilling,” balanced with a personal life that’s equally so, the best way to convince yourself you’re feeling it is to illustrate it for others. ​ Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.” ​ One of the ways to think through the mechanics of millennial burnout is by looking closely at the various objects and industries our generation has supposedly “killed.” ​ At least in its contemporary, commodified iteration, self-care isn’t a solution; it’s exhausting. ​ That’s one of the most ineffable and frustrating expressions of burnout: It takes things that should be enjoyable and flattens them into a list of tasks, intermingled with other obligations that should either be easily or dutifully completed. The end result is that everything, from wedding celebrations to registering to vote, becomes tinged with resentment and anxiety and avoidance. Maybe my inability to get the knives sharpened is less about being lazy and more about being too good, for too long, at being a millennial. ​ or take refuge in avoidance as a way to get off the treadmill of our to-do list. ​ It’s not a problem I can solve, but it’s a reality I can acknowledge, a paradigm through which I can understand my actions.

I love a good secret. More to the point, I love a good surprise. Seeing the excitement and joy that people feel when you give them good news? The best…

it's just so much easier for us to broadcast our love now. ​ He is ambivalent about the medium of social photography, arguing that the technology is only a tool that exposes existing fractures in the community and the self. ​ As Jean Baudrillard predicted in the middle of the 20th century, the camera went from changing the way we remember to changing the way we see. ​ To my son and daughters, when you read this one day: I see you and I love you with that eye too.

and I have so many things I want to show you.

We can be all of these things as we grow into adulthood, but I experienced them so much differently as a father, watching my girls live them. ​ I'm not sure how thinking about this distinction will affect future me. I hope that it will help me to appreciate everyone in my life, especially my daughters and my wife, a bit more for who they are and who they have been. Maybe it will even help me be more generous to 2019 me.

who did our laundry, cleaned our apartment, paid for our groceries and more.

As a writer, the question of worth is still one that plagues me. Today’s existential anxiety attack was set off by missing the compost drop off bc I was working on an essay. Not a solicited essay, one I want to write so I am (hopefully it'll be published but who knows) Especially on days when I’m not earning $, I put great stock in doing chores. Since I can’t contribute $ to the family, at least I can do the dishes, make dinner, dust, etc. This in part stems from my working class upbringing. And perhaps the masculine stereotype of “providing” So when I missed the compost drop off, I had a moment of absolute panic and an irrational dip of self-esteem. I had one job to do! Dropping off the goddamn compost. If I can't do that, then what good am I? As a partner, a dad, a human being. It got BIG real fast. Is it writing if it never gets published? Is it really work if I'm not being paid for it? I keep telling myself yes, hang in there, it’ll all work out, but some days I feel like I’m just mouthing the words and I don’t really believe them. Today has been one of those.

People will tell you where they've gone They'll tell you where to go But till you get there yourself  You never really know -Joni Mi...

“After a good year of planning the move, I am rewarded with the pleasure of walking my daughter to school almost every day of the week. We bump into other kids across grades on the stroll through the neighborhood to the school. Sometimes, she wants me to stay an extra second after the bell rings; other times, she runs into a buddy on the playground and waves at me that “she’s good” and I can go early. With so much of our collective work inputs driven by luck (which is derived from sacrifice and hard work), this new little morning tradition I have now in 2018 feels like the luckiest output in the world.”