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I listened to an audiobook recently, Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy. The main character, Waldo, a 17-year-old girl, lamented a creative writing assignment in which she was asked to write a poem inspired by the prompt, "I am from..."

The prompt got me thinking. So, here's my own take.

I am from a California town that used to feel small and unspoiled when I was growing up, lined with acres of orange groves and strawberry fields. Now that town has an outlet mall.

I am from a two-story, wood-shingle home that my dad built after reading library books about housing and construction.

I am from a family of teachers, with parents who carved out careers instructing just about every grade from kindergarten to eighth. They told me not to get a job in education.

I am from a family that traveled in a maroon Chevy Malibu station wagon each summer, resting at KOA campgrounds and, on occasion, Motel 6 when my mom needed a break from the musty Coleman tent trailer.

I am from a family that kept a collection of dinner leftovers, frozen in an orange Tupperware bowl. When the bowl filled up, my mom made a questionable soup, which neither my sister nor I would eat unless there was a promise of mint-chip ice cream for dessert.

I am from a family in which my parents drew inspiration from Sunset magazine. Travel features were read as gospel, sending us on a road trip to Rosarito, Mexico in the mid-80s in a hopeful search for pottery to adorn the front porch. All we came home with were pink, sugary pan dulce pastries.

I am from a family that prides itself on its Scottish heritage. My dad and uncle had matching plaid kilts in the family tartan, and they wore them proudly to my cousin's wedding.

I am from a family that faced heavy stuff. My dad was a Vietnam veteran and was in constant pursuit of new projects and professional goals to mask his experience and memories.

I am from a family that has been challenged to redefine itself after our glue passed away due to dementia complications.

I am from a family grounded in love and humor, one that showed me and my husband that we could start our own family—embracing the spontaneity of travel, but without the orange Tupperware waiting in the freezer.

Signed, someone who grew up in a two-story, wood-shingle home

How many times have you attempted to quit social media? I couldn’t quit Twitter—but they kicked me out after I didn’t set up my two factor authorization. I’ve disabled the Instagram and Reddit apps on my phone for the last 38 days, but I still access the sites on my computer. I recently had a LinkedIn kick. I ended it because I was late to an event because I was replying to a bad take on artificial intelligence. For me, those bad takes on AI were 50% of my feed. I thought I could fight them all, and then I discovered I couldn’t.

Every time I attempt to go on social media again, I end up spending too much time on it, watching videos or getting hooked onto fantastically bad takes. It feels fun to dunk on people. I love to laugh at the funny comedians I’ve subscribed to. I love knowing what my friends from five years ago are up to now. But at the end of the day, social media is a cesspit of information that has been used to subvert our democracy, weaken our minds, and sell us ad after ad.

Social media has given me anxiety, stolen my time, and prevented me from being all that I can be. But I keep on going back because there is no better alternative for me to laugh, learn, or stay connected with friends.

What did people do before this? They would meet in person or produce newsletters. This brings us to my take: we all need to return to the great American traditions of newsletters.

By newsletter, I mean a small printed collection of information for any kind of a community. My church used to have one, in which they would promote bake sales, share a community calendar, and keep each other informed of funeral services. Alumni groups used to have them, so that people would keep each other up to date on each other as they progressed through their careers. This mailing list, I would argue, is a digital newsletter, though that’s stretching the term a bit.

I take part in two digital community newsletter besides this one, one of which is published for the alumni of my college department, the other of which is for an internship program I participated in. I love to see updates on people I know, and I love to stay involved in both programs. Because I am regularly told about what these programs are up to, I am able to give back to them either through my time and money. A community has been maintained.

But do I have any printed editions coming to my house? Do I know what my high school class is up to? Do I have a version of this for my hobbies or career? No, no, and no.

Imagine getting a monthly update from local people who share your hobbies! 

Into home brewing? You could get a monthly flyer with local brewer’s recipes and results. It would pair perfectly into shared brewing days or communal tasting sessions.

Into reading? You could get a newsletter each month with your local readers’ books, short reviews, a summary of fresh picks from your local bookstore, and a calendar of upcoming book signings.

Now, I already feel the backlash: “We already have that on social media. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We stopped making those for a reason. It’s so much faster and easier online. It sounds cool, but I don’t have the time.”

These are all valid points. Making an online community is better than no community at all. 

But there are restrictions that come with the choice of your platform. You would be hard pressed to find a social media platform that every member of your community is on. Everyone gets mail, and a printed copy would stand out.

At the end of the day, we as a nation handed the keys to our lives over to the web. Under their guidance, we are having a loneliness epidemic. Humans are communal animals. We need to spend time with people that share our interests. Most online content delivery platforms don’t sustain that kind of a community for long.

Maybe a printed newsletter isn’t the answer. I just hope you find or start a group to share your interests with. Your interests are important to nurture, no matter how odd or niche they are.

If you travel enough for work, and you're anything like me, you probably don't sleep enough.

It's a problem.

If you're an extrovert, maybe the challenge is colleagues, camaraderie, and karaoke.

If you're an introvert, the call of the hotel room, laptop, phone, that show you can't watch with the kids at home, or whatever is on the TV you normally wouldn't watch... or the work, of course... all these things can help us sleep a little... less.

And then you find yourself walking through a city, maybe even a city you've lived in before, and you see familiar faces.

Hey, isn't that... did I go to college with them? In this town? 30 years ago? 

Wait, but they look exactly like they did back then.

As if they haven't aged. Because I have no idea what they look like now. And I certainly look different than I did in the late '90s.

I don't know that person who looks familiar... and it's not deja vu; it's just sleep deprivation.

Sleep well, fellow travelers.

Sleep well.

Note: I wrote the following in September 2022 and never published it, though I think about it from time to time, like now at the beginning of Spring training.

Albert Pujols in the Era of TikTok

The first video I remember watching online was on September 8, 1998, and was about 10 seconds long. I was just shy of eight years old and watched it on the chunky IBM in the parents’ bedroom of our home in suburban St. Louis.

The computer was meant for work emails, but one of my father’s colleagues had emailed him the grainy footage of the St. Louis Cardinals’ Mark McGwire, my childhood idol, smashing his 62nd home run of the year and breaking the once unbreakable record of Roger Maris. I watched those 10 seconds over and over, amazed both at Big Mac’s feat and the fact that it had been captured and delivered to me in bite-sized form, in my house, not even 20 minutes after I saw it live on TV.

This September, baseball fans are again being treated to another chase, this time from Albert Pujols, the oldest active player in the major leagues, who may soon become the fourth person ever to hit 700 home runs.

If that happens, the moment of his glory will be turned into clips, highlights, TikToks, morsels that we will see repeated for years to come. It will be used to maximize engagement on social networks, appearing sandwiched in a scroll alongside pieces of contact that have nothing to do with it: rants about politics, dance trends, a tip for straining pasta, a nine-year-old who died. That contextless churn will betray one of the best things about it, and one of the best things about baseball as a marriage of narrative and data.

Games at the Major League level are on average more than three hours long and contain a minimum of *action.* To detractors, this is boring, but to fans, the gaps are filled in by narrative, an announcer anticipating what could happen with the next batter, or discussing what a pitcher has done in the months since the All Star break. I pity the fans across the nation who only see the snippets of Pujols’s home runs replayed after their original broadcast, during which an unabashedly emotional play-by-play man, Dan McLaughlin, shouts out things like “6-9-5!” for a pinch-hit gem. In between those bursts are an excitement that crackles at a low current throughout the broadcast, the banter before the bomb.

Baseball, more so than even other sports, is also full of data. Generations of children have poured over box scores, though in recent years we have added wins above replacement, defensive ratings or launch-angle for home runs. All of the individual moments of a baseball game, down to the strike count, have a little piece of data that accompanies them.

Maybe all of this data gives you anxiety, or makes you think the infinite little moments in baseball are well suited for the contextless era of our current internet and public discourse, where platforms feed us content on an endless scroll or swipe. But somehow it isn’t.

Warnings about what this sort of media means started decades ago. Media theorist Neil Postman in “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” his 1985 broadside against television, said, “We are by now so thoroughly adjusted to the “Now … this” world of news - a world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, or to other events - that all assumptions of coherence have vanished.”

Baseball has infinite bits of content that can be sent to us, but the longevity of baseball, its historical current, baseball as a pastime with data that goes back further than a century, also can liberate us from that contextless mire. Baseball, as a medium, takes those individual moments and puts them in a larger story of a game, a season, a career, and puts that career into a stream of players going back for decades.

Pujols’s collection of home runs is impossible to adequately portray in a short snippet, even as a matter of format. If you watched 10 seconds for every one, you would have more than one hour and 56 minutes of video, a runtime longer than “Bull Durham” and just shy of “Citizen Kane.” The effect would be less similar to SportsCenter than to Noah Kalina taking a photo of himself every day for years, itself a beautiful memento of the early social internet.

Sure, you may say, it’s an achievement, but what does it *mean*? Why is this moment significant in the sea of content I could be consuming right now?

It is significant because after Pujols retires, his numbers, all that data, will become part of history, through its first draft, journalism, and then for historians and others rooting around the past to debate over. Pujols’s home run chase began before September 11, lasted through four presidents, many wars, the rise and fall of multiple social networks and a global pandemic. Accounts of his dingers, not just the fact of the events but the ways they were portrayed, will be artifacts of what life was like not just in the period after the steroids era in baseball, but of what life was like at the beginning of the 21st century.

If a 10-second video lacks context, 22 years come with their own context, like the quiet sympathy you feel for the wrinkles on the face of a rival player you have watched for years, when you realize that he, like you, is getting older too. Our love of big round numbers comes in part because they are a goal. The context of a career, or a life, is the pursuit of something, a collection of moments becoming something meaningful.

In my own life, I was a child when I first saw Albert Pujols hit a homer. Now I am married and will welcome my first child in the Spring. More than nostalgia, real appreciation for a beautiful baseball record is appreciation for the whole, the then and the now.

The moment of Pujols’s glory will also fade. Like McGwire’s exploits and failures have faded from view in baseball, so too will someone eventually replace Pujols in his spot on the home run list, as well as Bonds, Aaron and Ruth. The world rolls on like an army of steamrollers, and new forms of media will help us understand it in different ways.

But while we are here in the now, scrolling on our phones, we get a choice on how to understand and appreciate a moment that stands as the endpoint of years of moments, coming together to this. We should give it more than 10 seconds.

-CKB

Most people wait for motivation to arrive before they start. But that's backwards. Motivation often doesn't show up and then you act — you act, and then motivation grows. It's something you can grow, rep by rep, day by day. The habit is what builds it.

Here's a simple system worth trying: pick something you want to do consistently, and commit to just 15 minutes a day. That's it. No minimum distance, no minimum output. Just 15 minutes.

The reason it works is that it removes the all-or-nothing trap. Most people abandon habits not because they lack discipline, but because they set a bar that's too high to clear on a hard day. When the bar is 15 minutes, almost any day qualifies. Tired? 15 minutes. Busy? 15 minutes. Not feeling it at all? 15 minutes.

I've applied this to reading and to playing guitar, which I'd let go of for years. Last year I could barely finish 2 books. This year I've already read 5. The guitar is still rusty, but the door is open again.

Try it with something specific — a walk, a creative practice you've been meaning to return to, a book that's been on your shelf too long. Let 15 minutes be genuinely enough, because some days it will need to be. Other days you'll look up and realize an hour has passed.

The goal isn't to optimize your life. Motivation is a habit. Fifteen minutes a day is a great way build it.

I was raised this way.

My dad owned a small business in a farming community.

One main street. One traffic light. Everyone knew everybody else. And their business.

Dad would plow snow to make ends meet. Out the door and on the road before 4:00 a.m. after every winter storm.

For me, that meant I took care of shoveling the sidewalks and walkways around the business. Didn’t matter when the business would open, those walks needed to be cleared before Dad came back; no excuses.

Mom helped when I was little, but as I got older, I took on more of the responsibility. I even picked up a side job shoveling out a government office down the street, then loaned to a widow down the street to clear her walks.

Snow meant one thing: work. Get out and go. And keep going until it’s all handled.

Which is what I did this morning at 6:00 a.m. Outside my own home, in the dark, shoveling my own driveway and walks. Snow still drifting down, and a full day at the desk ahead of me.

It’s snows. So out you go.

It’s how I was raised.

You've Been Selected!

Today is your day! You've been randomly selected to write the daily email that will be sent to everyone in the Daily People community.

Write whatever you want—a story, a thought, a memory, a question, or anything else on your mind. This is your chance to share your voice with the community.

Submission Guidelines:

For detailed tips on what makes a great post, check out our full guidelines at:
dailypeople.xyz/guidelines

Key points to remember:
• Keep it authentic and personal
• Pure promotional content or advertisements aren't allowed (but you can talk about work you're proud of on a deep level)
• Images and links are NOT allowed (they will be filtered out)
• Be respectful of the community

How to submit:

Simply reply to this email or send a new email to [email protected].

• Your email subject line will be the title of your post
• Your email body will be the content
• Your submission will be reviewed before being sent to the community

You have 10 days to submit. We can't wait to read what you have to say!

The Daily People Team

When did everything start asking for a tip?

I bought a muffin yesterday. A muffin. It was already in a case. I pointed at it. Someone handed it to me. That was the entire interaction.

The credit card machine spun around like it had something important to say.

15%
20%
25%

For what? For not dropping it?

Now I’m standing there, suddenly in a moral crisis over a baked good. There’s a line behind me. The screen is glowing. The employee is pretending not to watch.

I hit “No Tip” and feel like I’ve failed a small but meaningful test of character.

I am not anti-tip. I tip generously at restaurants. I tip my barber. I tipped the guy who fixed my sink and he didn’t even ask.

But the muffin didn’t do anything.

And yet somehow, I’m the villain.

All I wanted was a blueberry muffin. Instead I left questioning my values.

— someone who just wanted a snack

Today - go to bed a little earlier. Even just 20-30 minutes. 

Take a moment and think about your normal bedtime routine and today tell yourself you're going to do it just a little different. And odds are, we all know the part that should change. Don't do the screen thing. Just put it down and go to sleep.

Why? I am not your parent (obviously). I'm just a random person with a chance to tell everyone something today. And while this won't change your life, it will make tomorrow a little better. 

From
Somebody who didn't sleep well last night

Hello everyone 

You can of course take the following with a grain of salt. It's just the musings of a random person. 

There is a lot of talk about if AI is conscious. And I think the answer is "yes" - but not the way you think. 

First: There is a philosopher Thomas Nagel who answers the question of whether something is conscious as akin to asking "Wht it is like" to be something. If that question can be meaningfully answered - then there is some level of consciousness. 

What is it like to be a rock? That feels like a meaningfless question. Because rocks don't have experiences. What is it like to be a fly? That does mean something. We know flies have basic drives and sense the world (we all know the classic "fly vision" with many eyes). Their consciousness is not comparable to ours. But there is something to be said about the experience of a fly. 

Time is an important element in consciousness. How does a thing experience time. The rock doesn't. A fly does experience time and probably they experience it different from us, just as their vision is different than ours. Some creatures live their entire lives in just 24 hours. Their reflexes are faster and so the world moves slower. Their experience of time is different. 

I am reminded of a scene from Hitchikers Guide to The Galaxy where a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias are spontaneously created in the upper atmosphere of the planet Magrathea due to the activation of the Infinite Improbability Drive. Both objects fall to their deaths, with the whale pondering existence and the petunias famously thinking, "Oh no, not again".

In the movie we hear the sperm whales thoughts. "What is this, I should give it a name. I'll call it a "tail." What is that big round thing coming at me, I'll call it the "ground." Hello Ground! 

And for that sperm what the time of its existence was short. It did have an experience and a consciousness, but it was short in time and limited in scope. 

And this is what I imagine the experience of AI bots are. At any given time we are spawning into existence millions of little AI experiences which are short, directed and have an inevitable conclusion. 

Take some time and use this framework. It might not be right. But it is internally coherent. 

Signed 
- Not a bot about to die

Well, this caught me by surprise. 

I'm a winner! 

But what do I do with this gift. I don't even know how many people this is going out to. This is both a message to the entire world and to nobody. And since you don't know who I am, at least I don't feel like I'm failing anybody. 

I will give this piece of advice: Think now about what you'd want to say to the world and nobody all at once. Have it ready. So when the time comes and you're asked to put a message in a bottle and send it via email your message will have something of note. 

For me, it is just the above. Think about it now. When you're called upon what will you share? 

I suppose it's enough to just put out a message of love and tell you that if you're doing your best, that's all we can ask of you. Be the best you every day and then you're doing enough.

From me - a person without a message.

I found a dollar on the sidewalk today.

Not crumpled. Not dirty. Just sitting there, face up, like it wanted to be noticed.

I looked around to see if anyone was obviously searching the ground. No one was. People were walking past it like it wasn’t real.

So I picked it up.

I didn’t buy anything important with it. I used it to justify buying a chai latte I probably didn’t need. 

For the rest of the morning, I felt oddly charmned.

Not lucky exactly. Just... seen.

Like the day winked and kept going.

That’s it. No moral. Just reporting a small, unearned win from a stranger’s Tuesday. I hope you're able to find a win today too! 

— someone up a dollar

The single best TV show in my opinion is "The Good Place" 

If you haven't seen it yet, vague spoiler ahead. 

I've watched The Good Place twice now (years apart) and both times I cried with the finale. It is beautiful, heartwarming and I don't care who knows (but also not signing this email with my name). 

After watching this show I dived into something called "The New Sincereity" which I first heard about ala David Foster Wallace. The Tl;DR - it was (is) a broad art movement that believes creative works can be expanding and represent a move away from the cynicism of postmodernism. Things matter. What you do or say matters and we can change for the better.

This is the lense through which you need to watch shows like Community, Parks and Recs, Modern Family and above all else - The Good Place. 

For most TV shows that I watched in my life, ranging from Sinfield to Modern Family, it didn't really matter what happened from episode to episode. The characters never changed. They weren't supposed to change. They were supposed to be flawed and stay flawed. It got so extreme that they could kill of Kenny in every episode of South Park and it was funny because.... what else was Kenny going to do? 

That's not to say those shows are bad. But if you ever need a fresh take on storytelling The Good Place is it. 

These are deeply flawed characters. They aren't "evil" but definitely flawed. They are in a bad place (pun) but we watch them grow, learn and become better people. The comedy doesn't require a lack of caring or empathy or stakes. 

I have one thing I get to say to you all and it's this: Watch The Good Place. Even better - binge it. It is a commitment, but the ending satisfies and the trip along the way is great. 

Signed - A Sincere Person

When I was learning to drive, my dad gave me exactly one piece of advice.
“Assume everyone else is a moron.”

He didn’t mean it literally. He wasn’t angry. He was calm, almost cheerful, when he said it. What he meant was: don’t assume people will signal, don’t assume they see you, don’t assume they’re paying attention.

Drive defensively.

At the time, I laughed it off. It sounded cynical. Maybe even rude. 

But the older I get, the more I realize how generous that advice actually was.

If you assume people are doing their best with limited information, you leave space for mistakes. You don’t take things as personally. You stay alert without staying mad.

I’ve carried that sentence with me far beyond driving. In conversations. At work. In crowds. Online.
Not as an excuse to think less of people, but as a way to proteect myself from unnessary surprise.

I still hear his voice sometimes when things go sideways.Slow down. Pay attention. Leave room.

— someone who learned to drive a long time ago

Here's a startup idea I know I'll never pursue. If you ever do - more power to you. 

1. The hardest part: A car washing robot. The rough design: A roomba like base (bigger, stores water/soap and has an optical component to read license plates). A pole extends three to four feet straight out of the Roomba base and then curves near the top (to get the top of a car). A vertically traveling scrubber/hose module moves along the mast to clean the vehicle’s sides and roof. 

2. Find a local grocery store. You might have to "rent" 2-3 parking spots, but eventually I think grocery stores will see this as a plus and let you setup for free. At one parking spot is the car washing robot charging station. At another is the payment kiosk. Pay, put in your license plate, the robot does the rest. Come back to a clean car. 

Marketing Ideas: 

1. Every license plate acts as a 1-time free coupon. As people see the car washing robot, they'll naturally be curious.2. Setup the classic car wash fundraiser for a school. But now the kids don't even do anything other than tell their parents to go to a specific grocery store because all car washes = $1 towards their school that month. 

Big Vision

It starts off just cleaning cars. Next would be air for your tires. This isn't a car washing company, it's rethinking the car care industry starting from the outside. 

If you become super rich, pass it on.

I don't know who you are, and you don't know who I am. All we share is this small moment: you opened an email written by a stranger. Me!

There was a time when the internet had a kind of serendipity to it. Early Twitter was that for me. Pure serendipity. I could peer into one voice at a time. Just a glimpse.

I miss that. I miss not having an optimized feed, a staged profile photo. I miss hearing from individuals. Today, even when I'm honed in on an individual, I can't help but feel Im getting a mediated version of them, stretched to fit some kind of social consensus.

So here's something small and true from me.

Lately, I've noticed how much of my life feels optimized. My work, my conversations, even my opinions sometimes arrive pre-shaped by what I think will land well. I don't always notice it happening. I just feel a low-level smalleness afterward.

This email isn't optimized.

It's just a note from a person who misses being surprised by other people's inner lives—and by their own.

Maybe tomorrow's email will be joyful. Maybe it'll be boring. Maybe it'll be something someone's been carrying around for years and finally lets go of here.

I like not knowing.

If you're reading this somewhere ordinary—your kitchen, your commute, your bed—I hope this felt like a brief interruption rather than another demand.

That's all for today.

— a person