Canadian engineers graduating college are all given an iron ring. It's a symbol of professional responsibility to society. It also recognises that every discipline must earn its social license to operate. Lastly, it serves as a reminder of the consequences of shoddy work and corner-cutting.

I want to be a part of a frontend culture that accepts and promotes our responsibilities to others, rather than wallowing in self-centred "DX" puffery. In the hierarchy of priorities, users must come first.

What we do in the world matters, particularly our vocations, not because of how it affects us, but because our actions improve or degrade life for others. It's hard to imagine that culture while the JavaScript-industrial-complex has seized the commanding heights, but we should try.

And then we should act, one project at a time, to make that culture a reality.

I’m slowly introducing exercise back into my routine.

A few days ago, I unceremoniously added a feature to the front page of this blog which tracks the number of consecutive days that I did 100 sit ups.

It’s been hard, private work. There was a day last week I took the bus downtown, and I found myself needing to brace before we rounded a corner. Otherwise, my core throbbed.

I’m also adding running back to my routine. I’ve done a 4 mile loop every other day for a few weeks now. I’m still slow (9:10 pace?), and I’m still having to ice my knees at night.

But boy, I sure do feel grateful for the ability to get out there and pound the pavement!

A third thing I’ve been working on is my writing. I’ve been experimenting with blogging monthly recaps of my thoughts and whatnot that I collect in my journal, which feels useful to me, but not specifically the end game.

I’d love to turn all this writing into something useful. Like writing lyrics or poems.

I came across this article in my Instapaper queue, and it is helping me work through some of the reasons I like both of those parts of me.

I didn’t get a specific pull quote from this article because it feels like one of those articles you need to enjoy in its entirety.

Every way I turn I am having to scale back on my ambitions of what I can accomplish. I am simply not going to be able to maintain a suite of healthy and fulfilling friendships and nurture a loving marriage and raise a teenager I wasn’t expecting to raise and be great at all of my hobbies while also participating in direct action mutual aid and harassing my elected representatives for being shitheel cowards and working a full-time job and keeping up with new frontend frameworks in my spare time and I guess learning Rust because apparently that is the thing that will optimize my employability once AI has eaten my corner of the software world. I do not have enough time in the day. No one has enough time in the day! The thing about getting older is that it is a process of accumulation, you accumulate people and stuff and responsibilities and moral obligations, and you can only Marie Kondo yourself out of so much of it. My dentist gets on me about flossing and I want to be like, motherfucker when? I know it’s only a couple of minutes a day but do you know how few minutes we all have?? Did you know the earth is going up in flames??? And you want me to FLOSS???? And host my own read-later service????? Why is this the reality we live in??????

I put this as a reminder in my phone to share a couple weeks ago, and I keep re-reading it and lolsob’ing every time I do.

This perfectly encapsulates life in the 21st century. 11/10 rant, A+++, would read again.

A need to “prove oneself” to internalized authority figures leads to things like climbing conventional status ladders, or staying in an unhappy marriage, or piling up as much money as possible to preserve the appearance of having “made it”.

What motivated Esther to do things like take a receptionist job at a film company, pick up her life and move to San Francisco, and risk her savings on her startup was something far more personal and idiosyncratic: a conception of the interests she wanted to explore, the people she wanted to meet, the products she wanted to create, the life she envisioned and wanted to build for herself—and, yes, the proof that she really could count on herself to do it.

This is super inspiring on so many levels.

It seems like life becomes a little more palatable once you figure out who you are and start leaning into that.

In these latter days everybody is familiar with concepts like the carbon footprint, sustainability, and the like. Measures of the ecological cost of the things we do. One of the most irksome problems bedeviling Earth's biosphere at present is the outrageous cost of many aspects of many human lifestyles. Society is gradually and too late awakening to, for example, the reality that there is an inexcusable, untenable cost to shipping coffee beans all around the world from the relatively narrow belt in which they grow so that everybody can have a hot cup o' joe every morning. Or that the planet is being heated and poisoned by people's expectation of cheap steaks and year-round tomatoes and a new iPhone every year, and that as a consequence its water-cycle and weather systems are unraveling. Smearing the natural world flat and pouring toxic waste across it so that every American can drive a huge car from their too-large air-conditioned freestanding single-family home to every single other place they might choose to go turns out to be incompatible with the needs of basically all the other life we've ever detected in the observable universe. Whoops!

This article really lays into Elon at the end, which honestly, as I’m getting older, I feel okay with.

Also: one of my main values in life is balance, which is essentially the goal of sustainability. How can we balance our needs with the needs of our planet?

Like any parasite, our species needs to achieve some sort of symbiosis with our host. You can’t extract so much that you kill it, but you need to live at the same time, so how do you reach that balance?

My brother-in-law is unabashedly into marching band competitions.

Last night, while playing cards at my house, he had the DCI World Championships playing on his phone in the background.

Competitive marching is his "thing".

He and my sister attend various competitions throughout the summer, and their goal is to make it to the finals in Indianapolis one year to witness the presentation of the Founders Trophy in person.

As a young kid, I used to have a ton of "things."

In the early 90s, it was the Minnesota Twins. In the late 90s, it was the Minnesota Vikings. Peppered throughout that decade, it included Animorphs, Power Rangers, Harry Potter, the Simpsons, Pokémon, and music.

As a high schooler, I became all too aware of people who had a "thing". When all your friends tease people because of their love for Texas Hold 'Em or pro wrestling or The Sims, you start to get self conscious.

What is my "thing" that everyone is teasing me about behind my back?

I made a choice somewhere around that time to never allow myself to be pinned down as someone who has a "thing".

In my late 30s, I occasionally find myself in this exasperating situation where I don't know what to do with my idle time.

I've been getting into small electronics repair, teaching myself soldering and fixing my old iPod. I've been playing guitar more often.

But my problem is that I don't have much idle time, because I have two small kids and a wife who I really, really enjoy being around.

And collectively, we don't have a "thing".

Growing up, our family's "thing" was attending each other's activities.

I remember being bribed by my parents with Pokémon cards so I didn't throw an absolute fit when my sister competed with her dance team at Williams Arena.

I remember getting together with the boys in the far corner of the stadium, playing 500 while my brother played a real game of football on the turf.

Every band concert, every theatre production, every softball game... that's what we did as a family.

But I don't recall having a "thing" that wasn't something we participated in.

We weren't huddled around a TV watching sports. We didn't go see shows together.

We mostly just supported each other.

That was our "thing."

The Olympics provided a great testing ground for various "things" we might adopt.

Every night for the past couple weeks, I've forced the kids to watch nearly every single sport with me.

The Olympics is a hot bed of weird, esoteric "things" that somehow get even more esoteric as the years wane on.

That's not a read, by the way: I am 100% here for competitive surfing, break dancing, underwater acrobatics, and dressage.

I can't say that we found a "thing" outright from watching the Olympics with the kids, but I learned that my son enjoys archery and my daughter enjoys hand-to-hand combat sports and track. Both of them enjoy gymnastics and soccer.

I want to find a "thing" that we, as a family, can all rally behind.

I used to assume that "things" become "things" organically, without much intentionality behind it.

As I'm getting older, I'm realizing that "things" only become "things" when someone decides to expose themselves to a new experience.

I'm unsure whether our "thing" will take the form of a sports team, or something in nature, or a TV show, or a book series, or something completely unexpected.

It could be something that's dorky like competitive marching¹ or more mainstream like professional football, it doesn't really matter to me.

All I know is that I need to start actively placing my family into situations where we can experience a "thing" together.

As everyone was celebrating and feeling good, I was barely functional. Truthfully, I had never felt closer to death in my life. I’ve done hard workouts before. I know what it’s like to push myself. I’ve been running for over a decade. But what I experienced after crossing that finish line was something else entirely.

And for what? To have a 07:25 pace instead of a 07:30 pace? Remove my two sprints from the race and I come in maybe 30 seconds later. What difference would it have made in my life? None. I don’t win some extra prize by coming in at 25:57 instead of 26:27. 

So why did I do it? Yes, I wanted to push myself. Yes, I wanted to beat my goal. But, ultimately, I did it because I was selfish.

I love a good running analogy.

I heard Derek Sivers make a similar point with biking a few years back. Pacing is an important aspect to a well-lived life.

I also enjoyed this Josh Brown quote he included in this article:

Make yourself useful to smart, successful people. That’s how you should spend the first ten years of your career.

Surround yourself with smart, successful people and then bet on them. That’s how you should spend the next ten years.

A long time ago, a manager friend of mine wrote a book to collect his years of wisdom. He never published it, which is a shame because it was full of interesting insights. One that I think a lot about today was the question: “How are you paying your team?”

With this question, my manager friend wanted to point out that you can pay people in lots of currencies. Among other things, you can pay them in quality of life, prestige, status, impact, influence, mentorship, power, autonomy, meaning, great teammates, stability and fun. And in fact most people don’t just want to be paid in money — they want to be paid some mixture of these things.

When I was in college, the phrase “it’s all about the perks” became something I ironically said often when people described their jobs.

I’m realizing as I get older just how true that axiom is.

We've all heard the personal finance advice popularised by Robert Kiyosaki: "Pay yourself first."

I've never liked this advice. It rings hollow. It feels selfish.

When you run a business, you don't pay yourself first. No, you have an obligation to pay your taxes first. To pay your employees second. Your vendors and suppliers third. And yourself? Dead last. This is how business works in the real world. Personal greed is a poor substitute for personal responsibility.

As an individual, yes, I find the “pay yourself first” mantra to work well for me.

As a business owner, I feel gross paying myself. I feel like someone is always gonna come after me for more money.

Maybe this is why I’m not a great entrepreneur.

But maybe there's a kernel of wisdom in "pay yourself first" that we can apply - not to money, but something far more precious - to our time.

This feels like a way more fitting application of the axiom, and it’s certainly something I’ve been prioritizing these past few months.

Maybe this advice will help you, too.

Value-driven responses are not as immediately appealing as finding a hyper-charged digital escape, but these latter escapes inevitably reveal themselves to be transient and the emotions they’re obscuring eventually return. If you can resist the allure of the easy digital palliative and instead take on the heavier burden of meaningful action, a more lasting inner peace can be achieved.

I’ve been finding more and more ways to become detached from my devices the past couple weeks¹, and believe it or not, it has been an unbelievable boon for my mental health.

Here is a short list of things I’ve done:

• Turned on grayscale. I wanna find a way to wire this up to my shortcut button on my iPhone 15 Pro, but (a) too much work and (b) see my next bullet point.
• Steeling my nerves to activate my Light Phone 2 that I got for Christmas. It’s a pretty big commitment to switch off the iOS ecosystem, but I’m getting close to trying it for a month or so.
• Deleted most apps off my home screen. Everything is a swipe away anyways, so why not just have a barren screen that messes up your negative muscle memory?
• Used a content blocker to block Reddit and LinkedIn. I can’t tell you what a relief it has been to not go down the politics rabbit hole this cycle so far, and that’s all because I blocked Reddit. LinkedIn is just as bad for me, and if I am going to keep building my network over there, I should try to be strategic about it and not mindlessly scroll it all day.

Tech is so, so cool, don’t get me wrong. But I, for one, am sick of being addicted to the allure of social media.

I’d rather spend my tech time building goofy websites and writing stuff.