Ben Norris

📖 🚽 Digital Minimalism

By Cal Newport

I loved this article from the Art of Manliness: Sunday Firesides: I Have Kids.

Then one day, for reasons unknown, I suddenly saw the open printer drawer not as an impertinent annoyance, but as the inescapable evidence of a simple fact: I have kids.   

I have kids, and kids inevitably come with some vexations. Yet they’re exactly what I want in my life, and a source of inexpressible joy. Because I have this privilege . . . I also have to accept its aggravations.

This is such an easy thing to forget and so important to remember. Our lives are not meant to be blissful, they are meant to be meaningful.

🧘🏻‍♂️ This is a great reminder. Take time to be where you are.

I thoroughly enjoyed the latest episode of Revisionist History from Malcolm Gladwell to celebrate Independence Day. He expanded the story of our nation’s independence, particularly the Boston Tea Party. Many of the Sons of Liberty were part of a smuggling organization providing tea to early colonialists that didn’t go through England, with the accompanying taxes.

I have to admit that framing them as drug lords defending their turf strikes me as a bit sensationalist. On the one hand, you have people trying to get their own legitimate products at a cheaper price by buying direct. On the other, people who are knowingly dealing in death and destruction. It’s hard for me to compare the two. I think the consequences of the drug in question matter a great deal to the morality of the issue. The fact that the early American patriots also protected their own business interests does not lessen their moral stand in my mind.

That being said, I love the additional perspective his research provided. I laughed out loud a number of times in listening to this episode. I am sharing a clip of one of my favorite segments to give you a taste. I highly recommend you listen to the whole episode. Here is an Overcast link: Tempest in a Teacup.

I finally published a Now page over the weekend. It feels nice to have something public declaring my current focus, as well as somewhere to record the books I’m currently reading. I have found that I start too many books without finishing because I forget I’m reading them.

How exciting! Congrats to the U.S. women! ⚽️ 🇺🇸

🎥 Dumbo

With three of the kids and cousins

As much as I learn the skill of self-compassion, it is so far outside of my natural response that I still feel like an awkward novice.

I had a rough morning. In many ways, it wasn’t all that bad, but it rocked me a bit. I got up and rushed away from the family on my holiday for a therapy appointment, trying to be on time. When I arrived, I found that I had received a text from my therapist ten minutes before leaving asking if we could reschedule. She commented, “I know you hate unexpected changes, can this be an exposure to reschedule? 😂😬”

I actually had very little problem adjusting the plan and rescheduling with her. But I was so damn mad at myself for not looking at my phone before I left. Since I am rescheduling for tomorrow, I felt guilty that I will be taking a couple hours away from the kids and my wife in addition to the hour today in travel time.

I called my wife and told her what had happened. She comforted me and tried to challenge some of my thinking. “If you had texted your therapist an hour before your session saying you were ill and needed to reschedule and she didn’t see it and drove in anyway, would that be her fault? Or would it still be your fault, or no one’s fault?” I thought for a minute and replied it was somewhere in between my fault and no one’s fault. She chuckled and reminded me that a little self-compassion might help here.

In my treatment follow-up session a couple days ago, my other therapist reminded me of the steps of self-compassion:

1. Be kind to myself
2. Remember my common humanity
3. Be mindful of what I am feeling

As I thought about those steps, I felt a wave of comfort wash over me. I could tell myself, “It’s ok to be upset. It’s not wrong to be mad right now. This is hard for me, and doesn’t need to not be hard.” I felt able to acknowledge my part in this without beating myself up. We will just move forward and do the best we can with the next couple of days. Almost right on cue, my wife sent me more compassion in another text.

Love you. Sorry it’s hard. There is no right way to do things in this situation. So there’s no failure.

I wanted to record this experience so I can come back to it. I will certainly have a similar situation come up again. I hope that the more I practice, the more easily and naturally the instinct for self-compassion will come. We could all use a little more of that.

🎥 Aladdin

With 5 older kids

Life can quickly get overwhelming, and if you allow yourself to be paralyzed by waiting for perfection, you will miss out on many opportunities.

As I have finished my OCD treatment and returned back to normal everyday living, I have found myself writing less and less. Part of the issue is the natural hustle and bustle of life. But as I step back for some introspection, the brutal truth is that I have been avoiding it. I have been waiting to have something truly meaningful to say.

I need to stop waiting and start writing.

While I was in the middle of intensive treatment, it was clear to me that I was writing to benefit my mental health. But after graduating from treatment, I was taking less time to think about myself—how I was doing and how to improve. In many ways, that is a good thing. I am going to be happiest as I seek to make other people happy. But as in all things, a balance must be achieved.

Deep down, I know that part of what has held me back from writing more is the feeling of shouting into the void. There is not a large reader base waiting for me to publish again, and so the pressure is less than in other areas of my life. However, throughout the course of this year, I have learned that writing is a helpful exercise for me and my mind. I do not need an audience. I am my audience. The act of processing my thoughts sufficiently to express them is healthy and productive, and requires no other validation to be worthwhile. Hopefully I can remember that.

🎥 Toy Story 4

With the five older kids

🎥 Men in Black International

Alone

Wow. Two nights. Two championships by first-time teams. Congrats to the St. Louis Blues and Toronto Raptors! 🏒 🏀

🎥 X-Men: Dark Phoenix

My impressions and reactions from the announcements this morning.

This was an exciting morning. I have the opportunity this week to be in San Jose with my team from work. Along with two other guys, I did not get WWDC tickets, so we are enjoying AltConf and Layers instead.

The thing that struck me most was the inclusion of SwiftUI in the keynote. I am thrilled that it exists, and I love that it got so much stage time. It felt like a portion of the State of the Union got picked up and plopped in a few hours earlier.

Announcing SwiftUI made this keynote feel like the most developer-focused event in years.

As a customer, I am even more thrilled with the iPadOS announcement. When I am not in Xcode, I prefer to be on my iPad Pro, and this will solidify that even more. When the SwiftUI demo was being shown, my first thought was that it looked very similar to Swift Playgrounds, and I have a not-so-secret hope to get Xcode on the iPad this year.

This will be an interesting week. There are so many positive changes I can tell are coming to impact our daily developer life, and I can’t wait to learn more about them.

I’m feeling lucky I work for a great company and could bring my team to San Jose for WWDC week. Looking forward to enjoying Alt Conf, Layers, and meeting up with people. I’ll be posting sketchnotes at @sketchnotable if you want to follow along.

Excited to be flying out for WWDC. Looking forward to spending the week with my team and meeting up with a few friends I rarely get to see.

📖 🎧 No Happy Endings: A Memoir

By Nora McInerny

A special episode recorded as part of my OCD treatment. Thoughts on my experience doing exposure treatment and how success is not the absence of failure, but rather progress.

Note: This episode contains strong language

Links

The OCD and Anxiety Treatment Center

Who is Fernando

Tried my hand at stand-up comedy for the first time today as part of my OCD treatment. The results were not nearly as terrible as I feared.

📖 🎧 It’s Okay to Laugh (Crying Is Cool Too)

By Nora McInerny Purmort

My thoughts and feelings for my new one-way friend, Nora McInerny, after listening to every episode of Terrible, Thanks For Asking.

Dear Nora,

This is an odd letter to write. I feel like I’m writing to a close friend who doesn’t yet know that we are friends. Maybe I will start by explaining how our friendship began.

I had a mental breakdown that started last summer and culminated in a night at the hospital in January and nine weeks off work through March. It turns out that I have OCD, and I found a treatment center which has made a huge difference. During that journey, I found The Hilarious World of Depression which was a lifeline. From their website, I browsed other podcasts by APM and discovered yours. I first listened to Episode 65: Sad and Lucky, and was hooked. I downloaded all past episodes and made my way through them over the past couple months.

One interesting effect of listening to you so much over a short time is being gifted a new relationship. You and I are close in age, which has always been a bit sensitive for me. I have always felt too old for my age, and with six kids and one on the way, when people ask how old I am, I have to math it. It was helpful and freeing for me to hear you own your age so matter-of-factly. I recognize that I only see what you have chosen to share publicly, but it seems that you have been authentic and vulnerable in sharing your true self. You are the kind of funny that I always wished I could be—seemingly effortless and natural.

Thank you for normalizing and harboring strong emotions. It would have been easy to focus only on grief, but you have welcomed all sorts of experiences into the show and given permission for all sorts of people to feel their feelings. This has helped me in my own journey toward self-compassion and mindfulness. I added your podcast to my “Funny” playlist in Overcast along with THWoD, but there were some days when I wondered if it was healthy for me to be listening to TTFA. It wasn’t always funny—it was often extremely heavy. But I found that as I opened my heart to feel some of the terrible things other people have felt, it was more open to feel what I was feeling.

I imagine there are days when you question whether being so open and vulnerable and honest is worth it. You have taken parts of yourself that we typically hold in reserve and put them out for all to see. I want you to know what a difference that has made in my life. I see how you have taken a defining, transformative experience and turned it into a catalyst to touch other people. The more I heal and the further I progress in my own mental health journey, the more I feel a burning desire to help other people who have suffered like I have. I don’t know what my future holds, but I draw strength and inspiration from your example and I am filled with hope and excitement.

Hopefully one day I can meet you, give you a hug, and thank you in person for how you have affected me. Until then, I will continue to participate in our one-way friendship.

Your new (but unknown) friend,

Glitter and sparkle,
Spin and shine,
Throw rainbows on the wall.

Ridges and divots,
Towers and gashes
Comprise identifiable topography.

Infinitely unique,
Utterly alike,
Common in our individuality.

Awash in a sea of special souls,
Kicking and fighting to stay afloat.
Wishing to be noticed,
Hoping to stay hidden.

Lifted up on to the shore,
Left alone to contemplate:
All my quirks and gifts and flaws
Make me just like everybody else.

What a game! St Louis Blues win game 7 in double overtime to head to the conference finals. Well earned win! 🏒