It has always been my dream to ease others' suffering. That felt juvenile (impossible even) until Elon made it his purpose to turn Sapiens into a multi-planet species.
It's even stranger how, just before February ended, I lost a dear friend to gun violence and could do nothing about it. Language is short of words in defining the dent abrupt losses can leave on one's psyche. Even so, the simple fact remains that I became confident I can dream, and my life was changed forever.
The problem with dreaming too wild, as with Colombia’s Pablo Escobar in the late 80s, is that no one can control the dreams they have. If you spend as much time as I do online — even if merely scrolling through your Twitter feeds and pretending to skim through your email subscriptions — you realize too early that with a quarter of a million pages added to the internet daily, diving deeper translates to getting exposed to a universe you did not know existed. And unless you are careful, you might be sucked into this wondrous plane of existence.
Ever since my father handed me my first smartphone almost a decade ago, with which I could easily access the internet and unlike the slow-loading junks I had before it, the internet has become an excellent friend of mine.
My online adventures are not particularly remarkable. But I have been fortunate to come across so much… uhm.. stuff: some brilliant and mind-boggling, others as bizarre as they come. Without that access — which is easy to look back on and see the inevitable of its emergence and wide adoption — portions of my identity, a young person on the shore of Africa, and the identities of many of my peers would be lost.
I have been very curious growing up (still am). As with a circular path, all philomaths like myself know that the more you tread, the more difficult it becomes to be content with finding on the very spot it all began. The quest to satisfy that insatiable thirst to know and experience remains an endless marathon.
I would watch Michael Stevens breaking down the future of reasoning, or Marques Brownlee giving a tour of his studio, or Sean Evans torturing his guests with chicken wings, or Hank Green yelling into his camera about… well, another interesting shit, and right in the next minute, I would begin planning to launch a YT channel.
Another day, I would read Maria Popova's Brain Pickings (now The Marginalian) and would rush to my Google Docs in an attempt to recast the spell of her undeniable eloquence. Other days, it is poetry. Music. Coding. Books. Movies. I could go on and on, but I have to keep this piece short in honor of February. I read only a few of Malcolm Gladwell’s books and can’t wait to profile true criminals. Hell, Nightcap was born thanks to CNN’s Allison Morrow, Dave Pell, and, in part, Austin Kleon.
All this farce boils down to this: the overwhelmingness that weighs you and I down as we go about our daily lives is a universal experience. No one can do it all, at least not in the context of satisfying that craving to fulfill a black hole we can’t describe.
Artistry doesn't do well with overspeeding, for no legacy meant to last forever should be built in a hurry.
I might be incapable of doing anything about my pleasant friend getting robbed of his life, but I can decide to keep on living. It is never enough to exist, but to live. Intentionally. In a way that brings pleasure or eases the smallest inconvenience to the people I cross paths with. With my art. With messed-up humor for those with that taste.
In a world that provides unlimited opportunities for expression, being a creator has never been easy. Hopefully, this post will serve as a wake-up call to those struggling with such excessive burdens. It doesn't matter how many things we miss out on in the end, but how we make conscious efforts to make the ones we choose to engage with actually worthwhile.