There’s an old concept, I can’t remember where it’s stems from, but it’s essentially:
A fulfilling life is the life of someone who voluntarily regains what it was that they lost in childhood, with the experience and insight that comes with time.
My number one goal for 2026 was to focus on reigniting creativity in my life.
Creativity, like many other aspects of a persons life, seems to be more like a muscle than an inherent skill.
The main area of focus for my creativity was drawing. I had all of these ideas for products and concepts that lived in my mind alone, so I started to work on drawing from an industrial design perspective to get these ideas an prototypes on paper, and as I began to get better at realizing my ideas I began to write about them, and as they amassed I decided to start learning CAD software to be able to play with those ideas in an interactive way.
This eventually led to getting into 3D printing - mind you, this has all happened only over the course of 6 months. But now I am able to take an idea, put it to paper, build it using basic modeling, and print a physical version of that idea that I can hold in my hands all over the course of 1 to 2 days.
It’s been an extremely fulfilling journey and I am trying to extend it to other parts of my life, but one thing this article got right was that treating it like an experiment and setting goals and hypothesis and fulfilling them is the true joy of the creative process.
> Creativity, like many other aspects of a persons life, seems to be more like a muscle than an inherent skill.
Ehh, I'm not so sure. I've never been creative. I've always been good at creating, but it's more recreating, since I hardly ever have any original ideas. Whereas my creative friends seem to have a never ending spigot of ideas. But I do really appreciate the creativity of others. I guess out of wanting what I don't have.
I see what you’re saying but I also think that recreating is a way to exercise the creative muscle as well.
At least in my own experience I feel like I also hardly have any original ideas, but the more I learn about, mimic, and study the creations of others, the more i find ways to integrate those creations into my own. Unless you’re God, I’d argue that almost nothing is brought to creation in a vacuum, even your creative friends are probably creating based on drawn inspiration from countless sources that they studied or recreated themselves for who knows how long.
It’s work, but it’s fulfilling work, in my opinion, to mimic and recreate until one day you take a step back and realize that what you just created is uniquely yours, even if you can point to the many aspects of it that were borrowed from others.
Not to mention the closing paragraph of the article essentially says the same thing 8 times - for such a well written paper the closing paragraph was a real disappointment in my eyes. Overall though, good write up.
Benn Jordan just released a new video proposing that we are not in “late stage capitalism” and instead we are currently an offshoot of capitalism called “leverageism”.
In the video he describes how when people like Elon Musk get to the level of wealth that they are at, it becomes far more beneficial for them to take from (or stunt) the spending power of lower classes than it is to add to their own net worth dollar figure - simply put, the former moves the needle far more in their favor than the latter.
Definitely explained the idea of our slice remaining the same while the overall pie around us is getting larger.
Interested in whether these bridge brawls were isolated to just Venice, maybe tanners and butchers had it out on all checks notes 3 of Florence’s main bridges
I agree, but I think two factors are at play here:
1) Valve is not in desperate need for capital, Steam and their older games are money printing machines therefore they don’t feel the need to release new games all the time. This is a pro and a con, they don’t feel the need to release same-y, barely iterative titles to make ends meet which means the overall quality of the games we do get is much higher. But at the same time it’s no telling when Valve just decides the juice isn’t worth the squeeze anymore.
2) the games that Valve do release are always a standard deviation above the other games of that similar genre at the time. Their ability to take a mechanic, or an engine, or a combination of the two and meaningfully expand and revolutionize in that space cannot be understated - and as game technology progresses, making similar impacts at that scale takes longer and is much harder than the previous title. Half Life Alyx was such a quantum leap in VR quality and I don’t think it’s talked about enough. Deadlock takes the MOBA genre to a whole new level in terms of gameplay depth and complexity. I think they’re taking their time with titles and they know the predecessors that came before them.
Moving from Iowa City to Kansas City I can say that free public transit works quite well. In Iowa City the campus bus system (Cambus) has all of its busses operated by students who go out and get their CDL and get great job experience, on top of it being one of the highest paid campus jobs for students.
Kansas City’s street car system is an incredible testament to this as well. It’s clean, safe, and for the most part quite efficient. And with its recent extension down to UMKC’s campus it’s now a viable transportation method for a lot of people in the heart of Kansas City. Keeping it clean and safe after more than doubling the size of its route might be a bigger lift now, but as long as the city sticks with it post-World Cup I see it continuing to grow.
A fulfilling life is the life of someone who voluntarily regains what it was that they lost in childhood, with the experience and insight that comes with time.
Easier said than done of course