The Column

Motto: Hamburgers are Fun on a Bun File this Column under "Aaron tells other people what they should be doing", which I realize is too common of a theme. You know what's fun? You know what's rewarding? Honing a skill. Creating something new. Doing a craft. Working on something just because you want to.  It's a lot more fun than enjoying someone else's work. It's a lot more lasting  fun than enjoying someone else's work. Creating things brings a sort of whole-brain engagement that only happens with the absolute best of storytelling. I wrote this Life Tracker thing to keep track of all sorts of different aspects of my life so I might be able to read through the data what makes me most happy... what I found out was that what made me most happy was actually BUILDING the thing. Doing the data work. I was more than just coding - I was creating. I was generating a thing that had never existed before and the possibilities were endless. That's really...

In Column #97 I wrote about "The Taxonomy of Human Attractiveness". In that post, I analyzed the perceived differences between "cute",  "pretty", "hot", and "beautiful". Today's post is a continued analysis on human attractiveness, but more focused on what it is and less focused on our nomenclature for it. I started writing today's post back in November of 2016... so this has been a long time coming. Since this is already a Column out of time, I'm going to correct my accidental skipping of Column #344, too. Also I feel the need to through out a necessary PREFACE CAVEAT! I'm an American white male. I'm a member of just about every majority class that exists in my region. Attractiveness is heavily influenced by culture. Everything I'm about to say is coming from a place of "I Googled this", but my Google searches, even in Incognito Mode, will inherently be geared towards the American majority senti...

Motto: Make Happy I write the first half of this Column from a position of privilege.  Actually I write  every  Column from that position, now that I think about it.  Regardless, this is all very personal and I can say up front that I know it's not this simple, this is all very easy for me to say, and what good does it do? Part of me thought about just deleting this, but heck I wrote it so here it is. I don't really understand smart people who aren't happy. If you're smart, you should be able to identify cause and effect relationships. You should be good at noticing patterns and trends. You should have a good idea about what toolsets are available to you and how to use them to create effective change.  Happiness, to me, seems like a key metric that most people are trying to maximize in their lives... and smart people are supposed to be good at tweaking dials to solve problems. Combining those two strongly-held beliefs, it doesn't seem like smart, unhapp...