His pitch was that there is a breadth of  experience to be had at our fingertips and that’s the problem – it’s only at your fingertips. It doesn’t have any depth. It’s a puddle we run through on the way to another puddle rather than an ocean that we can immerse ourselves in.

We used to read books then we started reading the Cliff notes on a book. Now if something is over 140 characters or 2 minutes in length then we can’t be bothered because we’re convinced that there’s something else amazing around the corner waiting to capture our attention (and there usually is).

There’s something to his idea. I find myself craving focus, meaning, a through line for everything I see in a day. I see a lot of stuff but I don’t walk around thinking I know very much.

But maybe that’s just old hat too.  Maybe meaning hasn’t been lost. Maybe, like information, meaning is just changing. How things come to mean anything is evolving.

This video skips across a lake of experience and images, touching down just long enough for a glimpse but it creates a great story and… well… it meant something to me.

And suddenly there it is – inexplicably the most perfect thing. In this case a video which I can’t even understand but that doesn’t matter. In fact, if I understood all of it then it probably wouldn’t be so wonderful.

It has a simple message, “be amazing”. There are a lot of reason not to be but none of them are very good.

Much thanks to Dwayne Hill for this. I had the fortune to meet some amazing people in my life. Dwayne is one of them.

via ITSBRO

Truth be told, I fell in love with this diagram because of its overt simplicity, complete fallibility and because PhD Robert Plutchick (God rest his soul) was so optimistic that he firmly believed the complex wash of human emotions can be distilled logically into a pretty flower (where rage is a petal and that petal is fuschia). 

I don’t think it’ll ever be that simple. That’s why people like being human.

Maybe I suffer from a touch of synesthesia because I fell on my head when I was a kid but I’ve always thought of emotions as flavors. Like flavors, they’re hard to pinpoint and language tends to fall short when you try and express them. Even something as unmistakable as rage is different for everyone and it’s rarely as pretty as a tulip.

Ever.