Mental Health and Homepage iPods
Hey friends,
What did the whiteboard say at the end of the first school day?
“Phew! I’m wiped.”
(😅 That's one's pretty bad, but we're rolling into our second week of middle school and we're all already feeling 'wiped' 😴)
Thinking Too Hard 🤔
Over the holiday weekend, we watched the new Marvel movie, Thunderbolts. It was a better-than-average story (for the franchise) and surprisingly emotional, as it tackled topics that can't be dismissed in the same way as other Marvel plots: depression and loneliness.
I'll try not to drop any movie spoilers, but growing up in a household of mental illness, I saw the effects of bipolar and clinical depression first-hand. It's a villain made of chemicals and chemistry that can leave everyone feeling powerless.
Yet even with court-side seats in my childhood, it's still remarkably difficult to track your OWN emotional and mental health as an adult (whether chemically imbalanced or not). How are you handling your stress? Are you processing your emotions to WHY you're feeling the way you are? Are you seeing any disruptive behaviors in your life that are forming a pattern?
These questions don't FEEL good, so it feels easier to ignore them and keep pressing on. That doesn't work very well, trust me.
The other temptation is to try and fix it yourself. That also doesn't work well, as I've found. You'll burn yourself out — we're simply not designed to live our lives on our own. We need community. Whether it's a church, a support group, friends — and not just one person. Your spouse, BFF, or therapist cannot fulfill all the needs for community that are baked into us on their own. Do you have a community?
Take it from someone who still doesn't have it figured out, but has made MANY mistakes: our mental health is just as important as our physical health, and just like our bodies, once we notice pain and injury, it's already too late. It's much healthier (and less painful) to course correct BEFORE the injury rather than after.
Interesting Web Bits 🍜
Web Stuff
- Matthew Ström-Awm makes some insightful observations about the talent crisis in design and our current lack of junior positions in the industry.
- Adrian Roselli takes a strong stance on horizontally scrolling content. I mostly agree for desktop interfaces... but I feel there may be more of an argument to be made for mobile interfaces.
- I love the iPod just chillin' on this homepage and the explanation post.
- Sam Rose explains Big O notation for functions at scale and how it relates to performance.
- DEMO: Cute birds follow your scroll position.
Other Stuff
- Cal asks, "What if AI doesn't get much better than this?" Are we seeing a plateau, or are we still skyrocketing towards our smarter robot overlords?
- WATCH: Ants slowly dismantle a Raffaello in this timelapse. (If bugs give you the heebies, maybe don't watch!)
- PLAY: Find and free your cursor friends.