Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Serenity Prayer
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.
I first heard these words in my twenties and thought they were the pinnacle of self-help wisdom. It’s known as the Serenity Prayer—famous in Alcoholics Anonymous. Here was a path to peace, proven in the crucible of real suffering.
My son Ari is playing on his middle school’s E-Sports Team. Each week, he and his classmates log on to play Super Smash Brothers against kids from other schools. Their uniforms are school-branded hoodies with their names printed on the back.
At first, it felt weird. A school E-Sports team? I’d always thought about sports as a physical thing where the coach would run him so ragged outside that he’d come home tired enough to fall asleep in his soup. Sports were supposed to leave him sore and grass-stained, not sitting in a classroom tapping buttons a controller.
I’ve been noticing a pattern: no matter how much I do, it never feels like enough. This make sense at work. The more I accomplish, the more money I can make, the faster I might get promoted, and the sooner I can wrap things up and spend time with my family. But I also feel compelled to do this at home too.
I catch myself listening to books and podcasts at 1.5x or 2x speed, just to get through them faster. Sometimes I even feel annoyed at a book—not because it’s bad, but because I have to finish it before moving on to the next one.
But I’ve noticed that I don’t do this with music.
We live in an age of constant urgency. Every scroll brings a new crisis, a new villain, a new call to action. And if you’re not keeping up, you start to feel like you’re part of the problem. You should be outraged. You should be doing more. You should care harder.
But lately, I’ve started to wonder—what if that feeling isn’t helping? What if it’s actually part of the problem?
When I tell people I’m re-reading Walden, they usually look at me a little funny. There’s a certain kind of surprise that comes with it—Wait, that book? The one everyone had to read in high school? The one where the guy builds a cabin and creates war stories about ants?
And I get it—Walden is an odd book. It’s undeniably important in the American literary canon, but it’s tough to get through it with that mindset. The first couple of times I picked it up, I tried to absorb every sentence as if each one held some hidden truth. That didn’t work. I stalled out somewhere in the bean field chapter, buried in Thoreau’s painfully detailed accounting of rows, yields, and the price of beans.
Early on, the Internet felt like it was going to be a force for good. It was supposed to connect people across the world, break down barriers, bring everyone a little closer together.
That’s not exactly how it turned out.
Spend a few minutes scrolling through Reddit and you’ll find posts where people gang up on some poor anonymous person. Titles like “Is this the ugliest woman in the world?” pop up, with the picture above, and the internet gladly weighs in. Everyone gets their shot. Everyone feels clever. This is the worst version of what social media can be — not connection, but collective cruelty.
When I first picked up Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to get out of it. Lamott writes about fiction and memoir, about the kind of writing that draws on personal memory, deep emotional truths, and a close relationship with storytelling. I don’t typically write that way. My writing tends to be more analytical—I like ideas, structure, context. I try to make sense of the world through observation and reasoning rather than plumbing the depths of my childhood.
Still, the book came so highly recommended, and so persistently, that I figured I’d give it a try.
Here are two quotes from commencement speeches:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” — Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement, 2005
Full Video
“You’re not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You’re not your collection of walking personality disorders.” — Anne Lamott
Anne Lamott, UC Berkeley Commencement, 2003
Full Speech
Which one will inspire you to lead a better life?
We were in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, getting ready for a tour. Tours start in the Vélez Blanco Patio, a light-filled marble courtyard just past the library. The kind of space that makes you pause—not just because it’s beautiful, but because it feels transported from somewhere else. Which, it turns out, it was.
The room is so unique, I had to ask, “Where did this room come from?”
When I was a kid, every sitcom seemed to have a time capsule episode. The kids would gather at school, bury a box filled with artifacts—a mixtape, a letter to the future—planning to dig it up years later.
I realized that I could do the same for 2020, but as a virtual time capsule—not one packed with sourdough starters and rolls of toilet paper, but a collection of the moments and memories that defined that strange year. And today, March 15, 2025—five years after New York City shut down its schools—feels like the right time to open it.
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