Our Struggles Define Us

I’ve always thought that the things we become obsessed with often stem from negative experiences. No one relentlessly seeks solutions to problems that don’t exist; that’s why no one becomes an expert in something they haven’t struggled with.

Those who seek calm are the ones who can’t find it. Those who want to improve their health are those who have lost it. People search for ways to sleep because, try as they might, they can’t manage to fall asleep and are all too familiar with the ceiling above their bed.

One reason I began writing was because I barely slept and thought too much. Writing became the perfect companion on those nights when sleep wouldn’t come. A way to capture the thoughts running through my head. And I believe it was through writing that I discovered it didn’t just help me—it made me fall in love with it.

Carlos Stro, a Spanish health educator, began to speak about how artificial light directly affects our health after losing a friend to cancer.

Viktor Frankl developed logotherapy after experiencing one of the most horrific realities—life in a Nazi concentration camp.

J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter when she was unemployed, a single mother, and dealing with a failed marriage. She used writing as an escape.

There are countless more stories like these.

That’s why the positive mantra of “find your passion” doesn’t resonate with me. We are shaped by our experiences, and because “no’s” often hurt more than “yes’s” bring joy, our negative experiences define us more than the positive ones.

No one became great without falling a thousand times. No one became strong without being knocked down over and over. No one came here with a promise of happiness; that’s an illusion of the fiercest capitalism.

Our only mission in life is simply to live it. To learn to survive the winters, the blows, and the falls. That’s what we became experts in, and that’s why we’re still here. We learned to come together and to work as a team. We discovered that companionship was better for our survival, and we created love. We found that our strengths, combined with those of others, made us invincible, and we held onto that truth.

Because happiness is too fragile to cling to. And perhaps too simple. Because experiencing the full range of emotions, no matter how difficult, is wonderful. Because it’s a miracle we’re alive. So let’s live—let’s enjoy those fleeting moments of happiness and face, with fear but without surrender, the experiences we encounter along the way, some bitter and some sweet.

Maybe in doing so, we’ll find ataraxia—and, with it, the answers to those questions that haunt us.

Today’s recommendations

• How I Read. Reading is a practice—a way to improve attention and exercise discipline. It’s a gym for the mind. I’ve often spoken here about how vital reading is for our mental well-being, and I think this article presents some compelling arguments to that effect.
• Analog Office. If you’re into paper and analog organization, this blog is pure gold.
• archive.today. Sometimes I come across content behind a paywall, and I don’t want to pay for another subscription just to read a single article. After trying several tools, this one is definitely the one that has convinced me the most.

Cantimplora Studio

I’ve been wanting to shift the direction of Cantimplora Studio, my small services website, for a while now. Over the years as a freelancer, some people have asked me how to get clients. I wish I had an answer, but I don’t. The only thing that’s worked for me is word of mouth.

What I can tell you is something that, for someone like me, hasn’t worked: having a website. That’s why I’ve gone back to the roots of what this place was always meant to be:

Cantimplora Studio is a small, one-person studio focused on building thoughtful software and curating captivating content from the Weird Wide Web.

I really enjoy working alone, but at some point in my life, I’d like to have a team of people who are better than me, with whom I can create much more ambitious things.

That’s why this move makes sense. I want to make Cantimplora the epicenter of that—like the town square of my small city.

This change was inspired by Good Enough. If you don’t know them yet, you should definitely check them out.

With thousands of websites curated by bots, pages flooded with ads that require you to be quick with your mouse just to read, and apps that constantly vie for your attention, I believe we need more websites like this.

Websites made by people who create software because they genuinely enjoy what they’re doing. And by people who curate content because they love what they’re curating. From humans, for humans.

As I wrote before, technology should be a facilitator of our lives. And our life is out there. Our life is our family, our friends, and the experiences we perceive.

That’s a bit of what I want with this—to ensure that everything I create serves as a facilitator, not a distraction.

That’s all for now. I’ll share more news soon in this newsletter.