Category: family
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When a lunch date turns into a lesson in contentment
I had a lunch date with my wife today, and I was reminded of just how incredibly profound contentment is. Contentment is one of the most difficult concepts in the entire world for rich people like me to grasp, because it’s the least obvious and most backwards path to walk down…
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Why are you working so much?
I used to work for the premier accounting firm in the world. That’s a subjective statement, but so is “Dook basketball is the worst.” But you know something about that place? Besides being the best at what we did, and besides having incredibly talented people there that were, for lack…
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Don’t move to California for the weather
Though I claim the Old North State as my own, I was actually born in Southern California, which is something I used to think made me really cool to girls in middle school, probably. California is, and I mean this as non-pejoratively as I can, a strange magical land.…
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Following rules no one taught us
“The English language is a rascal.” I came across a post over at Kottke today that blew my mind in a way that was at once disturbing and fantastic. The whole point of the post was to show that there is a very specific order for adjectives when we string more…
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Free stuff that matters
Do you know how much it costs to look someone in the eye, or to put your phone down and listen, or to send a random note, or to shoot baskets with your kid, or to give someone a ride, or to ask a good question, or to say “I…
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Happiness is an inexact science, and not a science at all
Your present self doesn’t quite know what will make your future self truly happy and fulfilled, which makes this business of living a pretty tough one. We sort of go around doing things right now that our in-five-seconds-or-hours-or-months-or-years-self will appreciate and be grateful for, and this is natural and expected.…
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Play It Again Sports, skipping Halloween, and the importance of family rituals
Despite the wonderful reality of having a Piggly Wiggly and a public pool and a library all within a two block radius, the town I grew up in had fewer homes than my current neighborhood in Raleigh, and it was a big deal when they built the strip mall with…
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Impress the right people, save money
An experiment I have for you to conduct is this: Instead of trying to impress everyone except the people closest to you, why not impress them first and foremost? Report back your results, but my working hypothesis is that the way you go about impressing those closest to you differs markedly from the…
Meaningful Returns 