My weekly notecard, old people, new cities

Apr 17, 2022 12:31 pm

Greetings amigos,

I started making a weekly notecard on Sundays to set clear intentions.

Plus it gets me HYPED for the new week.

Here’s last Sunday’s before/after.

👴 Old People

I LOVE old people.

They have the best stories, wisdom, and life perspective that ages better than wine.

But it makes me sad when they get old and lonely.

Rewind to last Sunday, one of my goals was “give.” So I decided to give back to some old f̶a̶r̶t̶s̶ folks.

There's an awesome site Love For Our Elders that aggregates requests for lonely old people so anyone can “make an elder smile today.” (I mean look how happy this old man is)

I found an old granny in Massachusetts who lost her husband and was depressed. So I wrote her a letter. Her name is Margaret and she’s my new bff penpal.

Here’s what I wrote to her.*

*I typed it out on Cardly where they print it, put into envelope, and mail it. Please don’t tell Margaret this part.

🪦 Let ‘er RIP

Mike Posner says “I’ve made love in every city but I’ll be buried in Detroit.”

I’m not ready to go yet. (still have some international loving-making to do)

But it’s a fun exercise to ponder.

Better yet, what do we want our tombstones to read?

I just looked up my grandparents' grave on findagrave.com. It reads, “Life may not be the party we asked for, but while we are here we should dance.” (They both were big dancers.)

That’s pretty bad*ss if ya ask me.

Not sure what mine will say yet. But might draw some inspo from Leslie:

🌎 Cities & Ambition

Paul Graham (author, VC, founder of Y Combinator and Hacker News) writes one of my favorite blogs.

His classic essay “Cities & Ambition”, beautifully articulates how different places can send different messages:

Silicon Valley → be powerful
London → be aristocratic
Boston → be smart
DC → be an insider
NYC → be wealthy
Paris → be stylish
LA → be famous

A few golden nuggets:

“A city speaks to you mostly by accident — in things you see through windows, in conversations you overhear. It's not something you have to seek out, but something you can't turn off.”

“No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.”