Big Feelings

Personal Growth, Material Goods and Rising Above Online Rudeness.

An ACL Kodachrome scan from my collection.

Today, I have something different. No product recommendations or thoughts about consumerism or European travel. I want to talk about criticism, self-reflection, and the fact that despite what we see on the internet, no one’s life is perfect.

Before we get any further, I want to just say how lucky I am with a lot of things in my life. I married a great woman, have two wonderful children, and have a supportive family who did their best to enable me to accomplish the things I have. I’m fortunate to be able to write on the internet for almost 20 years and be involved with companies I love, doing work that I find meaningful. It’s all a bit of a miracle considering I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life when I graduated from college. When I started ACL, it was simply to celebrate the things I thought were overlooked and underappreciated.

If anyone was around for the early days of ACL, you might remember the comment section of the site. It was lively and rowdy at times, but I was also aggressive and didn’t take any sh/t. (Goldberg and Coggins loved it all and made me a book of ACL comments for my 40th.) I was younger then and less patient than I am today, but there were probably other, deeper reasons I reacted the way I did. Something happened to me recently that dredged up some feelings from those early days on the open internet, and it got me thinking about our possessions, self-esteem, my faults, and how we all manifest those feelings on the internet.