Drew Downs

Make a New Normal

Living

Life is hard. And full. And awesome. Live it.

  • The point isn’t to be good, it’s to do good. It seems both countercultural and yet so normal, doesn’t it? For those of us who grew up trying to be good, though, this is hard to swallow. We were rewarded for sitting still and following the rules; often being complimented for our behavior. Our benefit…

  • I spent a good part of my home quarantine the last couple of weeks learning more coding with CSS and HTML. It seemed like a good idea. Now I know more. I decided it was important because I wanted to do more than tweak my site. I wanted to make it really mine. Since I…

  • We’re familiar with the phrase “comparing apples and oranges”. The problem with the phrase is that most of the time we aren’t trying to classify all the apples or all the oranges: we’re trying to classify fruit. Which means we think the difference between them doesn’t matter. But when “fruit” is defined as “red”, crisp…

  • I’m begging you to start with your principles. Your actual principles. As in the stuff you actually believe in.

  • I want to break up with big tech. But it is just so convenient. Two nights ago, I downloaded Vivaldi. It’s a web browser that is faster, more secure, and most importantly, not run by Google. The thing is, I didn’t open it. I was too afraid. Last night, I buckled down and started it…

  • Is that sometimes you can’t. The thing about kids is that they will ultimately do what they want. And this, of course, is a good thing. We can’t make our kids resilient. We can, at best, help them develop the tools to be resilient. As the idea of raising resilient kids becomes even more trendy…