Don’t be happy, worry

From a Brain Pickings piece on how trying to be happy all the time is bad for our creativity.

To be clear, I myself am deeply opposed to the Tortured Genius myth of creativity. But I am also of the firm conviction that access to the full spectrum of human experience and the whole psychoemotional range of our inner lives — high and low, light and darkness — is what makes us complete individuals and enables us to create rich, dimensional, meaningful wo

In Praise of Melancholy and How It Enriches Our Capacity for Creativity – Maria Popova, Brain Pickings (28 November 2014)

Read the full piece.

The world is a good place when there are people like this in it

Screen Shot 2014-07-11 at 10.33.25

It just made me happy. A guy by the name of Zack Danger Brown – you know what he says to everybody about his middle name – launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund his making a potato salad. His stated goal was to raise $10 (£5.85) and as of this moment, with 22 days left to go, he has got 5,660 backers contributing a total of $46,052 (£26,873.46).

The page’s description just keeps tickling me:

We’re making a lot of great progress. I think it’s time for us to think about getting hats made. I added a new donor level for people who want hats.

And he made a stretch goal – long since beaten – where he says:

$1000: I’ll do a live stream of the potato salad making

Go take a look and back this vital work on Kickstarter.