what I did & things that brought me joy
Saw Coldplay live after 7 years missing their 2018 concert. Funny story, my wife and I (we were just colleagues at that time) were both trying to get tickets in the office in 2017 and failed. So the fact we can catch them live as a married couple now is extra special for us.
The band is excellent live! I appreciate how they try to connect with their fans (which is no mean feat in a sold out 60,000 stadium show); and they seem to have fun + genuinely appreciate their fans, which is something I’ve not seen before in English music.
Plus they had these cool LED bracelets that lit up in time with the music. Super cool!
It was the Pongal festival last week (a celebration of the end of the harvest season and honoring of farm animals within the Tamil community), so we had a cow and calf in our estate.
My wife makes amazing blanched choy sum - you know the amazing buttery-soft, yet slightly crunchy vegetables you get at yumcha HK restaurants. It’s.So.Good!
what I enjoyed from the internet
The comments especially in this post 🥲🥲🥲 “I get upset when they rearrange the grocery store” YES!!
Sometimes it’s difficult to think of lived realities different from our own and who may need different access requirements. Threads like these help shine a light on these different realities.
Found this great article from my wife about enjoying hobbies by half-assing them: It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, thanks to the growth of ‘content creators’ and ‘side hustles’, it’s so easy to commoditise your hobbies from something that brings you joy and fun into something that pays the bills. And your relationship with it changes when you do it (believe me, my full time work and now business is built off my ability to write well, and enjoy writing. It’s taken me years to find a place where I’ve began to enjoy writing and reading again. (Also see this excellent essay on hobbies by Anne Helen Peterson.)
Speaking of reading, I finished reading my first book in forever - Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey. I’ve done up a quick review (which was in itself inspired by a comment by a group program mate thinking out loud on why it was so hard to rest). But I want to be a bit more intentional with my book reviews so you might see a more detailed post on this space soon. I dunno, I guess I’m feeling increasingly icky about having my writing on rented platforms and social media platforms, so I’m trying to find ways to have all my stuff under one roof.
what I’m thinking about
This week I moved my business newsletter to Beehiiv. I wanted to keep everything else the same, but something felt off with the entire concept of it being so curation-focused.
See, I love curation and sharing interesting things. Even the previous iteration (Noting This Down) of this newsletter was built around curation. But it never seems to stick. I’ll dive into it with a fervent passion for a couple of months which fades over time.
But as I told my business coach this week, I like curation, but I realise over my many fizzled out curation-linked projects, I don’t love it.
She asked me one question - “does it feel like the newsletter name is becoming a restrictive box?” Maybe sticking to a set format is too rigid for me and I need to design my newsletter spaces to be more freeform.
Curation doesn’t set my soul on fire, if you want to put it that way. I’ve had more fun writing long form, deep dives into topics and weaving curation into those posts instead. When I wrote the latest newsletter issue, I could feel like I was shoehorning the curation element in and it didn’t feel fun.
Not a great experience for both the creator and my readers. So it’s time for a change!
Doesn’t mean I want to eliminate curation entirely though. I still like doing it, but I won’t build a newsletter around it, which is what I think is stressing me out.
Images that come to mind, a playground, a notebook, or a diary of sorts for me to take either approach in my newsletter.
I’m accounting for days where I feel like putting together a bunch of links while offering space to go deep and think about things if energy and space are available.
Exciting times ahead for that newsletter! That one’s going to see a change in the coming weeks.
Which brings me to another digital space which I think it’s time to archive or shift - my personal website.
I started this in 2020, as part of the Write of Passage course and COVID-induced lockdowns. I wrote some of my best essays at that time, and it’s still work I’m proud of today.
But this digital space is gathering dust. I haven’t updated it in years, and I’ve been paying 168 USD/year to keep it online.
While traffic metrics are up (somehow), the website doesn’t reflect who I am today. 2020 Joshua was very into reading, creating online and following entrepreneurship/self-improvement/creator economy type people (I guess you can call them the productivity-hustlebros lol) on Twitter and Medium.
Today, I’m still interested in these things, but it’s become a lot more nuanced. I’m a lot more aware of systemic factors now, the value of rest, and life beyond your work self.
I originally envisioned the website as a hub for all the writing I’ve done over the years, whether it’s my adventures on Medium from 2017-2019, publishing on the website from 2020-2022, or random thoughts. It’s pretty cool to see how I’ve evolved, writing-wise over the years!
Kinda like a messy desk in a way. I’ve disabled the subscription renewal which expires next month as a first step. I might just fold it into this substack and make this substack my personal website instead. Kinda silly to be paying so much for this website if I’m not using it, ya know? I still like the domain though, so maybe I’ll connect the domain here hmm.
Still thinking about it!