There is so much to love and celebrate. Reclaim joy. Be open. Forgive.

Autumn continues with chilly winds and overcast skies, and I couldn't be more grateful. I've had a lot more eyes on my work than usual lately, and so I've taken stock over the past few days—trying to measure the inventory of myself.

But to do so, I first start with the world.

I think to myself of the billions of people across Earth who work hard on a near-daily basis. Those who are responsible for keeping the plumbing water-rushing and the lights bright and humming. Our oceans are peppered with titan-sized cargo ships carrying hundreds of millions of pounds of products—a lot of it made by people. Our skies dotted with aircraft thought impossible a century ago. How many colours of yarn are being knit? How many people are confessing their love right now? Petting their dog? How many children are writing their first poem, at this very moment?

It is overwhelming how much joy and humour there is at any given moment. The surface of this planet carrying us, together, quietly travelling through the impossible vastness of space.

We have so much in common. All people are nearly identical genetically, you know—99.9% of the genome is shared between us all. None of this is to say that we are without our differences and our faults, or that we're not facing problems minor and existential, but it is good to remember the good.

I return once again to Carl Sagan, speaking about our Pale Blue Dot:

That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Being a single person with a single lifetime on this mote of dust, I've been trying to answer the question "who am I?" my entire life. I think that's rather typical. I try my best to present an answer with clarity, with steadfast values and ethics. But the truth is far more malleable and nebulous.

I have the irrational compulsion to leave the world better than I found it, however possible that may be. And I have an irrational compulsion to write and share it with you, reader.

I want to be defined by my joy and positivity. I do not want to be defined by my enemies and what I'm against. And there's a lot of friction that goes up against that when I feel compelled to speak up on important issues I don't see others speaking up on enough. It is easy to mistake passion and care for outrage and scolding, I don't blame anybody for getting the wrong idea or a false impression.

A lot of us are afraid of the same thing, and approach it from different directions—of institutions that don't answer to anyone, and of old money reshaping our world. Of being sorted into a side before anyone's bothered to ask what we actually believe.

There are two constants I have tried to be consistent with in my writing. First, a warmth towards people. I try my best to thank others and attribute properly, and follow through on the promises I make to my readers.

Second is a fury towards systems. The oppressive mechanics in place that subjugate most everyone, even those that argue in defense for them. Of course, there are exceptions to this, like individuals who are vectors of harm with power and money.

I've never believed in the idea that you can win an argument. Whether it's the domestic mundane or philosophical, debates are exchanges and dialogues, not tribal contests.

My fury is aimed at concentration—at the people who hoard power and spend it in the dark—not at whoever happens to be standing nearest, and not those who leave angry comments out of a need for catharsis.

Those in power can throttle the money, chip at the reputation, threaten rights we assumed were permanent—but they cannot take the joy of simply getting to be alive on this rock, right now, with the people we love. And they cannot take the will to keep choosing it. Toi Derricotte wrote how joy is an act of resistance, and adrienne maree brown gave us pleasure activism. Reclaiming our satisfaction is a way of resisting systems built on scarcity and our exhaustion. Every system built on fear needs you tired and joyless to keep operating and functioning. Do not go gently into that good night.

Right now, while you read this, there are people maintaining the software the rest of us built our entire digital lives on top of, and ask for nothing in return. No corporate funding. No millionaires back them. People who have spent hours or decades creating the free, open-source digital commons. curl moves data on more than ten billion devices. Phones, cars, streaming services, hardware sent to Mars. Maintained for nearly thirty years nearly single-handedly by a Swedish developer who never built a company nor took a salary from the corporations relying on his work every day. The encryption library OpenSSL, which protects two-thirds of the web's traffic—your banking, your email, your passwords—is maintained by four volunteers, only one of them full-time, on a foundation budget of about two thousand dollars a year. Ordinary people spend a good chunk of their one short life making something useful, because it was needed and they were capable of making it.

So, I think I have not articulated enough that, because of things like the examples above, I believe people are inherently good. I have a deep optimism for our shared, collective future still. Despite everything. You are not forever-marked a bad person because you've done bad things. We will always have room for more grace and benevolence and restoration.

I desperately try to remind myself often that all we have is each other. There is a short amount of time for all of us, a century at best, on a planet that's existed for 4.5 billion years. We will only ever experience up to 0.0000018% of Earth's history. And we will only ever experience up to 0.00000058% of the universe's existence.

That's why I take stock and examine the inventory of myself. To ensure that I maintain the beauty of good discipline, and practice an everlasting optimism towards others. I am certainly far from succeeding in doing that all the time, but I am trying, I promise.

Submissions Open

Even now, when a handful of corporations try to control what billions of people are allowed to see, you can still put up a single page on Neocities—a scrappy little index.html—and have it be seen and discussed. I'm not remarkable, and what I do isn't clever. I took efforts, research, and arguments other people had painstakingly already done, spent a couple hours writing CSS and Markdown, ran it through a converter to spit out plain HTML, and uploaded it. That's it. Ctrl+S on that page and you'll have everything.

You can do this. For whatever important thing in your life is—or just for something you want to share with the world because it delights you—you can make a page and put it up and people will find it. Anybody can.

I already know what I want to build next. Another one-page site, but this one to collect good projects, code or otherwise, made by humans. If you've made something like that, tell me about it in the comments!