The world won’t end (Day 16)

A few months ago, I missed my flight for the first time. In retrospect, I’m glad I did because I was able to see that side of airline service. The kiosk lady was very helpful and immediately started looking for flights she could put me on in the next few hours. I was put on another flight for a fee (flying Southwest from then on) and I arrived at my destination a few hours later than planned. At no point did she tell me, “Well, you screwed up big time.” She wanted to help.

That’s when I realized, people miss their flights all the time! I was probably one of hundreds that day. They miss them so often, that airlines take that into consideration and make sure the transfer process is as easy for the traveler as possible. So why was I so scared of doing something people did all the time?

Because in our world, everyone omits their mistakes. I didn’t know a single person who missed their flight, so I thought no one ever did. I bet there is at least one person reading this post who once missed their flight.

We like to sugarcoat the lives we present to other people. Guys who hit on girls don’t talk about the times they got shut down, they only talk about the hottest girl they dated. People take hundreds of selfies (many bad) with all kinds of different angles before settling on the perfect one to post on Instagram. We think we are putting our best foot forward. Sure, we are doing that, but we are also omitting the ugly parts of our lives. And if no one mentions the ugly parts of their life, people will look around, see clean, spotless lives and think there is something wrong with their life because theirs isn’t perfect like the others.

If you do some digging into why people sugarcoat, you can start to see that people don’t really know what they’re doing and they’re just doing what everyone else is doing. If you read from Day 6 on, I think you’ll be able to draw some understanding about this.

I want to tell you that no one is perfect. Attempting to live up to that expectation is the root of unhappiness and feelings of inadequacy. You are where you are. Admit your flaws and mistakes. Especially to yourself. Every time you do, you make your world feel a little more real and everyone else feels a little less alone.

Starting stopwatch…

• Time: 22 minutes, 2 seconds
• Learned:
  • Started Pong tutorial
    
  • Much better understanding of requestAnimationFrame
  • Better understanding of the game loop and how to update info
  • The pong game ball moves! See here.

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