I was in high school when this came out so I can recite this song word-for-word because in 1999, it was all over MTV, the radio, and most importantly, on Napster. I remember the original 1997 edit (even though I first heard it in 1999), because that was the version I downloaded off of Napster as a 15 year old.
Even back then, there were all sorts of weird attributions to it (I think that my Napster copy had a Kurt Vonnegut credits, though the author was Baz Luhrmann in the meta data) and conspiracies about it. But I remember learning fairly early that it was some newspaper column.
The other part of this is that the 7:10 version has the “Everybody’s Free” sample from Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” — which like every other 13 year old girl in 1997, was a soundtrack I knew backwards/forwards/upside down/verbatim.
Like the people on the podcast, this has remained a weird earworm that I can just recall instantly in weird places.
What a weird but great song. And as I am now in my late 30s, the advice is good!
I was also inundated with this song late in highschool. It was one of the songs that made it from whatever illicit file-sharing system into my personal library as "Baz Luhrman - Everybody's Free (to wear sunscreen)." I also remember the discovery process of learning that he didn't write the words. Learning that he didn't speak the text either. Learning that it was speech given to a graduating class. And learning that it wasn't a speech to a graduating class, but a column written.
We still have a library full of mislabeled music like that.
I'm in my early 40s, "Be kind to your knees, you'll miss them when they're gone" comes to mind not infrequently.
I was in highschool when I first heard it too - class of 2000. I loved the song and Kurt Vonnegut. I have even played it for some friends within the last year.
I had absolutely no idea about the true origin until today.
I remember first hearing it in college, a few years after it came out. It was around the time I'd first heard of Baz Luhrmann for other reasons (Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, and Moulin Rouge, all of which I loved at the time), so I feel like he was in the collective consciousness of my social circles, and that increased its popularity. I remember not finding out the true origins of the prose until quite a few years later.
I hadn't known about the sampling from "Everybody's Free" from R+J! Always something new to learn.
Listening to it again today... the parts about getting to know your parents before they're gone for good (mine have both passed since I first heard the song), and being kind to your knees (I'm still recovering from a knee injury from back in January), really resonated with me. One major thing I am pleased about is that I have managed to hold on to those "precious few" close friends over the years; my life would be very different without them.
Ha, amusing to see a fan of this song. I'm class of '99 and definitely remember that this song exists now that I see this thread, but had forgotten up until today and do not remember a single word. Still love Romeo+Juliet, though, and make my wife watch Quindon Tarver (RIP) singing When Doves Cry on YouTube every few months when I think about him.
I mean, you just described 99.99999% of the population, especially those that participate in a discussion of a 25 year old pop song on a technical community board, or more broadly, teenagers.
More jollies and harmless pranks, I say!
But on a serious note, I reflect a lot on that song and empathize with being kinds to knees (I broke mine at 18 and decades later still feel it).
It's amazing how every so often, I gain new insight into a line from this song. I recently hit 40, and "be kind to your knees, you'll miss them when they're gone" is starting to make sense in a way that used to be more abstract.
Hopefully this helps someone else. I'm approaching 50. I just took up mountain biking after moving to an area that has lots of trails. I have seen gains in my health and my mood that I worried might not return. I ride with a guy who's 60 and he regularly smokes the rest of us. My wife and I started kayaking together recently and that's done wonders for mood, health, and our marriage. So, here's my advice:
1) Don't stress about your age. And don't stress about approaching an age. Enjoy whatever age you are. Instead, consider your condition. Should you improve it? Can you improve it?
2) To help with #1, find a hobby that gets your heart rate up and uses a good portion of your body. Better yet, find multiple hobbies that exercise different areas of your body.
3) For me, the key to #2 was finding a hobby that actively engages my mind at the same time. I needed the rush and challenge of riding on trails that mountain biking offers. But for kayaking, I thrive on the opposite. The tranquility of the water and being out on a date with my wife is a sort of meditation. In both hobbies, I come home refreshed and energized. If you haven't found such a hobby yet, keep trying different things until something clicks. You'll probably know it when you get there.
As someone who just started mountain biking for health two days ago (mid-30s now, always been athletic but decided to take the pandemic off...)
I agree with all this! Great list. I'm considering taking today off from doing hills on the mountain bike, but maybe I'll still go out and ride some flats, not sure it's more healthy to take a day off from it right now. I felt great for hours after both rides.
This is so funny. I started mountain biking last year and it's been fun but I wanted to do something with my wife as a hobby. I'll look into Kayaking. LOL.
Do you do a 2 person kayak or 2 separate 1 person kayaks?
Protip from someone who is 45 and has had bad knees since he was 15: Strengthen the muscles around the knee as much as possible. The stronger your quads and calves are, the better your knees will be.
The best way to do this is squats with either no weights or just a couple of pounds. You may need to wear knee braces when you do this (in my case I was able to skip the braces after about 10 years)
This is actually true for most any joint in your body -- the stronger the muscles surrounding the joint are, the better that joint will perform.
The surgeon who fixed my first knee injury advised me to do single legged squads if in any way possible: the balancing aspect is good for activating many small muscles around the knee, and the weight is high enough to maintain muscle mass even after age 50.
Any easy way to start out with single-legged squats (pistols) is to find yourself a step up or box jump box. Start out low and just step up onto the box for several reps/sets. You can increase the height until just below the knee. You don't want to go too high. After you strengthen from that, you can start doing other progressions for true pistols if you want.
Agreed! I injured my knee back in January, and my physical therapist's main focus has been on strengthening my all the muscles around the knee in addition to the knee itself. It's been a slow recovery, but I can definitely see how it works better this way.
My sister has been having foot and hip problems, and her PT has been taking a whole-musculature approach to healing those issues. It's really nice to see these kind of thoughtful interventions, rather than immediately getting prescribed a steroid shot, or, worse, surgery.
Many people have reported good results from Ben Patrick’s knee rehab workouts. I can't personally vouch for them, but people who are struggling with knee injuries might want to research his protocol.
I decided to try sled pulls after seeing a YouTuber KneesOverToesGuy, who claimed it was great for knee strength. I do sets of sled pulls at least a couple of times a week now, and imo it’s been great for my knees. I can do 3-4 6+ mile runs a week without ever getting sore knees.
I guess it depends on your specific problems, but my general advice would be to start small. Don't worry about getting a deep squat at first; start shallow. You can also use a chair back or counter to support some of your weight.
Take it slow, and start off preferring more sets of fewer reps. If 4 or 5 reps is all you can do, that's fine!
Work your way up over a period of weeks or months, increasing the depth of the squat and number of reps. If you're using something to support some of your weight, slowly wean yourself off of that. Eventually you'll want to be doing fairly deep squats, 10+ reps per set, while holding some light weights. But it's ok if it takes you months (or even over a year) to get there.
(This is of course not medical advice; you should speak to a doctor who knows your specific situation before starting a new exercise regimen, especially if it's something you're already having trouble with.)
Almost 50 here. 40+ is not just an age. It sucks being in your 40s. Things really don't work the same. My brain is slower, I get confused a little bit more, I struggle to find the right words at least 3 times a day. Even worse, your parents get sick and you have to start worrying about them and taking care of them.
Enjoy your 30s to the fullest, because it gets worse and it's completely out of your control to make it better. The best you can expect in your 40s is to slow down the decline.
40+ is just an age. Things work about the same. My brain operates at the same speed.
There is a point when significant mental and physical deterioration becomes inevitable, but for most people that's well past 50. I suspect that most people complaining about issues in their 40s haven't put sufficient focus on fitness and nutrition, or have damaged themselves though substance abuse.
Was around the time I started doing yoga semi-regularly (which reminds me I haven't done it in weeks). I have a couple of YouTube videos starred that I use depending on where things ache, though I've found the bulk of what I need is for tight hips; takes care of hips, legs and back pain.
Very much agree re: the aging advice in the song, my gosh the difference past 40!
I sorta followed the advice of the song and spent around 10 years in California (LA + Bay Area). Have spent the following 10 years living in the NYC area (mostly, there was a short break in the middle). Wish the song gave a suggestion after you leave both! I tried the “live in a large RV” life in 2021 traveling all over and it was great, but it isn’t something that would be a multi-year thing for me I don’t think.
That wasn’t the problem as much for me, the issue was hassle. It was a hassle finding campgrounds with availability. It was a hassle ensuring the campground had sufficient cell coverage (every coverage map is a LIE) for me to continue my full time day job (less problematic now with Starlink RV, but still an issue with their network capacity in that area somewhat). It was a hassle maneuvering a 38’ camper everywhere I went (I bet I can back up through a complex obstacle course after all that practice though!). etc. etc.
Ooof, yeah. I injured one of my knees back in January, and at 41... well, it's still recovering, and the physical therapy is slow. I'm otherwise in good health, but it's just frustrating to see how we don't heal as well as we get older.
The words "do something every day that scares you" had a tremendous impact on my life.
After a bad breakup, I decided that those were important words and that I needed to make an effort to get out of my comfort zone. So I wrote down a long list of things that scared me, all from eating weird foods, talking to strangers to traveling to new places and starting companies, and I started deliberately doing them.
That became the start of a 7 year digital nomad adventure with several experiences that I feel could be movies. It came at a cost as well, but nothing that I regret.
I spent most of my time in Barcelona, but I was in NYC, London, Bangkok, Shenzhen and various small spots throughout Southeast Asia, mostly in Bali and Thailand. I never changed residency officially. I am Danish so I could certainly have saved a lot in taxes, but I just didn't bother.
These days there is a lot more infrastructure (like https://nomadlist.com/) which is great but I imagine also takes some of the excitement out of it. If you are able to work remotely, it's quite easy to make it work in cheap places, depending on your expectations. There is a certain type of loneliness associated with it in that you make lots of temporary connections. There were times where that got to me. On the other hand, I made many true friends that I still speak to frequently. Today I am happy to have an international network of people that always offer me a place to stay when I am in their region.
I haven't been aware of nomadlist.com before - is it worth the fee? I'm somewhat hesitant to sign up. The signup starts with some bullshit 50% discount from $218 to $109, while apparently $99 is the regular price anyway. Looks a bit sketchy in my eyes, but I might be too critical.
Eh, depending on what you want to get out of it, I'm not so sure it's worth it.
A lot of the information I've come across on things like cost of living and average internet speed I've found to be pretty inaccurate.
Like, it's saying $64 a month for a 1 br studio in the city center in Buenos Aires right now. That's nowhere close to what you'll be paying and it's not useful information. It's similar to some of the stuff you find on Numbeo, which makes you think "where are they getting these numbers??"
It does seem like it would be pretty good for meeting people though. I happened to note in my profile that I was currently in Bali and had nearly half a dozen people DM me over the span of a couple months just looking to make friends or connections in the area.
It does also offer access to some pretty active chat rooms where you get to share information with other digital nomads which can be pretty useful.
~$100 for access to what could essentially be a free discord server, or be replaced by the countless free expat Facebook groups you'll find based in any destination you'd like? Eh.
Thank you for the reply! Being an introvert, I don't care much about the people :) but rather about the information. If it's not accurate, it's probably not worth the $$.
While an EU citizen can at least roam in the EU fine, and a US citizen can roam the 50 states, seems that roaming outside of that would be exceedingly difficult and expensive to get appropiate visa (if they exist)
> an American could spend years just traveling the United States
Yup. I actually imagine a Californian could probably spend a LIFETIME roaming California and still not see everything that's worth seeing. The late Huell Howser did just that, but he only scratched the surface of the amazing places to visit in CA.
> Also it's an open secret that enforcement is poor to nil on the above setup.
OK, but what happens if you have a medical emergency? Googling suggests there are dedicated "digital nomad" insurance plans, but does a sizable fraction of digital nomads actually have insurance that provides cover for people who are doing illegal remote work?
Most developed countries (especially EU, but even USA) require that hospital take care of actual medical emergencies regardless of ability to pay or immigration status.
This is different than getting a doctor checkup or a scheduled surgery. For that you need to go home. But if you get into a car accident in the UK while a digital nomad, the process is probably the same as if you were a tourist.
E.g. NHS would take care of you, and sort the billing out later. And tourist insurance would probably even take care of you. For insurance underwriting purposes, being a nomad is a plus (other than customs law), because you spend all day in a library or WeWork, not bungee jumping or safari riding.
Of course, your point is correct that being on a tourist visa vs (say in the USA) a green card does cause a lot of headaches. Landlords will not rent long term to you. You cannot get a local job in case your main employer fires you (and you fall in love with the place). You'll have a hard time getting utilities, a bank account, etc.
I would assume you either are young and gambling you don't have an emergency, or you accept that you'll be treated by whatever is available, hopefully stabilized, and return to your country of origin.
You may be able to survive on "tourist insurance" or whatever, if you keep your working down-low (if it's all laptop work, maybe nobody will know or care enough to investigate).
What about the tax aspect of it? Or do you simply pay tax as resident of the place you last properly lived?
Maybe this is a more relevant question for non-Americans, since most other countries don’t tax their citizens on their worldwide income. Eg UK definitely doesn’t. But often it requires the employer to be comfortable with the HR situation you put them in. Often easier to contract via a company (intermediary HR entity or your own).
Many people just keep "working" for wherever they "officially" live and stay on the down-low. You get a lot of cash/barter happening also, and try to stay out of the attention of the authorities.
Many places have tax treaties that allow you to pay taxes to your "home" nation (and/or state/province) as long as you don't stay there/away more than a certain number of days each year. That also assumes you have the right visa to work there legally, and I don't mean work for a local company... I mean do any work that you get paid for such as remote work.
Traveling the US misses out on different cultural experiences though which are the most interesting parts of traveling I think, esp making friends and dating.
Just like “illegal immigration” in the US, you probably add more to the country economically than you cost. If you’re working remotely, it’s not like you’re taking a job away from the locals.
I can attest to that, my wife and I are planning the digital nomad lifestyle later this year. But we are doing it only in the US, staying in one brand of hotels (Hilton brands -- Homewood and Embassy's mostly) to take advantage of loyalty programs for free nights, the consistency over trying to stay at an AirBnb and just for comfort, and flying everywhere.
It's going to take us at least 3 years to hit all of the places we want to stay. Depending on hotel prices, we plan to stay at each place from 7-21 days. It's definitely on the "expensive" side. But we are renting out our house and selling our cars to make it more affordable.
Of course The whole credit card churning and earning points won't hurt.
Every hotel has mini fridges they can put in your room. These are for people who have medicine that needs to be refrigerated. You can request one of these fridges if your room doesn't have a fridge. I always let them know that I don't need it for medicine and that they can have it back if they need it. I did this every week and only once was a hotel ever out of fridges; never did they request to have it back.
Bring your own router and network cables. Sometimes, I should say often, the wifi signal is weak in your room. If there's an ethernet jack then you can setup your own access point. If you can only get one connection, then the router can help share that connection. A nice router will also have multiple ethernet ports of course, so you can both be wired in when you have important calls, etc.
Bring your own streaming media device. If you like roku, or firetv, or whatever, bring your own and plug it into the hotel TV when you want video entertainment. If you bring your own router it also makes for easy setup on their network. Roku, Amazon, Apple and Google all have models with ethernet support if you want extra stability.
Bring a small toolkit with basic tools and a flashlight. Sometimes your things or the hotel's things are broken and it's so much faster to get up and running with a couple turns of a screwdriver than waiting for a maintenance guy who may never show up.
The flashlight is also very useful if you're renting cars. They're often parked in dark airport garages and it's nice to walk around the car first so you can properly report damage before you take responsibility of the car. Never rent from low priced local car rental agencies, they are known to milk the same damages for money from every customer.
Bring a good bluetooth speaker. If you enjoy music, decent sound is a simple luxury that punches above its weight. In a jam, you can cut a rectangular hole in the bottom of a hotel paper cup to make your phone speaker a little more directional. Having that toolkit is helpful here.
Check the tax laws. If you stay in any one place too long, you'll owe income taxes there. 21 days shouldn't be a problem, but probably good to check.
All Hiltons at least have mini fridges. Homewood Suites and Home2Suites have full refrigerators. Homewood suites has full kitchens with stoves. Home2Suites allows you to check out “burners”.
I have a Roku stick for traveling. It has a feature that lets it log in to captured networks where you have to login. Some hotels have remotes that don’t allow you to change the source. I travel with a couple of “universal” brand specific remotes
TMobile has a “secret plan” called Global 15 that gives you unlimited high speed hot spot data in the US (not 3G) for $50 a month. I signed up for that.
I travel as a consultant occasionally and I visit my parents decently often and work from there. I’ve optimized my travel setup:
- I have a portable USB C powered display for a second display
- I use my iPad as a third display using Duet (the native Mac screen sharing doesn’t work on my corporate laptop)
- I have a Roost 3 laptop stand
- I have the largest airplane legal Anker battery pack that can charge a laptop and other devices
For context: A "point" can be worth from $0.005 to $0.009 depending on how you use them.
When I stay at a Hilton, I get points per dollar spent not including taxes. But including hotel restaurants.:
- 10x - base points everyone gets
- 10x - Diamond status for having the Amex Hilton Aspire card
- 14x - every dollar spent at a Hilton including taxes and fees..
So that's 34 points per dollar that I usually would say is worth $0.17 to $0.23 per dollar in points.
Also with Hilton, if you pay for four nights with all points, you get the fifth night free. You also don't pay taxes and fees when you pay with points. We are planning to stay for free at least 40 days next year in various big cities across the US.
You also get 10K points for each 10 days you stay over 30 and an additional 30K points after you stay over 60 days. Hilton is usually running some kind of special. For instance from May through September, you get an additional 20 points per dollar when you stay more than 3 days. That's 54 points per dollar or almost 38 cents per dollar toward future stays.
Airlines aren't nearly as generous - ever.
I travel maybe 6 times a year for business and collect points using "other people's money"
What makes you say that? Admittedly most of my backpacking-like travel days are long behind me, but border crossings typically aren't that difficult or expensive. EU is probably the hardest (almost certainly needed the visas before you arrived). Most of SE Asia and Africa you'd just hand over a few USD at the border, get a stamp, and keep moving.
Probably depends a lot on your citizenship. As an American it’s easy to get at least a 3-6 month visa basically anywhere except for embargo nations; many other countries that have visa holiday systems make 6 month stays pretty easy too. not so for my Indian friends for instance.
It does, German passport rate apparently under the most visa friendly ones. Not that I will ever have the luxury to actually try that... Never say never, I hope!
I as a UK citizen can temporarily visit the US, or Japan, or Thailand on holiday.
I could also go to meet my colleagues there, go and sell something, go and buy something, go to a convention, etc. That's counted as "doing business"
I can't work there though, unless I have an appropriate visa. Doesn't matter if I'm working remotely for a remote company that doesn't even have a presence in the country, it is still doing work.
You can easily get year-long visas to Australia and New Zealand if you're young enough and from an "approved" country (look for working holliday visa).
I think countries like Thailand and Indonesia (Bali) also allow foreigners to stay quite a generous amount of time... South America is also an option for up to 6 months, I believe, without much hassle... if you fancy China, they also have not-so-difficult-to-get student visas from what I've seen (lots of Europeans were going to study there for some reason when I was a "traveller" myself, around a decade ago... and it can be to study silly things like dance or a language, nothing too serious) so that's pretty much most of the world already?
Would anyone want to nomad to China now with their harsh lockdowns if you test positive for Covid? This isn’t an anti-China political statement by any means.
Your chances of being hit by a lockdown in China are very tiny, specially given you have freedom of movement and can easily get away from a region that's being affected. Why do you mention China while you could be hit by a harsher lockdown in e.g. Australia and many other countries?
A bit of an anti-globalist perspective IMO. With an EU or US [1] passport you can freely visit 100s of countries with no visa - or "visa on arrival" which is usually still relatively cheap for most countries.
I other words, you are willing to commit insurance fraud (or shoulder the risks of being uninsured) and violate visa laws and hope nobody finds out. But at least no one will accuse you of being of an "anti-globalist perspective".
(For what it's worth, I think it would probably be a win for many countries to make it feasible to get some short-term-ish remote work visa if you are unlikely to burden them or drive down local wages).
> Kansas has policies that could deter remote work and are deterring greater interstate work with our neighbors. Kansas requires employer withholding for people working in the state just for one day, which creates an annoying hurdle for companies trying to operate even in a small capacity in Kansas. In 2020, the Kansas legislature considered a bill that would have extended the withholding requirement period to 30 days, but the proposal died.
I've never heard the original, but i remember my had occasionally listening to the (Australian) parody Not the Sunscreen Song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YwqFz14xY4 when i was a kid. The line "never go to Adelaide - it's a hole" is stuck in my brain.
In high school before I had even heard the song on the radio, we went on a field trip to local pharmaceutical lab. One of the chemists there had printed out copies of the lyrics for us from an email that had it mislabeled as being from Kurt Vonnegut.
That was during the era where people of a certain age, even a scientist in a chemistry lab, would believe anything sent to them in an email.
Hah, according to Wikipedia[1] Luhrmann himself got the lyrics from that misattributed Vonnegut chain email, and only when trying to secure rights discovered it was actually from a Mary Schmich article.
Ah yes. Chain emails were where meme-like disinformation used to spread before Facebook made it even easier. At least I don't have people forwarding garbage into my inbox anymore.
Wow, what a blast from the past. I haven't heard this song in 20 years, when it was on the radio, and mostly just ignored it then - when I was young and powerful, to quote the song.
Hearing it now was oddly relieving. It's like every line tells/assures you of things you think about, realize, or worry about - suddenly making it all just seem perfectly normal and OK. Especially for someone without parents or mentors to give you such advice. I guess I was just too young and 'allknowing' to relate to it or appreciate it when it came out.
Reminds me of ‘Fitter Happier’ by Radiohead. Some loose guide on how to succeed in life, although the Radiohead lyrics are more cynical. Here’s the lyrics:
"Fitter Happier"
Fitter, happier, more productive
Comfortable (Not drinking too much)
Regular exercise at the gym (Three days a week)
Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries
At ease
Eating well (No more microwave dinners and saturated fats)
A patient, better driver
A safer car (Baby smiling in back seat)
Sleeping well (No bad dreams)
No paranoia
Careful to all animals (Never washing spiders down the plughole)
Keep in contact with old friends (Enjoy a drink now and then)
Will frequently check credit at (Moral) bank (hole in wall)
Favours for favours
Fond but not in love
Charity standing orders
On Sundays ring road supermarket
(No killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants)
Car wash (Also on Sundays)
No longer afraid of the dark
Or midday shadows
Nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate
Nothing so childish
At a better pace
Slower and more calculated
No chance of escape
Now self-employed
Concerned (But powerless)
An empowered and informed member of society (Pragmatism not idealism)
Will not cry in public
Less chance of illness
Tires that grip in the wet (Shot of baby strapped in back seat)
A good memory
Still cries at a good film
Still kisses with saliva
No longer empty and frantic
Like a cat
Tied to a stick
That's driven into
Frozen winter shit (The ability to laugh at weakness)
Calm
Fitter, healthier and more productive
A pig
In a cage
On antibiotics
Doesn't the final sentence suggest that the list is more than slightly cynical? To me it seems like Radiohead are sneering at this safe middle-road existence.
I've never caught the full lyrics before, but I've never thought it was meant as a guide in any way. Rather, it's a condemnation of mass modern life and complacency, people getting older and more boring and going through their lives like cattle until they die. It's mocking all the life advice our boring parents gave us when we were growing up. This is all delivered in a monotone, almost robotic text-to-speech voice with Radiohead's typical eerie music backing it.
(As a longtime fan I'm a bit biased, but I think it's worth a listen to understand the tone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4SzvsMFaek . The rest of the album also adds some context, as others have noted.)
I get the message, and I strongly disagree with it, as someone who hasn't achieved stability yet.
When you don't have a stable career, or work for long hours for low pay with family to take care of, you wish you had this life. The message can also be taken in a bad way by young people, who then neglect to develop useful skills early on, and ultimately struggle hard to find work. There is so much messaging against good choices in life, that people overlook why they are good choices anyways. I'd rather be at least middle class with the money and freedom to change my circumstances, than struggling with little freedom due to lack of resources.
I don't deny that this is a work of art, and one crafted well, but I just disagree with the sentiment.
It's very rockstar live fast die young mentality. (at least half of it, the other half I agree with) Assuming they value art, I find in my own life that stability gives me more time to work on and finish art. Drinking less, exercising three times a week etc, for me it allows me to be more deeply transgressive or unconventional, not less so.
Noting that a typical middle class lifestyle is comparable to a pig being held in a cage for a meaningless life and eventual slaughter probably does in fact meet the full definition of cynical.
I grew up loving Radiohead, and they are still my favorite band. Recently I realized that my life is resembling this song more and more. It was a depressing discovery.
I had not heard this song (or the original column) until my 30s, after my divorce. My close friend sent me this song, and it was the anthem for my next couple of years, regardless of how cheesy that sounds. It really did help me out of a bad place, and it's filled with absolute wisdom and actually did change the trajectory of my life.
Mary Schmich was the speaker at my graduation from North Central College in Naperville IL in June 2000. She gently prefaced her remarks with the clarification that she, and not Vonnegut was the source is the song’s text.
>>The column was circulated around the Internet, with an erroneous claim that it was a commencement address by Kurt Vonnegut, usually at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the misattribution became a news item when Vonnegut was contacted by reporters to comment. He told The New York Times, "What she wrote was funny, wise and charming, so I would have been proud had the words been mine."[15]
> If I could offer you one tip for the future, documentation would be it. The long term benefits of a well documented system, with FAQs, RFCs, and man pages, have been proven time and again by systems administrators everywhere, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own miserable experience... I will dispense this advice now
> Enjoy and appreciate the well behaved and polite users. Oh, nevermind, by the time you figure out who the well behaved and polite users are, you'll have wasted all of your available time on the ones who are not. But believe me, in 20 years you'll look back at photos of some users and recall in a way you can't grasp now, how much time and energy you wasted on those other whiners.
Development is like a one-way hash function: a line of code may have been added and structured a particular way for any one of an infinite number of reasons.
Without the documentation (the forward mapping) there's no way to exactly predict its intended function, leading to all sorts of misunderstandings further down the line when someone tries to reverse it.
Doesn't need re-explaining but makes me realise we often talk about comments explaining what code does, which leads to "your code should be well-written so it's easy to understand what it does" or "I'm a good developer, I can understand that easily by reading it".
But as you say the question is why - people will often be reading existing code because of a bug, so clearly the thought process that created it had a faulty step somewhere.
Really, what people think should go in comments should instead go to commits, which is actually a snapshot of what the author was trying to achieve during a point in time.
Inline comments just become out of date or mangled. Commit revisions are the source of truth.
The problem with commit messages is that they quickly get buried in the log, and are difficult to dig up. It's not perfect, but comments stay with the code throughout the versions.
git blame will usually give you the last edit of a line, which I find is fairly easy to see the last time it was changed (and then if you want to know how things were done earlier, do the same on its parent commit)
Playing by ear is an amazing skill you can develop. Some people (to name drop a musician: Joe Stump) can hear something once and just play it, note-for-note.
But it's a ton easier when you're young, and your brain is malleable.
Lots of music is performed first, and only later transcribed (often from a recording). In all cases, a music performance contains more data than sheet music (although there's no guarantee that the performer played their sheet music accurately to the page, if they had any). However, in many cases it's much more productive to learn a song by listening to a recording. Paul McCartney famously didn't use sheet music at all.
I guess sheet music is like documentation, but just like documentation it's often incomplete, wrong, confusing, misleading, or worse than nothing at all. Sometimes it's the only ground truth we have, such as with classical music where we can't know what the composer truly had in mind, so in cases like that I'd say the sheet music is effectively the source code.
Interesting! I am the age when I should have come across this song, but I never did. Never saw the music video, never heard it on the radio, never heard anyone talk about it at school.
The advice is timeless, but I don't know that the song has aged particularly well. If you can call it that. It's less a song and more an essay read over a very 90s beat, and not 90s in a way that makes me nostalgic either.
I'm 41. I just asked 6 friends who are my contemporaries and each of them knew this song well. It was also, of course, extremely popular, as the link points out.
Can you introspect a bit about what may be unusual about you so that you were never exposed to this song?
For starters, at 35 I am a bit younger than you. That's certainly a factor, but I still should have been exposed.
For radio play, I was living in rural Alabama at the time. Wouldn't shock me if the local station never played it because someone's church had some kind of issue with it. (Famously my mother once called in to request a Billy Idol song and was refused because the DJ claimed that Idol was a satanist.)
For the music video, my dad was the unrelenting Master of the Remote Control, and he didn't care for music videos (although he loved rock music. I have his record collection. Go figure.) My brother and I did get to watch stuff, but my brother is younger still. At the time, we would have been watching programs suitable for both of us, which was mostly cartoons, as he was the right age range and I wasn't quite too old.
I definitely had friends and classmates who were watching music videos and talking about them at school. I remember that much, but don't remember any details. I probably tuned them out since I wasn't paying attention to music videos anyway.
Early forties, grew up in NM, never heard the song until today. I wasn't personally into hip hop but I seemed to have been exposed to most of the other hip hop songs on the Billboard top 100 in 1999 when the song peaked.
We grew up in the burbs. Everyone was into music. Just never heard this song. Not all songs go everywhere, eh. For example, as a Canadian, most Americans I met at the time had never heard of the once most popular band in Canada - The Tragically Hip.
I love this song. It has had tremendous impact on me. It somehow just takes the pressure off, especially in moments where you are stressed, depressed, or anxious.
Listened to it. Great podcast. I was positively surprised that they got Baz Luhrman and Mary Schmich to tell their story about the song and how it came to be, really cool story as well.
From the podcast as well as the reactions here it seems this song/speech touched if not changed a lot of lives for the better. How powerful music and words can be is astounding.
And how wonderful that this song with so much impact has such a history of random events and lucky moments.
This song has a special place in my memory, very specifically we used to listen to that exact CD in the first years when we came to America. I remember feeling something very deep and profound from the words, even when I didn't at first understand the words or what the song was really saying- I could tell from how it sounded, even as a child, that it came from a place of sincere caring. In contrast with much of everything else in music before and since, it really stands out. Knowing the story behind it is really nice, it's whimsical, heartwarming, and unlike most things inspired by internet culture... genuinely wholesome.
Thanks for sharing this!
The comments here feel weird now, after changing the target link of the post to an article not focusing on the song, when the majority of the top level comments are about the song. The new link barely mentions the song twice.
We trust readers to be smart enough to figure things out. Anyone interested enough in the comments to read through them will soon put the pieces together.
Eventually we'll have better software support for this, so related links won't need to be scattered across various comments, possibly pinned.
Mostly it makes me think about high school and how difficult and uncertain my life was at that point. I didn’t even really know my life was all that difficult and uncertain, but I really disliked high school :)
There’s something endearing about someone famous saying that their talent isn’t fit for what people want them to do, and still, somehow, nail it anyway.
“Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.
This song has the best advise I've ever heard. Every single line. I remember hearing it when it first came out, and I remember thinking of it many times throughout my life.
Had a car drop off the jack five seconds after I rolled out from underneath it. Jesus Christ that was frightening. Gave me the shakes. Now I never work on them without stands.
Meant to ask this earlier, but how odd does the accent of the narrator sound to native-US ears? (when I first listened at very low volume I just assumed he was an American, but listening carefully at full volume it's fairly obvious he's not)
Nothing about it jumps out to me as obviously "not American". It's not a distinct regional accent to me but that's very common. It sounds mannered, like a TV presenter who has worked on developing a recognizable voice. What stands out to you?
EDIT: The voice actor who performed it is Australian. I'm not hugely surprised to learn that. Australians seem to be pretty good at credible American accents.
Nothing "stands out", but as an aussie myself I could hear particular vowel sounds (especially the 'ee' in sunscreen, after "One tip for the future") that were a giveaway.
I first heard this on Radio 1 when they were playing it next to a similar modern song, Self Esteem's I Do This All The Time. Both of them are incredible.
"Getting married isn't the biggest day of your life, all the days that you get to have are big."
I remember listening to this song over and over as they played it in heavy rotation on KROQ when I was in my 20s. Some of those words I wish I’d taken to heart.
Laying in bed the day after ACL reconstruction, the advice about your knees is particularly poignant.
Can confirm; I graduated '99 and the speaker led with "A graduation speaker is like the body at an Irish wake; you can't have the party without him, but nobody really expects him to say anything important" then segued into "So what should I say; should I tell you to wear sunscreen?"
Less than a decade later he won the Nobel Peace prize. Probably not for those jokes
I think this is very good advice. I have boxes of love letters from long since lost lovers and although I never read them I know they are filled with happiness.
Love letters are a dying art. I only wrote and received them during my time in boot camp in 2009.
I've been watching the Ken Burns doc about the Roosevelts and it is incredible how much we can know about people from physical letters they leave behind. What will survive us in 100 years? Almost all of my creative output is in digital form.
I am a pasty Scots-Irish hillbilly from a long line of same. I lived on the equator for years, and have also lived elsewhere in the tropics. At all times, I have enjoyed a variety of outdoor activities and performed a variety of outdoor tasks. I have applied sunscreen perhaps twice as an adult? I wear a hat when I think I need to, a shirt when I think I need to, and I stand in the shade when it makes sense. I've gotten a mild sunburn maybe a half dozen times.
In my late forties, I conclude that the leathery oldsters who insist on the sunscreen advice were crazy about sunbathing. Don't be like that, but rubbing random cheaply-acquired chemical potions over one's skin on a regular basis also doesn't seem wise. The portion of the spectrum that gives us skin cancer is not the one that causes sunburns. The primary defense against covid infection is vitamin D. Humans lived outside for tens of millennia. This week a bunch of this sunscreen crap has been recalled for containing benzene. Good grief.
Strange that your experience is so different. I'm light-skinned, but by no means pasty. If I'm out walking in the sun or doing work outside for a couple hours without sunscreen I'll end up burned. Sure, wearing a hat helps, but there's always something that gets exposed.
I do know a couple red-haired folks with Irish ancestry and very light skin, and they burn even more easily if they don't wear sunscreen.
I agree that sunbathing is pretty bad for you, even with sunscreen. Unless you are ridiculously fastidious, you are always going to miss some spots, and re-apply a bit later than you should.
> rubbing random cheaply-acquired chemical potions over one's skin on a regular basis also doesn't seem wise.
Do you use soap and shampoo? Shaving cream or after-shave? Hand cream or another moisturizer? Anything like that? Have you examined the ingredients of all those as well, and chosen ones that have ingredients you deem safe? If so, there's nothing stopping anyone from doing the same with sunscreen; it need not be "random" or "cheaply-acquired".
> Humans lived outside for tens of millennia.
Human skin adapted over millennia based on local conditions. It shouldn't be surprising that places with more and stronger sun tend to have more native darker-skinned people. We of the light skin have outpaced evolution by moving all over the globe, including places with strong sun.
Then we have more recent issues like ozone layer damage, climate change, etc. Can't really compare today's situation with that of a thousand years ago.
> The primary defense against covid infection is vitamin D.
At best there's a correlation, and it's possible that people with a vitamin D deficiency are more susceptible (which does not mean that "more vitamin D" meaningfully helps), but "primary defense" is an unsupported overstatement.
I graduated high school the year this was most popular, so the graduation speaker at my high school made a reference to it. The closest thing I can think of to a hit as a precedent for it is maybe I'm too sexy by Right Said Fred. It was a gimmick song and everybody knew it was one, but it was fun.
