Mistakes, Mental Health, and Midjourney

Hello friends and welcome back to Life Reimagined, a free weekly elixir designed to make you feel good and live better.

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🤦‍♂️ I. Rethinking Mistakes

I’ve spent a lot of my life toiling about the mistakes I’ve made. But over time, I come to accept two things that have made mistakes less painful:

1. While the initial pain of a mistake often feels like it will last forever, even the worst errors don’t hurt too much with the passage of enough time.

2. Mistakes are indispensable to learning, which basically makes them unavoidable taxes for learning.

So next time you mess up, try to remember that the pain won’t last forever and that it may be the catalyst you need to learn something valuable.

📈 II. What’s Going On?

As many long-time readers know, my mom committed suicide in 2017 after a multi-decade battle with mental health issues. Since then, mental health and suicide have been issues that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about.

But it wasn’t until I had a particularly dark period last year that I really understood how people come to the conclusion that life may not be worth living.

I’ve discussed that period of darkness briefly in previous newsletters, but now that I have some distance from it, I’m considering writing a piece about what that experience was like and what helped me come out the other side.

In the meantime, I’ve been looking at data on mental health and suicide. This week, I learned from Our World in Data that suicide rates have declined in France, Italy, Norway, Spain, and other European nations, over the last 20 years. The declines are attributed to “greater awareness and help for people at risk, improvements in mental health treatment, and restrictions on some of the methods of suicide.”

This data came as a surprise, particularly as I’ve heard many times that suicide rates are increasing. Our World in Data makes it easy to plot data from different countries, so I added the United States to the chart that shows a decline in suicide rates in European nations from 2000 to 2019.

As you can see, while suicide rates in some European countries have declined significantly over the last two decades, the United States has seen a 40%+ increase in suicides since 2000. This data is alarming, and it left me wondering: why are so many people deciding that life is not worth living in one of the most prosperous nations in the world?

My current understanding of this question is incomplete, and I may share some ideas in a future newsletter. But in the meantime, I wanted to share this chart as a way to bring more attention to a societal issue that causes irreversible harm to the people we lose and their friends and family.

If you’re doing well and interested in doing something helpful, I’d encourage you to call the people you love and ask how they’re doing. And if you’re struggling, I’d encourage you to reach out to someone who really cares about you, even if that feels scary at the moment.

🧑‍🎨 III. Midjourney

We’ve spent the last two newsletters discussing fears about artificial intelligence, but this is a newsletter that’s supposed to make you feel good.

To that end, I wanted to share two posts from Lorenzo Green who used Midjourney (an AI image creation company) to reimagine Harry Potter.

In his first post, he creates images of the main characters in Harry Potter as if they were in a Pixar film.

In the second post, he does the same thing in the style of Wes Anderson.

The Wes Anderson renditions seem spot on.

I suppose I enjoyed this so much because I spent the last week reading the Harry Potter series. I’m currently mid-way through the sixth book and now have a few different versions of the characters to imagine as I finish the series.

🧠 VI. Something I’m Thinking About

That's all for now. See you next Sunday.

— Cal

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