1 Second Everyday
Inspired by Cesar Kuriyama and his related TED Talk, since 2012 I've been recording 1 second of daily video of my life -- my family, my friends, my world. This is everything up to last year!
There are so many tiny, beautiful, funny, tragic moments in your life — how are you going to remember them all?
Trying to answer this question has been a years-long obsession for me.
Since early college, the time when I first became obsessed with chronicling my life, I began keeping a journal. Both the consistency and frequency of my authoring reflected the bell curve of my melancholy: during stressful or sad times, I wrote a ton; and during the it’s-awesome-to-have-a-girlfriend epochs, my page collected dust. They take up a shelf in my closet. One is even buried in my time capsule!
When I got my first iPhone, writing things down declined in favor of taking photos. And as the camera on that device improved — and I started having children — I started stockpiling video snippets. Despite having years of photographic material, it was difficult to understand the scope of what I recorded.
Cesar Kuriyama came up with a brilliant answer to this. For years, he has been selecting single seconds of video from each day of his life, then mashing them together into some brilliant compilations. He shared the results of this at TED, in one of the “talks” that has stuck with me.
He parlayed the popularity of his TED appearance into developing an application that lets the masses do this in an elegant manner: the 1 Second Everyday iOS app, which I used to create the video below. It helps you identify the second-long clips to use, then handles piecing them together into the larger video I’ve presented above.
As of the first publication of this page, I’ve barely started this new method of documenting my own life. Yet it’s amazing how much life I’ve packed into the past several months, even if it may be ho-hom stay-at-home-dad kind of stuff — being able to watch my kids grow and thrive has been a privilege! After all, I have proof on film how awesome it is.
As I continue to record over the upcoming months (and hopefully years), I’ll update this page with my latest video (below is everything thru 2023-12-31).
