2000 Posts On Overthinking It

This is the 2,000^th post published on Overthinking It since the site launched on January 22, 2008.

I know it’s a little sentimental, but I enjoy pointing out all these small milestones—the site’s anniversary every year, the podcast anniversary (5 years without missing a week, and going strong!), round numbers of things (300 podcasts coming soon, coinciding coincidentally with the sequel to 300)…

I asked all the writers on our email list if they had any thoughts on this latest one. Most of the responses were dumb, because I suppose the question was pretty dumb and it serves me right for asking it. The best was probably from Ben Adams:

This would be a good time to launch a completely rebranded “OTI 2000.” We could have like a rad skateboarding Otis. You know, for kids. [1]

If anyone wants to illustrate that and link it up in the comments, be my guest. We’d be happy to see it and would probably send you some free Overviews or something. But Fenzel wrote something profound, as usual while simultaneously making a joke:

The real secret to human endeavor is if you do a little bit of it, relatively consistently, over a long bit of time, some day you will look back and see that you did a whole bunch of stuff.

I’m not sure how seriously Pete meant that. But he’s not wrong. And something happens when you do look back and realize you’ve made a whole bunch of stuff: It provides a kind of map and a kind of autobiography, a sense of the path you’ve been taking and what your concerns were at any time. It gives a sense of where you’ve been and how far you’ve come. Fenzel continues:

In all seriousness, being able to listen to all these years of podcasts in the future is really intriguing. I never anticipated the record of my life that this represents. For all my half-empty journals with months or years between entries, it turns out there is a record of what I thought and felt about stuff that mattered to me at the time that extends beyond what I ever imagined.

That is actually pretty cool. And cooler still is that we’ve been able to share so much of it with an audience, a unique community of like-minded Overthinkers the world over. Here’s to where we’ve been, here’s to where we’re going. See you at 3,000.