Silly Observations

Data • Design • Dataviz

Jun 27

When life is overwhelming,
focus on the silly things.

I'm a bit late writing this week. Recently, life has been overwhelming for everyone, and for me personally I've been working late into the night for several days.

So let's relax for a bit, let's find something fun to distract ourselves. After all, we need a bit of silliness to survive the endless waves of emails, Slack messages, terrible news, etc. Pick your modern poison.

What do you do to relax and center yourself?
Different doctrines will tell you to turn to mindfulness and disconnect. Which is a good option, and I've tried to do it from time to time. But sometimes I don't want to transcend the reincarnation cycle, I just want to laugh for a bit before replying to another dreadful WhatsApp message.

Doomscrolling on Instagram until the third add in a row finally makes me throw my phone across the room is not ideal, so I try to look for something silly to focus on. These last few days, it has been "fun data observations" — let me show you some examples.

Time waiting for the S-bahn, visualized in pills.

I was waiting for the train to get to the airport the other day. After rushing to get to the station, the display showed a delay. Ah, the joys of living in Germany, I thought. The biggest surprise when I moved here was that the trains "die" very frequently. Yeah, they just go "poof", no more train. Time to wait, get comfy on the platform, you live there now. Germans everywhere confirm this.

But I digress. It was a chilly morning so I had a cardigan on, and I had nothing to do, so I started picking at the little balls on it. I didn’t know they were called 'pills'. I ended up collecting them in my hand (see above) until the train arrived.

I then thought to make a silly comparison: how much time would it take me to get through airport security vs waiting for the S-Bahn? Well, you can see below. I found it was a better use of my time to focus on finding something silly to text my favorite engineer than getting annoyed at Deutsche Bahn.

Time waiting at MUN airport security, visualized in pills.

Another example? I had to wait in line at a bakery. Normally I don't like to wait in line — in fact, I hate it. But my friend told me this was the best bakery in Copenhagen, we had to go. The line was 40 minutes.

My silly thought was to wonder if there a correlation between time spent waiting in line and pastry flavor?
Not usually in my experience, but here we had an outlier. This was worth the wait... dear lord, I didn’t think humans could make bread even better. This is a free shoutout to Juno the Bakery. They don’t need the promo but they deserve it.

Good job Denmark, as a country, for baking pastries that make you weak in the knees.

The best pastries I've had to date.

One last example, I went for a long walk yesterday and noticed a new path in the park. It didn’t make much sense since there was a bigger path right next to it and it seemed that this was more recent.

Who wanted to cut 2 seconds from their walking PB? It wasn’t very useful but it reminded me of this phenomenon where people make their own paths despite having another planned one right next to it. (It's called Desired path) This is fairly common in urban landscapes, see if you can spot one next time you go to the train station.

Animals do them too, is it our need to find the best solution or just our desire to go fast?

Who needs this? A very fast hedgehog?

I know these examples are silly but I'm fond of the spirit behind them. Focusing on the world around you and trying to see things from a slightly different angle is key to make your day-to-day special. If you don't romanticize your life, who will?

I think this spirit also helps with being creative. A few weeks ago, a dear friend asked me how I come up with stuff for the blogs. I didn’t give her a good answer back then and just shrugged, but I think the ideas come from these silly observations, from wanting to keep myself entertained and make people in my life laugh.

If I can leave you with one last nice thought during these seemingly endless trying times, it's something my mom says: "Vive cada día no como si fuera el último, sino el primero." Live every day not like it’s the last one, but the first one.

So, if you look at the same old things with new eyes, what silly observations will you notice?

That’s Enough About Me!

What do you think? What should I focus on next?

What silly data will you look out for? Anything interesting around that inspired you to create something? Hopefully life isn't too stressful for you and if it's, remember to focus on the silly things.

Let me know—shoot me an email! 😊
📩 sifuentesanita@gmail.com