I really do love life so much. During the winter of 2018, on a rural desert road roadtrip in Utah, I became inspired. College had ended. Graduate school loomed large. I had the sense that life was slipping away unremembered and it would only be a matter of seconds before it was actually gone. Little beautiful moments, the actual material of life, seemed so easily dissolved in time. Yet on that desert road in Utah, I heard someone else sharing my same love of life's beautiful seconds and presenting an elegant method for appreciating and even celebrating the passage of time. I was listening to TED talks as I drove--one given by Cesar Kuriyama: One Second Every Day. He shared how he clipped one second out of videos he took every day for a whole year. Then he played them chronologically, effectively creating a mosaic of his life, each pixel being a second of each day. I pulled over to watch the video. The idea was magnificent to me! I decided to do the same thing. 

Well, that didn't last long. Within a week, I had forgotten to video each day enough times that I scrapped the project. But I didn't forget about it. 

Months later I tried again. I set reminders to myself three times a day to take more videos everywhere I went and of everything I did. After a few weeks, I picked my favorite from each day and compiled them on iMovie to trim to a second each. Watching that first 14 second video had me hooked. Somehow it seemed to romanticize the mundane. It conveyed that every second had been worth it. 

As I continued the project, I noticed that a single second from a day could ignite memories of everything else that happened on that day. I had a moving, growing album of moments. I just want to remember sixty years from now that I was thankful to exist; that I truly had it all. 

I created this site as an 'end-point' for my videos each year, to mark the conclusion of another chapter. Let it encourage you to do the same.

After my first few years, I discovered a small community others who had compiled their own yearly videos, inspired by Cesar Kuriyama's talk and an app he had created to help people capture a second from every day. I began posting my videos to r/OneSecondaDay on Reddit where similar videos can be found of other people's lives. 

I sometimes find myself going the extra mile to make my day exciting, if only to get an interesting or exciting video. One could say that it was contrived. But I would tell them that I did the thing, and I might not would have done it otherwise. 

The data present in the videos was also of interest to me. As the years went by, I realized I had a lot of data embedded in the videos. Data of the location and the people I saw every day. This has led to a new project ...

My city, country, and world heatmaps. 

Generated using Google Maps data for each video of the day with the help of CM Burnham.