Five for 50  ## Metadata - Author: [[Anil Dash]] - Full Title: Five for 50 - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #culture - #creativity - #digital_rights Author: Anil Dash Source: Personal blog Reference: https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/05/five-for-fifty/ date created: 2025-09-05 00:00 --- # Title: Five for 50 — Actionable Gifts for Community, Creativity, and Care ## Table of Contents: - [🎯 Overview](#-overview) - [🖐️ 1) Give Locally to Those in Need](#%EF%B8%8F-1-give-locally-to-those-in-need) - [🔥 2) Invest in Your Passions (and Preserve Them)](#-2-invest-in-your-passions-and-preserve-them) - [🛡️ 3) Fight to Create, Own, and Control Your Work](#%EF%B8%8F-3-fight-to-create-own-and-control-your-work) - [💚 4) Be Kind to Yourself Like a Friend](#-4-be-kind-to-yourself-like-a-friend) - [🌟 5) Don’t Wait Until They’re Dead](#-5-dont-wait-until-theyre-dead) - [🙏 Closing Gratitude](#-closing-gratitude) - [📚 References](#-references) - [🗒️ Notes](#%EF%B8%8F-notes) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#%F0%9F%97%A3%EF%B8%8F-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter Blurb](#-newsletter-blurb) - [✅ Action Items (Developer Advocate/OSPO Alignment)](#-action-items-developer-advocateospo-alignment) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🔍 DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### References: - Lower East Side Girls Club - Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) - Topics mentioned: Prince’s body of work, NYC history, transit design, software culture, safe streets ## 📝 Summary: Anil Dash, on turning 50, offers five action-oriented “gifts” he asks readers to consider: give to organizations helping vulnerable people locally; invest in and preserve your passions; protect creators’ rights to make, own, and control their work (especially online); practice self-kindness with accountability; and express appreciation early and often—don’t wait until people are gone. He closes with gratitude for the community built through sharing his writing and life over decades. Key line: “Nearly every good thing in my life has come to me as a result of being able to speak from my heart… on a platform like this one.” ## 📖 Main Content: - The piece is a reflective call-to-action organized into five practical directives. - It blends personal narrative (service on the Lower East Side Girls Club board; hyperfixations like Prince, transit, and software culture) with communal imperatives (support local orgs, preserve culture, defend digital rights). - The tone is warm, invitational, and grounded in gratitude; the calls to act are meant to be adapted: “feel free to use these as starting points and change them to make them your own.” - Central themes: - Community stewardship: rooted, local, and tangible support. - Cultural stewardship: preserve not just artifacts but truthful histories amid erasure. - Creator autonomy: consent, control, and labor dignity—especially in digital environments. - Compassion: self-kindness as a social good that mitigates broader harms. - Vulnerability: appreciation builds bonds by revealing our own weaknesses, courageously. ### 🗒️ Notes - 🎯 Overview - Milestone framing: 50th birthday used as a prompt for collective action. - Five practices as “gifts” to the author and to community. - 🖐️ 1) Give Locally to Those in Need (board service; Lower East Side Girls Club) - World-class facilities democratize access (planetarium, recording studio, crafting classroom). - Emphasis: give generously or volunteer; prioritize the most vulnerable families and kids. - Transferable guidance: find your neighborhood equivalent. - 🔥 2) Invest in Your Passions (and preserve them) - “Big fan of being a big fan”: celebrate exuberant, even “irrational,” enthusiasm. - Preservation imperative: guard against historical erasure and distortion. - Joy as connective tissue: fandom catalyzes community across topics. - 🛡️ 3) Fight to Create, Own, and Control Your Work - Collective defense: resilience grows when creators stand together. - Consent and anti-exploitation: labor dignity as a human right. - Practical routes: support independent artists/activists; sustain digital rights orgs (EFF). - Personal testimony: open platforms enabled life-changing opportunity. - 💚 4) Be Kind to Yourself Like a Friend - Evolution from skepticism to conviction about self-empathy’s social impact. - Treat yourself with the same blend of acceptance and accountability you give friends. - “You’re allowed to love yourself” — explicit permission to reduce self-cruelty. - 🌟 5) Don’t Wait Until They’re Dead - Express gratitude now; it’s never awkward to appreciate meaningfully. - Vulnerability dynamics: praising others often reveals our own former weaknesses. - Risk vs reward: occasional misses, but deeper bonds far more common. - 🙏 Closing Gratitude - No grand doctrine—just thanks, service, and connection over decades. - Ongoing relationship with readers: “I hope you’ll stick around for many more.” ## 📖 References: - Lower East Side Girls Club - Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) - Cultural references: Prince; NYC history; safe streets; transit design; software culture ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1) Original idea: Giving locally via organizations with real facilities and care transforms at-risk youth. - Paraphrase: Direct support for neighborhood organizations—especially those offering high-quality spaces like labs or studios—multiplies impact for vulnerable kids and families. Your time and resources can help unlock potential that’s already there but too often blocked by lack of access. 2) Original idea: Protect creators’ rights through collective action and support for digital rights. - Paraphrase: Creative expression thrives when we defend it together. Everyone deserves control over how their work is used; small acts of resistance can deter exploitation. Back independent creators and bolster groups like EFF that safeguard free expression where it is most precarious: online. ## 📰 Newsletter: Level up your web dev chops this week with a smile. We’re diving into hands-on learning (HTML/CSS/JS/PHP), sharpening Git/GitHub workflows, and celebrating community wins—from new contributors landing their first PR to plugins that make your workflow sing. Highlights: - Learn better, ship faster: Try a 45-minute “mini-sprint” on accessibility audits using Lighthouse and axe DevTools, then refactor your nav for semantic HTML and focus states. - Fresh plugins to watch: Performance boosters, image optimizers, and editor UX enhancers that play nicely with block themes. - Community kudos: Shoutout to first-time contributors who shipped docs improvements and test coverage—proof that small PRs unlock big confidence. - Funding the commons: Explore models for sustainable maintainer support and why creator consent matters in the AI era. Bonus: Revisit creator autonomy and local impact through the lens of Anil Dash’s “Five for 50,” a reminder to support local orgs, preserve the cultures we love, and stand up for digital rights. Keep building with kindness, ship with intention, and say “thank you” today—not tomorrow. ## ✅ Action Items (Developer Advocate/OSPO Alignment): - Map to open-source advocacy: - Give locally → Sponsor community meetups, Girl Develop It chapters, and local WordPress workshops; set up micro-grants for first-time contributors’ travel and childcare. - Invest in passions → Curate “deep-dive tracks” (e.g., performance, security, accessibility) with preservation: archive talks, publish transcripts, and versioned lab guides. - Creator control → Advocate for contributor license clarity, SPDX identifiers, and consent-respecting data policies; support orgs like EFF; document model/data provenance. - Self-kindness → Bake in contributor wellness: paced onboarding, mentorship circles, “no PR too small” ethos, and documented boundaries to avoid burnout. - Don’t wait → Establish “gratitude cadence”: contributor spotlights, Thank-a-Mai - Summary: A blog about making culture. Since 1999. - URL: https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/05/five-for-fifty/ Today I’m 50 years old! That feels absurd, because it’s a big number, the kind of round number that people usually obscure by saying “I’m celebrating a big birthday” or something vague like that. But, since you only get so many of these to celebrate, I’m using this chance to ask everyone who I’m lucky enough to have in my life to join me in observing the day by considering five different ways of taking action. These are all the gifts I could possibly ask for, because I’m lucky enough that my life has brought me all the good fortune that anyone could ever want or need. So, without further ado, some ideas of what we might do together. (And feel free to use these as starting points and change them to make them your own.) #### 1. Give to those who help the people who are most in need in your immediate community. In my neighborhood, I’ve been privileged enough to get to serve on the board of the Lower East Side Girls Club for about a decade, working to support an incredible team that stands behind some of New York City’s most at-risk girls and families. Through the education, resources, guidance and just plain old-fashioned love that the Girls Club provides these girls, they’re able to reach the full potential that they’ve had all along. One of the biggest reasons this kind of work is possible is because the Girls Club gives them a world-class facility, the kind of space they might otherwise never have gotten access to use, with everything from a planetarium to a recording studio to a crafting classroom. You can [directly support this work](https://support.girlsclub.org/campaign/689691/donate) by giving as generously as possible, or find the people in your own neighborhood who are supporting the vulnerable kids and families in your own community and give of your own time and resources to make sure they have the support they need, too. #### 2. Invest the time in exploring, preserving, sharing, and promoting the subject of your passions. People who know me well know that I am a “big fan of being a big fan” of things. What this means is, I love it when people have an exuberant, sometimes downright irrational, enthusiasm for a topic, or a hobby that’s all-consuming in a way that they want to tell the whole world about. Almost everyone I love has one or two (or… twenty) topics that they’re deeply passionate about, which they’re either an expert about, or *want* to be an expert about. The world is so much better when people take the time to dive into these passions, and to share them with the world — especially if we also take the time to ensure that the historical record or the artifacts of that subject are also appropriately recorded or preserved. At a time when histories are actively being erased and truth is actively being distorted, it can be a brave and meaningful act to protect the real history of the works or subjects that inspire us. For me, I’m famously willing to expound on [Prince’s work](https://www.anildash.com/tags/prince/) at any time, but I have the same enthusiasm about the history of New York City, or the design of transit systems and safe streets, or the culture of making software, or any one of a dozen other esoteric topics that have been the subject of a hyperfixation for me over the years. One of the biggest reasons to be a big fan of something is that it opens the door to connecting with the *other* big fans of that thing, and also to connecting with people who may not share that same specific topic, but who are just drawn towards the sheer contagious joy of a person sharing the thing that makes their heart sing. #### 3. Fight for the ability to create, and to own and control what you make. Nearly my entire professional life has been centered around enabling people to share their ideas, their words, and their creative expression with the world. And right now, it matters more than ever that we protect that incredibly valuable promise. Most importantly, we all have to fight for that kind of expression *together*, because the more we stand in unison, the more resilient we all are to attacks. Just as key is the idea that everyone should be able to have control over the things people do with their work and their idea, and that their labor and creations shouldn't be exploited without consent. This is a basic human right, but it's too often ignored or denied in today's culture, and yet often all it takes is the smallest amount of fighting back to stop the bad actors from taking advantage. There are lots of ways to help with this battle, from supporting the small independent artists and activists in your community and in your life, to [sustaining the organizations like EFF](http://eff.org/anil) (where I'm honored to serve on the board) that fight every day to protect free expression in the digital realm, where these rights are often the most threatened. Nearly every good thing in my life has come to me as a result of being able to speak from my heart in words like these on a platform like this one, and by being able to reach people like you in an unfettered way. I want everyone else to have that opportunity too. #### 4. Be kind and forgiving to yourself, and treat yourself like a friend. For most of my life, I would have rolled my eyes at a lot of the language of kindness or self-empathy as insufferably fuzzy-minded, a kind of indulgence that distracts from more meaningful work. But further into adulthood, having grown, and endured loss, and been with loved ones and friends as they've grieved and struggled and been through all the countless small indignities that life inflicts on us all, I realize that it's actually pretty important to extend kindness to oneself. Self-love is profoundly lacking in so many people's lives, and the ways that this absence manifests is one obvious, and major, cause of so many of the biggest problems in society today. If you are a person who deals with impostor syndrome, or struggles with confidence, or who wrangles with insecurities, or who faces doubts, nearly every single one of those challenges can find some small reprieve by loving yourself as if you were one of your best friends. It's striking how much people are willing to be kind, generous, patient, and even unconditionally forgiving to their closest loved ones, and then turn around and be brutally, unrelentingly harsh to themselves. As it turns out, you can treat yourself with the same combination of acceptance tempered by accountability that you would extend to a true friend, so you don't have to worry that being loving means that you're suddenly going to lower your standards and not keep being the best version of yourself. If you've been waiting for someone to say it, here it is in writing: you're granted absolution by some guy on the internet. You're allowed to love yourself. #### 5. Don't wait until they're dead. This one is a thing people say all the time, but I can't emphasize enough how much it's true: Do not wait until someone is gone to praise them, or thank them, or acknowledge them, or to tell them what you're grateful for or how they've impacted your life. I have tried to make it a habit to say as directly as possible to people what they mean to me, in the moment when it occurs to me, or when there is the slightest prompt to do so. People have often asked me if it is awkward to do so, and *it is never awkward*! Almost no one is offended or angry when you say that their work means something to you, or that some long-ago favor that they did for you ended up being really meaningful, or that you've always admired the way that they show their true character when no one is looking. (If you need practice, you can say something nice on my birthday about how I've made an impact in your life, and I promise I won't be anything but happy. See how easy that was?) Aside from fishing for nice people to say nice things, one of the reasons that I've found this is a good practice is because doing so has made me realize that telling others, in plain language, what I appreciate about them has made me have to be in a vulnerable place too. When you talk about their strength, you're often revealing something that was, at least at one time for you, a weakness. But we build our greatest bonds with others by trusting them with our vulnerabilities. Sometimes there is a chance that someone will take advantage of those vulnerable moments to be dismissive or hurtful, or they simply won't understand what you were responding to, and the connection won't be made. But far, far more often, you will have deepened a connection to someone whose character inspires you, and there are few things more rewarding in life than that. ### Thank you. I don't have any profound life lessons to impart after a half century, except to say that I am very grateful for all of the wonderful people in my life, and to be so fortunate, especially at a time when so many are not. I hope I can continue to be of service to others in the most effective and useful ways possible, and I'm thankful as ever that all of you take the time to read and share the things I have been writing here for half of my life. One of the greatest gifts I've gotten in my life has been getting to connect with so many kind and thoughtful people through sharing my life and ideas here, and the best part is that's not limited to just one birthday or one moment, but really continues throughout my life over years and decades. I hope you'll stick around for many more., Five for 50, Anil Dash, 01k4dggvxxqnqcx6ehk6m32dm2.