brendex
  • Welcome
  • From the Start
  • Context and Frameworks
  • Creativity Overview
  • The Complexity Stack
  • No One Will Stop You
  • You Can Do Anything But Not Everything
  • Pay To Win
  • Decision Making
  • Food
    • Diet and Food
    • Calories per Dollar
    • Why I Don't Drink
    • Pizza Masterclass
    • Bread Recipe
  • Work
    • Work Hours
    • Autonomy and Optionality
    • Pricing Your Work
    • The Many Types of Currencies
    • Ego and Arrogance
    • I've been a freelancer longer than any other thing in my life
  • Money
    • Crash Course
    • Why Money Exists
    • Modern Money
    • How I set up my finances
    • Investing
    • Spending Less or Earning More
    • Credit and Debt
    • Credit Scores
    • Buying a Car
    • Owning a Car is Expensive
    • How Net Worth Works
    • Hustling
  • Travel
    • Japan 2018
    • Europe 2019
  • Books and Summaries
    • The Timeless Way
  • Miscellaneous
    • Fitness + Lifting
    • Clothing
    • Photography and Cameras
    • Daily Schedule
    • Books and Reading
    • Fighting vs Winning
    • 2018 Year in Review
  • Essays
    • Jack of All Trades, Master of None
    • The "Real" Me
    • You Need to Flail
    • On: Housing Costs
    • What do you do before you die?
    • Memento Mori
    • Different Efficiencies
    • In Memorium, Mini
  • PHD in Curiosity
    • #45 Fast Facts
    • #44 Whistlejacket
    • #16 School of Rock
    • Labour Day: a history
  • Working Theories
    • Disclaimer
    • Parasocial Relationships and Story
    • Cricut Settings and Notes
    • Cosplay Notes
    • Kayak Design Notes
  • Timelines (mostly personal use)
    • Seasonal tire changes
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On this page
  • Early Years
  • Growing Up
  • Moving On
  • The Future

From the Start

the story so far...

PreviousWelcomeNextContext and Frameworks

Last updated 6 years ago

My name is Brennan Letkeman. I was born in the winter of 1993 in a small prairie town called Medicine Hat, in western Canada.

Early Years

  • I went to public school and was one grade ahead because of my birth date.

  • I was raised evangelical protestant, the church was a big part of my community growing up.

  • I had the two best parents in the world, really.

  • In grade three the class had a field trip to my house because my dad was building a robot vehicle for the military and seeing the hydraulics move was the coolest thing ever.

  • Growing up I had a ton of Lego and How It Works books, which informed the rest of my life building and creating mechanical things.

  • Scholastic Book Fair was magic, I devoured books

  • We rode bikes to school in the warm seasons, I've loved bikes my whole life

Growing Up

  • In junior high I was introduced to Photoshop, which at that time was very basic.

  • In high school I was introduced to AutoCAD and later found Blender from the Gamemaker forums

  • I was one of those kids who didn't really study and finished his homework the morning of, because the nights before were spent doing Blender stuff, which felt infinitely more useful.

  • Somehow I accidentally graduated with first-class honours.

  • My friend and I won gold in Skills Canada for video editing, went to provincials to compete.

  • I had a paper route in the morning, a part-time job at Sears selling electronics and in the summers got my first more 'real' job doing web design with a local CMS startup / studio which I did for three years.

Moving On

  • in 2010 I moved to Calgary, Alberta to attend SAIT for mechanical design

  • Had a lot of fun, met great friends and colleagues who are still more core network today

  • Investigated deeply and eventually left Christianity

  • Started and wrote the Acrylo Design Blog for a few years, wrote a ton every single day

  • Graduated and was quickly hired designing police and emergency vehicle interior gear: the consoles and articulating arms and whatnot to mount laptops and siren controllers and guns etc.

  • Worked there for 3.75 years, eventually becoming bored and - in hindsight - pretty depressed

  • Lost the job, decided I wanted to freelance instead of looking for another desk to hold down

  • As of this writing, this is my fourth year freelancing and it's going great

The Future

It's taken me this long - honestly, shockingly recently - to realize that I'm allowed to just, like, want stuff?

I've never really wanted anything before, partly because the basics were all neatly provided for, and because I grew up knowing that "nothing could fill that happiness hole in all of our hearts" (besides Jesus, but I left him too) so I had just internalized a sort of nihilism about searching / finding anything.

Not wanting things is pretty zen, but having accomplished the lower Maslow things, I have discovered that without striving there's mostly just boredom and navel gazing which aren't super useful for either me nor the world / community around us.

So that's my next phase in life: find things to want, worth wanting, and then striving to get them.

Let's find harder problems and solve them together.

look at this hairless monkey