Mark Duplass:
Check it out. One, two, three. Number one. Not enough years to do all the fun things I want to do. I love my life. I love my career. I love my kids. I'm very close with my wife and my parents and my brother, and I wish I could live for a fucking thousand years. I really do.
Number two. Losing my kids’ affection when they hit puberty. I'm so close with my children right now, and it's going so well, better than I ever thought it could. But I have seen the DNA shifts happen in other kids, when they hit puberty, the chemical shift combined with access to their phone and the awareness that there's a huge world out there and they go slip into social media. And I think that that would, more than anything I can imagine right now, just wreck me.
Number three. Raising my children in the wrong city. In 2005 I moved to Los Angeles with the idea that I would be here for maybe a year to get myself settled in my career as a filmmaker. And now I'm 41. And I have a ten and a six-year-old daughter, and I'm raising my kids in Los Angeles. And it's a little bit not real life out here. The conversations that we have are like, you know, they'll be watching an animated movie and then my oldest daughter will be like, “Oh that's so-and-so's dad doing that voice.”
Number four. Making bad art. Making bad art is something that I did for a long time. Starting at age 15 when I really identified as an artist. And then when I was 20 I was making movies in film school. And when I was 21 I went on tour as a singer-songwriter, and all of those years I was struggling so much to make something good. And so I have this trigger in me now when I'm like, you know, on the precipice of making something, or if I’m shooting a scene and I'm feeling it's bad. I will feel a panic attack start to rise up in me that is connected to this younger struggling artist in me that's just terrified of making something bad. And that, oh my God, will I be kicked out of my relative tenure as an artist here who people listen to and be sent back to the Dark Ages of climbing those mountains which were really painful for me.
Number five. Heights.
Number six. Cancer with an exclamation point.
Number seven. That I'm a bad friend. I've had lots of intimacies with friends through the years, and they have come and gone. I feel like that is somewhat unique, to have gotten very close with some people and then not really have them be a prominent part of my life anymore. And I wonder if that means I'm just kind of an asshole who just gets close with people and then when the winds change, or when we move to a new city, or when my kids come along I kind of leave them behind a little bit.
Number eight. Will my kids grow up to be unhappy.
Number nine. That I am selfish with my money and don't give enough away.
Number ten. Highways and the fact that you can die on them.
My name is Mark Duplass. And these are 10 things that scare me.