John Allen Hardy

Founder of Why Are You Sad?

I didn’t start Why Are You Sad? because I thought the world needed another website.

I started it because I kept thinking about the stories we lose.

The things our parents told us once. The stupid things our friends did that still make us laugh thirty years later. The people we loved. The people who hurt us. The moments that seemed ordinary when they happened and somehow became important years later.

And the stories we never think to tell until someone asks the right question.

Why are you sad?

That question sounds simple. It usually isn’t.

I’m John Allen Hardy, founder and primary author of Why Are You Sad?, an independent storytelling project based in Omaha, Nebraska.

I grew up in Tekamah, a small town about forty-five miles north of Omaha. A lot of the stories here begin there—on farms, in classrooms, around airplanes, with family and friends, and in the strange little moments that somehow survive when much bigger things disappear from memory.

But WAYS? was never intended to be just my collection of stories.

Everybody has a story worth keeping

One of the things I’ve learned from writing these stories is that memory is rarely about the event itself.

A coffee mug can become a story about your daughter growing up.

A teacher can become a story you remember more than fifty years later.

A song can put someone who has been gone for decades right back in the room.

And sometimes the memory you thought was funny turns out to be about something else entirely once you start writing it down.

That is what interests me.

Not extraordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Ordinary people remembering the things that mattered.

Some of the stories on WAYS? are mine. Others come from family, friends and people I have never met who decided there was something they wanted to leave behind.

They don’t all remember things the same way I do.

That’s part of the point.

Stories that keep people close

Why Are You Sad? isn’t really about sadness.

Sadness just happens to be one of the places where memory gets loud.

There are stories here about childhood, parents, friendship, marriage, divorce, fear, grief, getting older, raising children, making mistakes and starting over.

There are also stories about doing incredibly stupid things.

I’ve contributed a respectable number of those.

What connects them isn’t sadness. It’s the idea that telling a story gives another person the opportunity to recognize something of themselves in it.

Sometimes that person is a stranger.

Sometimes it’s your own kid.

And sometimes it’s you, years later.

That’s why the line at the bottom of every story matters to me:

If this resonated with you, you’re not alone.

About John

John Allen Hardy is the founder and primary author of Why Are You Sad?, an independent storytelling project based in Omaha, Nebraska.

He grew up in Tekamah, Nebraska, and has spent much of his professional life in advertising, design and communications. He is the founder of Brandscapes, an Omaha-area creative agency, and his background as a designer, writer and pilot frequently finds its way into his stories.

John created Why Are You Sad? as a place to preserve personal stories and encourage other people to tell their own—not because a life has to be famous to be worth remembering.

He lives in the Omaha area with his wife, Laura. Their family, friends and the people they’ve encountered along the way appear throughout the collection, sometimes with slightly different memories of what actually happened.

Those versions are welcome too.