Lemma the Optimist
@DoctorLemma • 427,535 subscribers
Strangers, animals & small acts that restore faith in humanity. Long-form storytelling and original photography. | Entertainment, Arts, Photography
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I watched a film recently, based on a true story, about a man who spent fifty years consumed by what one person had done to him, then went looking for that very person. His name was Eric Lomax, a British army officer captured when Singapore fell to Japan in 1942. He was sent to work as a prisoner on the Burma Railway, a line the Japanese forced tens of thousands of POWs and local labourers to build through the jungle in horrific conditions. So many men died that it became known as the Death Railway. Lomax was a lifelong railway enthusiast, which is its own cruel irony. He and some others built a small radio from scrap to hear news of the war. When it was discovered, Lomax was singled out and interrogated for weeks, and what was done to him left wounds that never really closed. Through all of it there was one figure he could not forget, the interpreter who stood beside him and translated every question and answer. The man’s name was Takashi Nagase. Lomax went home to Scotland carrying that face for decades. The nightmares did not stop. He has said he spent years rehearsing what he would do if he ever found that interpreter again. Much later in life, he learned that Nagase was not only alive but had spent his postwar years as a campaigner for peace, building a temple of penance near the railway and helping reunite former prisoners with their captors. Nagase had been carrying the same fifty years of guilt that Lomax had been carrying as anger. They agreed to meet, on a hillside in Thailand near the river the prisoners had bridged. Nagase saw him, bowed, and began trembling and apologising over and over. Lomax, who had arrived without a shred of sympathy, took his hand instead. The two became real friends and stayed close for the rest of their lives. He first told all of this in his memoir, also a true account, called The Railway Man. It was later made into the film I watched.
Lemma the Optimist591,464 views • 7 days ago
An elderly couple in the United States made national news after discovering a tomato in their garden shaped exactly like a rubber duck. In 2015, Marie Davidek was tending to her plants when she spotted the oddly shaped fruit, which had grown with a distinct head and beak. When she showed it to her husband Bob, he initially thought she was joking until he saw the clear resemblance for himself. Instead of eating it, the couple placed the unique tomato on their porch to display it alongside their regular harvest. Their simple discovery quickly caught the attention of local journalists and eventually landed the couple a segment on CNN.
Lemma the Optimist13,187,556 views • 3 months ago
Sixteen years ago, one man stood alone on a grassy hill at a music festival in Washington State, USA, and started dancing by himself. People glanced over and looked away. Some laughed. His roommate leaned in and warned him people were filming him. He did not stop. Then one stranger got up and joined him. Then another. Then the hillside tipped. Within minutes, hundreds of people were sprinting from across the field to be part of something that, thirty seconds earlier, had been one man being laughed at in a field. Someone filming from higher up the hill said quietly: "See what one man can do. One man can change the world." The clip spread across the internet in 2009. Entrepreneur Derek Sivers played it at a TED conference to explain how movements actually begin. Not with the first person brave enough to start, he argued, but with the first person willing to join them. Collin Wynter, the man dancing alone, later said he had no idea he had done anything special. He was just tired of watching everyone sit still.
Lemma the Optimist9,825,065 views • 2 months ago
19 years ago, a high school basketball coach put his team manager into a game for the final four minutes. The kid had never played a single minute of competitive basketball in his life. He scored 20 points. Jason McElwain was diagnosed with severe autism at age two. He didn’t speak until he was five. He couldn’t chew solid food until he was six. He wore a nappy for most of his early childhood. As a baby, he was rigid, wouldn’t make eye contact, and hid in corners away from other children. He tried out for his school basketball team every year and got cut every time. Too small. Too slight. Barely 5’6 and about 54 kilograms. But he loved the game so much that his mum called the school and asked if there was any way he could be involved. The coach created a team manager role for him. For three years, McElwain showed up to every practice and every game. He wore a shirt and tie on match days. He ran drills, handed out water, kept stats, and cheered every basket like he’d scored it himself. On 15 February 2006, the last home game of his final school year, the coach let him suit up in a proper jersey and sit on the bench. With four minutes left and a comfortable lead, the coach sent him in. His first shot missed. His second missed. Then something shifted. He hit a three-pointer. Then another. Then another. His teammates stopped shooting entirely and just kept passing him the ball. He hit six three-pointers and a two-pointer. 20 points in four minutes. The highest scorer in the game. When the final buzzer went, the entire crowd rushed the court and lifted him onto their shoulders. His mum tapped the coach on the shoulder, in tears. “This is the nicest gift you could have ever given my son.” McElwain won the ESPY Award for Best Moment in Sports that year, beating out some of the biggest names in professional sport. He’s 36 now. He works at a local supermarket, coaches basketball, has run 17 marathons including five Boston Marathons, and travels the country speaking about never giving up. When asked about that night, his coach still gets emotional. “For him to come in and seize the moment like he did was certainly more than I ever expected. I was an emotional wreck.”
Lemma the Optimist10,190,197 views • 2 months ago
A ten-year-old girl on a beach in Thailand saw the sea start to behave strangely, and because of something she had learned two weeks earlier, around a hundred people got off that beach in time. Her name is Tilly Smith, a schoolgirl from Surrey in England. On the morning of 26 December 2004 she was on holiday with her parents, Penny and Colin, and her seven-year-old sister Holly, walking along Maikhao Beach in Phuket. It was their first big family trip abroad, a Christmas treat, and the morning looked completely ordinary. Then Tilly noticed the water. The tide was not going in and out the way it should. It kept rushing in, further and further, and the surface had turned to a strange froth, like the foam sizzling in a frying pan. To everyone else on the beach it was just an odd-looking morning. To Tilly it set off an alarm, because she had seen those exact two signs before. About two weeks earlier, her geography teacher, a man named Andrew Kearney, had shown her class a video of a tsunami that hit Hawaii in 1946, and had explained the warning signs that come right before the wave. The receding water and the frothing sea were the two things she remembered most. She started telling her parents they had to get off the beach, that a tsunami was coming. At first they were not sure, but she was insistent enough that her mother flagged the hotel staff. The beach and the lower floors of the hotel were cleared in the few minutes that remained. Then the wave came. That stretch of coast was one of the only beaches in Phuket where everyone made it out safely. A geography lesson she had sat through a fortnight before, almost by chance, turned out to be the reason a whole beach full of strangers got to safety in time.
Lemma the Optimist397,133 views • 6 days ago
A woman transporting rescue cats to their new homes had no choice but to put some in cargo. When the plane landed in Athens, Greece, she watched nervously through the window as luggage came down the ramp. Then she saw a baggage handler pick up each cat carrier slowly, crouch down, look inside, and gently talk to the animals one by one. He didn’t know anyone was watching. His name is Archie Ardales, 32, originally from the Philippines. When asked why he did it, he said the cats were probably scared because it was their first flight. He just wanted to comfort them.
Lemma the Optimist4,152,129 views • 1 month ago
For about 18 years, a self-taught truck mechanic named Tim Friede in the United States let cobras, mambas, taipans and rattlesnakes bite him 202 times, and injected himself with their venom 856 times. Once he took two cobra bites within an hour and slipped into a coma. Most experts called him reckless. Then in 2025, scientists took a sample of his blood, isolated the antibodies, and produced something the world has never had: a single antivenom that works against 19 of the planet’s deadliest snakes.
Dr. Lemma2,072,695 views • 1 month ago
10 years ago Australian surfer Mick Fanning encountered a Great White Shark during the final of the J-Bay Open in South Africa. The heat was being broadcast live when the shark surfaced behind him. Fanning reacted by punching the animal in the back to defend himself. His opponent Julian Wilson ignored his own safety and paddled toward the splashing to help. Fanning’s leash was severed during the struggle but safety teams arrived on jet skis to rescue both men. They emerged physically unharmed and the organizers cancelled the event.
Lemma the Optimist11,108,615 views • 4 months ago
There’s a fisherman in Costa Rica named Chito who, back in 1989, found a 70 kg crocodile bleeding on a riverbank, shot through the left eye by a cattle farmer who’d been losing cows. The animal was barely alive. Chito dragged him into his boat and took him home. For the first months he hid the crocodile in a secret pond deep in the forest, under a thick canopy of trees, because he didn’t trust the authorities to leave them alone. He fed him by hand. He slept next to him at night so the animal wouldn’t feel alone. He named him Pocho, which means “strong” in the local dialect. When Pocho was finally healthy, Chito drove him in a truck to a river far from the house and released him properly. The crocodile climbed straight out of the water and refused to go back in. He just waited. So Chito took him home again. The trust between them took years. “At first it was slow, slow,” Chito has said. “After a decade I started to work with him.” His first wife left him over the crocodile. Chito’s response: “Another wife I could get. Pocho was one in a million.” He later remarried, and his second wife came to love the animal too once she saw Chito putting his hands in its mouth. Every Sunday for over ten years, the two of them performed together in a small pool for whoever showed up. Pocho would charge at Chito with his jaws wide open, then close them at the last second so Chito could kiss his snout. They did this for years without incident. Pocho passed peacefully in the water outside the house in October 2011. By then he was around 5 metres long and probably about 60 years old. The whole town came to the funeral. Chito sang a calypso song he’d written for him, holding the crocodile’s hand. American crocodiles are one of the most aggressive species in the Americas, with the second strongest bite force of any animal alive. Researchers have only recently started taking crocodile intelligence seriously, finding that they play, use sticks to lure birds during nesting season, and form social bonds with each other. None of which explains Chito and Pocho, but it does mean what happened between them wasn’t impossible. Just very, very rare.
Lemma the Optimist1,283,980 views • 23 days ago
During the 2020 COVID lockdown, a bored student named Josh challenged every other Josh he could find on Facebook to meet up and fight for the right to keep the name. One year later, nearly 1,000 Joshes actually turned up to a random field in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA, armed with pool noodles, for a free-for-all battle. The ultimate winner was a four-year-old boy named Josh Vinson Jr.
Lemma the Optimist1,575,537 views • 1 month ago
Back in 2009, in London, England, a bald, overweight community worker named Paul Yarrow decided he was tired of news cameras only ever filming attractive people for street interviews. So he started showing up in the background of live broadcasts, always in the same beige sweater, just walking past or pretending to be on his phone, never saying a word. By the middle of 2010 he had appeared in over 100 live news shots across the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky News and Al Jazeera. He told reporters it was a protest. “It is a statement about the image-conscious media.” A British comedian on the BBC dismissed him as “one fat guy who just wants to get on telly,” which Yarrow said proved his point exactly.
Lemma the Optimist1,571,564 views • 1 month ago
A wild goose once knocked on the door of a parked police car until the officer inside got out. He offered her food, which she ignored. She walked away a few metres and stopped, looked back at him, walked again, looked back again. He followed her about 90 metres (100 yards) to a patch of grass near a creek, where one of her goslings was tangled in the string of a Mother’s Day balloon someone had thrown in the bushes. His feet were kicking. A second officer, a mother of two herself, knelt down and worked the string off. The mother stood about a metre away the whole time, watching, completely calm. Geese normally attack anything that gets near their young. The rescue happened on the Monday after Mother’s Day. The strangest part isn’t that a bird walked up to a human. It’s that she knew to walk up to that specific human, and somehow knew not to attack the one who touched her baby.
Lemma the Optimist876,764 views • 21 days ago
Horses possess a remarkable anatomical feature called the “stay apparatus,” a system of tendons and ligaments that locks their leg joints in place, allowing them to doze while standing. This evolutionary adaptation means they can bolt from danger in an instant if threatened. But standing sleep has limits. To enter REM sleep, the deep, restorative phase where the brain dreams and the muscles go slack, horses must lie down completely. In this position, they’re defenseless. They cannot flee. They are exposed to predators. So they only do it when they feel absolutely safe. If a horse lies flat in your presence, stretched out and still, it’s offering you something profound: its trust.
Lemma the Optimist6,857,390 views • 3 months ago
In most countries, half the buttons you press in a day might be placebos. The walk button at the crossing, the close-door button in the elevator, the thermostat on the office wall. They click, they light up, and many of them are not actually wired to anything. Take New York, in the United States. Of the roughly 3,250 buttons at its pedestrian crossings, fewer than 120 actually do anything. The rest click when you press them, they look like working buttons, but they have not been connected to the traffic lights for more than thirty years. The city quietly deactivated them in the late 1980s when the signals moved to a computer system. Nobody told the public, because the public kept pressing them anyway. The close-door button in most American elevators is in the same condition. It has been doing nothing since 1990. That was the year the Americans with Disabilities Act passed, which required elevator doors to stay open long enough for someone in a wheelchair or on crutches to get in. The button stayed on the panel, but the wiring was cut. Karen Penafiel, who ran the National Elevator Industry trade group, confirmed this plainly to the New York Times a few years ago. In Hong Kong, the walk button at many pedestrian crossings is real during quiet hours and a placebo during rush hour. A central traffic computer decides which one it is, depending on how busy the road is. The same button, pressed by the same person at the same crossing, might or might not be doing anything, depending on the time of day. Parts of the UK and Australia use the same system. Office thermostats have their own version of this. A 2003 piece in the Wall Street Journal revealed that landlords in the US had been installing dummy thermostats in commercial buildings for years. A tenant would complain about the temperature, an engineer would walk over, turn a dial that controlled nothing, and the complaints would stop. One HVAC specialist estimated that as many as ninety percent of office thermostats in the country were fake. Other engineers said it was closer to two percent. Either way, it was widespread enough to be a known trick of the trade. These are only the places where someone has bothered to investigate and report it. Nobody has done a proper audit of the buttons in Lagos, or Nairobi, or Jakarta, or Mexico City, or Karachi. The crossings, elevators, and thermostats in those cities were installed by the same manufacturers, run by the same kinds of building managers, governed by the same kinds of traffic computers. There is no particular reason to assume the buttons there are any more honest than the ones in New York. A Harvard psychologist named Ellen Langer has a name for what is going on. She calls it the illusion of control. When you press the button, even if nothing happens, your brain registers that you took an action, and the waiting becomes easier. The door closes eventually, the light changes, the office cools down. And every time, your brain credits the button.
Lemma the Optimist101,846 views • 3 days ago
13 years ago, a 20-year-old woman came home from her part-time job, changed into a crumpled green t-shirt she found on her bedroom floor, sat in front of her webcam, and recorded a video that would follow her for the rest of her life. Laina Morris had entered a fan contest run by pop star Justin Bieber. He’d asked fans to record their own version of his song “Boyfriend” from a girlfriend’s perspective. Morris decided to make hers as unsettling as possible. She wrote lyrics about taping a recording device under her boyfriend’s sleeve and stealing the key to his house. To fill time before the song started, she stared into the camera without blinking, eyes wide open, with a fixed smile. She didn’t win the contest. But a friend screenshotted her face from the video and uploaded it to the internet. By the next morning, her expression had become one of the most shared memes in the world: “Overly Attached Girlfriend.” People added captions like “Took you 15 minutes to get home. Google Maps says 12. Who is she?” Morris leaned in. She built a YouTube channel, landed brand deals with major companies, appeared on late-night television, and turned the meme into a full-time career with over a million subscribers. Then in 2019, she posted a video called “Breaking Up With You…Tube” and walked away. She said she’d been battling depression since 2014 and had been keeping it a secret. “I felt ashamed and I felt guilt for being stressed and overwhelmed with a job and opportunities that were so great. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t handle it.” She’s 33 now. Lives quietly with her dogs. In a recent interview, she was asked if the meme still follows her on dates. She said one date ended early after the person realised who she was, spent the rest of dinner texting people about it, and left saying, “I can’t believe I just went on a date with the Overly Attached Girlfriend.” What’s something from your past that people still associate with you, even though you’ve moved on?
Dr. Lemma4,250,284 views • 2 months ago
In 1999, Hyundai Sweden released the "Toy Boy" ad for its Coupé. At a red light, a woman uses her electronic reclining seat to hide a young lover from her husband in the next car. The camera pans to show the husband doing the same to hide his own lover.
Lemma the Optimist7,935,493 views • 4 months ago
Her mother spent $4,000 to record a birthday song for a thirteen year old girl. It changed the next decade of that girl's life in ways nobody could have predicted. The song was called Friday. Rebecca Black recorded it during school break, just for fun. It sat at around 1,000 views for a month. Then it didn't. It became the most disliked video on all of YouTube. The count was public back then. Everyone could see it. Millions of people had gone out of their way to press a button just to register their contempt for a thirteen year old girl. She was in eighth grade. Kids at school would walk past her singing it in mocking voices. Food was thrown at her. She received threatening messages serious enough that police investigated them. She eventually switched to homeschooling. At nineteen, almost every producer she approached told her they would never work with her. She wrote years later that she had spent most of her teenage years terribly ashamed of herself and afraid of the world. She kept going. Lady Gaga called the song genius. Katy Perry championed her publicly and invited her to appear in her own music video. Friday was covered on Glee. Her 2023 debut album received critical acclaim. In 2025 she released her second album, toured across North America and Europe, and opened for Katy Perry on a world tour. She has turned down every offer to have the video removed from the internet. She said pulling it down would only attach more shame to something she no longer feels ashamed of. The video has been watched over 167 million times.
Lemma the Optimist3,995,708 views • 2 months ago
A railway company in Japan once ran out of money to pay a stationmaster. So they gave the job to the cat who lived outside the station. She wore a custom made hat, worked for cat food, and saved the entire line. Her name was Tama. She was a calico cat who had spent her days sitting near the entrance of Kishi Station in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, greeting passengers anyway. When the company destaffed the station in 2006 to cut costs, the president visited to discuss what to do about the stray cats living nearby. He looked into Tama's eyes and later said they conveyed a sense of purpose as strong as any of his employees. He made her stationmaster. Within a month passenger numbers rose by seventeen percent. People began travelling from across Japan just to see her. Tourists arrived from other countries. A French documentary crew came to film her. The station was eventually rebuilt in the shape of a cat's face. In her eight years as stationmaster Tama contributed an estimated one billion yen to the local economy. She was promoted four times. She eventually held the title of Honorary President of the railway. The only female in a senior position in the entire company. When she passed away in 2015 over three thousand people attended her funeral. She was given the posthumous title Honorary Eternal Stationmaster and enshrined at a nearby Shinto shrine as a goddess. The position of stationmaster at Kishi Station is still held by a cat today.
Lemma the Optimist3,677,320 views • 2 months ago
These two boys should be about 31 years old now. Back in 2006, the internet was united by a low-quality video from Mexico titled "La Caída de Edgar" (Edgar's Fall). The clip captured a moment of pure childhood betrayal. A young boy named Edgar attempted to cross a small stream on two loose tree branches, while his cousin Fernando jokingly threatened to move them. Despite Edgar's iconic pleas of "Ya wey!" (Knock it off, dude!), Fernando dropped the log, sending Edgar plunging into the muddy water. It was one of the first global hits of the YouTube era, turning Edgar into an instant legend.
Lemma the Optimist7,816,524 views • 5 months ago