I get this question a lot but it's in my bio. I am a software developer. I work 9-5 etc (actually its a small company and I work all kinds of hours).
I am in some sense a provincial person. I have lived in New Hampshire my whole life, excepting college in upstate New York (I have never really been to NYC). I live about 10 miles from where I was born. I have worked at the same job for over ten years now.
I went to NYC only once for a half-day conference put on by google. Actually I have never been to almost any major American city. I have never seen Chicago, or LA or Miami or Austin, or really anywhere outside of New England. Only real exception is SF.
I have been to several places in Europe. I stayed a month in Ireland as a kid, then a month in Paris with Simi a few years ago. Other trips were a week or less, places like Malta, Lisbon, Tirol, Istanbul. We drive to Montreal often (well once a year ish)
As I've said before I would rather travel to the same place over and over than try to check off boxes of different places. Places reveal themselves to you slowly. And you have to be paying attention.
Food is almost a spiritual thing for us, and there are not really restaurants here that care. Montreal is an incredible food city. Lots of high quality options and surprisingly inexpensive for a city. So we mostly go to get fat for a long weekend 🤣
My flower field experiment this year has mostly failed, due to the April drought, leading to very stunted plants in most of the field except where I watered consistently.
The result is an OK patch in the middle, but my hope was the whole field would look like that.
This is what the good part looks like. Even here the flowers are a tad stunted, and the goal was poppies, chamomile, and bachelors buttons for a display of red white and blue. The bachelors buttons (some say cornflower) did the best, and they are coming up elsewhere too.
The chamomile on the other hand are about 4 inches high with puny little flowers, and very few poppies (compared to the millions planted) took off. Some poppies are just a few inches high also.
CERTAIN CHICKENS may be responsible for some areas where nothing came up at all
On certain lucid mornings, before even farmers awaken, the fairies emerge from the edge of the forest. On the sloping hills, with the first strokes of sun, they dry the gold and paper money that they create at night in their underground dwellings.
One morning the fairies were surprised by two boys walking by, who must have woke up very early indeed, or else never slept. The boys gazed longingly at the newly minted treasure, and so the fairies, in a good-natured mood, told them to take what they like.
One of the boys filled his coat pockets with gold, and stuffed his socks and hat with paper. He then bowed to the fairies, and left. The other ran to town as fast as he could, to look for a horse and a cart.
dating discourse newly centered around arranged marriages/matches seems misplaced. Despite atomization its easier to find more people than ever. The real issues almost certainly lie elsewhere.
A big component of the problem is that people cannot articulate their values and goals, or do not actually have any. Obviously school / parents (?!) / peers are little help.
Without these people idea of "dating" isn't forming something so much as abating loneliness.
It's no wonder they're default disposable. People follow vague instructions [WITHOUT GOALS OR VALUES OF ANY KIND], get bored or confused, and "move on." Like its another component of school. Some people almost see it foremost as resume building.
The most important technologies that no one is working on are optimism and beautiful visions of the future. A belief in technological progress must include giving people places and futures worth believing in. It doesn't come for free.
Which of these has more joyful people? Which has more dancing and singing?
If you want belief in progress, the folk future is what you must show, not the cyber highway or the economic version of vital statistics. If the future is to be conceived, I hope it is one that is far happier, messier, and greener than the futures we enjoy depicting.