2024-05-28
- I’m once again trying to write/publish more stuff on this blog (and eventually syndicated to other, larger Internet platforms, but that’s a ways off). I have identified Instagram and Twitter as the main distractors that take time/attention away from this goal. So I have set up a system to try and guide me away from infini-scrolling those sites. It relies on an app a friend told me about called One Sec, which forces me to pause for like 10 seconds before continuing to the infini-scroll places. That didn’t really work that well at first. I’d just wait at the time tollbooth and then go on. But then I had the idea to use some of the other features of One Sec, specifically the configuration option that allows One Sec to give you one-click links to other, preferred apps. Naturally, I put my writing app (Obsidian) as one of the preferred apps. And this has helped the last couple days with ensuring I actually write at least one small thing, before/in addition to my
infini-scrolling habit.
- Was thinking more about a “big question” in my life: where to live for the next stage (i.e. the “family” stage). Was talking this over with my partner. One thing I wanted to note here about those talks. It still seems like the biggest missed opportunity in the housing question on a broad scale is a coordination one. Basically, people coordinate exceptionally little with friends when it comes to choosing a place to live. At this point, it does seem to me like there are strong, positive, generally non-linear returns to living close to friends/family. Those returns seem to increase all the way from “same continent better than diff continent”, “same country better than diff country”, “same state better than diff state”, “same city better than diff city”, “same neighborhood better than diff neighborhood”, and “same block better than diff block.” And then, yes, they do seem to hit diminishing/potentially quite negative returns at “same building better than diff building” and “same room
better than diff room.” With that said, the level of coordination I see around this kind of structure (from myself and peers) is very low. I don’t think that’s a huge surprise, there are plenty of reasons why people don’t try to build life around each other in this way. And I think a large portion of those reasons are cultural preferences that could go a different way without much bad stuff happening. But nobody else seems to reach for this kind of thing or push on this thing, so we broadly don’t even try. I am not that different in this way, of course. It’s not like I am out waving the flag of “let’s try to get a group of friends to live in the same neighborhood of a particular city.” But I do note that it seems like a missed opportunity, when you sit down and think about life from the broadest perspective. Both in the moment and when looking back, it seems that time with friends and family reliably leads to the best times/memories/most meaning in most cases/etc. And yet,
that seems to play kind of a medium factor for people in the housing question, at least over these past 10 years/at this life stage. There seems to be some notion of “we’ll build community wherever we go,” which is totally fine, but also I’m kind of skeptical that you can just swap friends/family out like that and get particularly comparable results. In this domain, specific people seem to really matter. The big factor seems to be time. You can’t swap people out bc you invested significant time with people you met in childhood/early adulthood and there’s no similar shared cultural stuff like college past age 30. But who knows, maybe I’ll find that actually making lifelong, deep friendships past age 30 is not that hard, that my hesitance is mostly a skill issue in some way, and things will work out better than I can imagine from my current level of life experience. I dunno. But I do think about it as a thing that would be cool if it were somewhat different.
Date
May 28, 2024