I can’t imagine ever affording such a nice apartment.
That's a super tiny apartment. The niceness comes from caring, not from money.
Ordinary Abundance
31–40 of 203 posts
Re: Ordinary Abundance
#32For the last year I've been on well water for the first time in my life. High iron, manganese and iron bacteria - safe, but tasted eggy and ruined shower heads, dishwashers, clothes, washing machine, kettles... I just finished installing a whole-house filter & softener system and everyone is delighted. I told my kids that once a month we're going to serve untreated well-water with dinner, so we stay grateful for it.
I like this form of parenting. Make your life better for your kids, but reintroduce some challenge so that they learn to appreciate the comforts of life.
Re: Ordinary Abundance
#33I really loved this, thanks for sharing
Re: Ordinary Abundance
#34Hedonic adaptation really is something. I have been deeply trying to appreciate these modern marvels more and more, but it's hard. A hot shower, air almost 50 degrees cooler than the outside air coming out of my vents, communicating instantly thousands of miles away, it's all so easy to just forget and take for granted
Go camping
I've found that camping and hiking have the amazing benefit of restarting many of the daily pleasures like a good bed, a hot shower, a nice hot elaborated meal, a set of fresh clean clothes, etc.
So, +1 to the recommendation
Re: Ordinary Abundance
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know if I’m just weird, but my reaction is usually the opposite. When the power goes out, and you’re forced to sit and talk to people or just enjoy the quiet of the night. I think about how much we’ve lost in the modern rat race. One of the things that sits with me is that for all we’ve been given, most of us have lost the ability to just sit out in a field and enjoy the stars (light pollution, starlink, etc)
Yeah, OK but this is clearly romanticizing away the fact that you are deeply dependent on these services. See how long you can just sit and enjoy the stars when your indoor plumbing and refrigeration goes away, and more importantly when your neighbors go away, not to mention the billions of little moving parts that must operate flawlessly for something like the global supply chain that brings you those shorts you wea…
Fair enough, but I do think there are diminishing returns beyond the basics, and there’s a hierarchy.
We are very fortunate to have clean water and sewage. There are terrible stories in Victorian England of like workers popping in water systems and killing hundreds of people.
Electricity powers a ton of basics and maybe you think you could do without heating and air conditioning until a heat wave passes over Europe and kills hundreds of people. I do think beyond that you start to deal in a lot of tradeoffs. I hate they seemed to have systematically replaced wood burning fireplaces with gas. I moved out of a house with a wood burning fireplace and what a mistake,
Except automated bill pay. I swear I could go back and live in the 70’s if it wasn’t for automated bill pay.
Re: Ordinary Abundance
#36This is an interesting premise, and I would like to read the article, but the weird scrolling makes that almost impossible; the pictures overlay the text to such an extent that I can only read a couple of lines at a time. I wish there were some browser feature that would force sites to use normal scrolling.
Reader mode
Does not work in Firefox's reader mode, unfortunately
Re: Ordinary Abundance
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
We need a Netflix Chaos Monkey tool for modern life. Each week one modern convenience stops working for a day: indoor plumbing, air conditioning, electricity, wifi, automobile, air travel etc. after one day without, you will again appreciate those things for the next few years
If our education system, hiring processes, onboarding/skill transfer support, career development pipelines and similar systems continue to degrade, we should have something like what you're asking for before too much longer.
Plants crave Brawndo.
Re: Ordinary Abundance
#38Hedonic adaptation really is something. I have been deeply trying to appreciate these modern marvels more and more, but it's hard. A hot shower, air almost 50 degrees cooler than the outside air coming out of my vents, communicating instantly thousands of miles away, it's all so easy to just forget and take for granted
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Re: Ordinary Abundance
#39This is an interesting premise, and I would like to read the article, but the weird scrolling makes that almost impossible; the pictures overlay the text to such an extent that I can only read a couple of lines at a time. I wish there were some browser feature that would force sites to use normal scrolling.
For me, the images and text are out of sync; by the time the focus in the image has moved to the next item, the text is already hidden under the image.
Re: Ordinary Abundance
#40I can’t imagine ever affording such a nice apartment.
In the US, it's pretty easy. My wife used to live in the Tenderloin for $2400/mo and her place was nicer than this because she was good at putting things together. I don't happen to have a photo of the whole studio handy, but here's the view from the window: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/b/b7/Photo_-_San_Fran...
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