notenoughhorses

I am a millennial and my parents did no events, since they both worked and had long commutes. I wonder when the middle class entertainment slowed down—I want to guess it’s when you have more two income households, that don’t earn enough to hire home help.

In my city, an older guy organized an “urban hiking group” where he would plan walking routes through the city, usually stopping at a restaurant for brunch. It was very popular, but probably a lot of work. He was semi-retired, so he had the time to do it. He did research to have talking points on the history of some spots we passed, like a tour guide.

It was a great low key meet up. You didn’t have to make friends with the organizer. If you were walking with someone you didn’t really like in the group, it was easy to drift to talk to someone else.

Many accountants are worried about the risk of filing for their clients and won’t do it at all. Determination of ownership is not as straightforward as one might assume in many cases.

Looks good on my iPhone 11

Or alternatively, to add to the list, working parents cannot afford to live near grandparents. They bought in the 1980s.

I’m an accountant, not developer, but in my case I found freelancing much preferable to working on a team.

I don’t think I’m “bad” at working on a team, in that my team members would be happy to have me on the team, but I personally found it stressful to navigate multiple bosses depending on the project, having to rely on junior teammates that I would not have picked to hire, etc. I am much happier working with clients where I get to decide how the work gets done. Even though I still interface and meet with lots of people, it’s different and much more comfortable!

I’ve been using blot.im It’s not free, but it’s cheap and the workflow really works for me.

You keep the files in markdown in a Dropbox folder, and the blot service uses the files to update your blog. This makes it easy to use my preferred editors on my phone, iPad, and windows or Linux desktop pretty seamlessly.

Yes

I’m not a “kid” person, basically never held a baby before we had our first this August.

As the child bearing person in this equation, I also did the most research on pregnancy, birth, subsequent baby stuff. (My partner did do some reading too, but not the same extent of feeling like he needed to figure it all out.)

One thing that’s interesting is that in many ways, even the pair of us who knew nothing about babies have pretty good instincts for what they need. We got some help from a post partum doula to show us baby care, since we figured you can’t learn all that from reading.

We did read some books. I tried to stay away from articles because they are incentivized to act like there’s conflict or “new” stuff to talk about to keep engaging readers. The most useful resource has been a private Reddit forum of other people who had babies the same month, so we can compare what’s worked for lots of people, what popular info seems totally wrong to lots of us, etc.

Kids aren’t easy, but they are not hard the same way our knowledge-worker jobs are to learn.

Before Instagram, we had magazines to help teens compare themselves to an unrealistic ideal. I had an English teacher in high school who had an entire wall plastered with problematic themes in magazine ads, so it would highlight the subtle messages we are receiving when we look at these ads. I used to love buying fashion magazines and looking at the ads before I took that woman’s class, and after that I totally stopped buying them.

Now, I do think Instagram is way more insidious because you’d now be thinking you are comparing to other normal teens rather than at least knowing these are special magazine people. But my point is that the teacher who explicitly taught us about these patterns and influences did so much more to “protect” us from these negative effects than trying to ban/blame the magazines would have done.

I like it, but it doesn’t feel liberating. It feels like you need to be very careful, because if you express yourself in a way that could be taken the wrong way, it will be! But I like getting the insight into how many different people think. Edit: typo

I have a - in my name, and while I’m used to websites not accepting this, it’s always interesting which ones give a neutral error like “only letters and numbers allowed” vs an insulting error of “please enter a valid name” when I try to see if their firm will accept my correct name.

Become a contractor doing this stuff for clients. I do bookkeeping currently, which is super easy for me, but in trying to train clients who want to do it themselves, and in general just working with all kinds of business owners, I see so much about what “normal” people struggle with.

When I first started doing it, I thought what I did was so easy, there’s already lots of software to help, soooo thought clients could just do it themselves if you showed them how. But I’ve learned so much of it is so hard for people with no background in it, and also so hard for people who don’t Google stuff.