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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • My advanced activities consists primarily of hiking and on a more frequent and casual form day-to-day, just carrying heavy and bulky stuff around.

    I was born and raised in the vast wildernesses, forests, wetlands and the old mountains/fells of the Fennoscandic Lappland, so hiking and walking in nature in general has been a big part of my life since I was a wee lad. Even as a teen the closest thing counting as something close to a city was some 200km away, and I spent my pre-teens in a small remote village of 300 inhabitants not so close to anything bigger. Closest village with a church and a few shops a few tens of kilometers away. This is all to give the context in that I haven’t even had much chance to do stuff other than wandering in the wilderness, so whatever I now am has been built and predicated on that mostly.

    I have found that the usual form of hiking and backpacking (in nature) in places not requiring special tools or equipment (such as for cliff climbing) seems to favor building up upper body bulk and strength as opposed to a general lightweight build. If we are to assume the logic you suggest is universal and true.

    I haven’t been to gym or actively building up my mass or strength, but I’ve grown to be quite heavy on my upper body just by loving hiking and traversing wilderness and fells with a backpack and camping equipment. I’ve also grown pretty hefty thighs and legs overall.

    I’ve attempted climbing (in a hall setting, you know as a total beginner) and I’ve got to say: My build is entirely wrong for that. I’m not very agile and the weight the muscles bring makes me very unstable and really bad at swinging/maneuvering. Of course it’s mostly that I’m a total stranger to that and probably would get a lot better with a lot of patience and training, but then my friends with lighter, more usual build (from hobbies in jogging, tennis, soccer or such) with exactly as little experience or knowhow in climbing, were all so much more natural in all that, in much less time and with much fewer attempts.

    This is all to say, that your usual hiking and backpacking (especially on a multi-night, even a weeklong carry) is probably not so directly building towards climbing itself, or a lighter build. I think it tends to favor bulkiness to sustain the required carrying weight and the tough, varying terrain. But running of course does favor lightness, maybe the well-paved tourist trails do too, in terms of hiking, but even then you’re going to have to carry a lot and keep a modest pace to be able to sustain the energy for the long haul, while still being able to power through the hills, the ravines, the fells and the deep thick forests with a lot of trunks, large glacial erratics etc, with the weight on your shoulders and back, which I think is pretty much all of it disadvantageous on a lighter build(?)

    But that’s neither here or there, just thought I’d offer a differing anecdote. Otherwise I think your (and others’!) points are great!


  • So are men. Flooded with choices on dating apps and otherwise. It also puts women in competition. And others. It’s not a gendered problem. It’s an attitude problem.

    The amount of effort is very likely way more equal to that of those “others” have to expend than most would concede, it’s just that some of the young boys aren’t taught to have a spine and as such expect everything to be easy, then get majorly disappointed when that isn’t the case. World is tough, life is hard, you have to actually fight along the way and struggle to get to places. Just about everyone else already knows this by heart, but some men are barely starting catching up.

    Patriarchy isn’t as alive as it was, though very much alive still, so their expectations just no longer match the reality. And that’s a bummer. Boo hoo. Makes them commit mass murder, school shootings, but more widely, outside of those extremes, just fall in love with toxic men with a platform that actually do speak of things that better match their expectations.

    It’s simply that some young men are pampered little babies that aren’t adapting to a less powerful patriarchy and have zero idea how to actually live in this world as a normal person without an excess of privileges.

    And that’s often just an upbringing thing. And a complex one at that, with not just the parents at fault. Society was, and still is, patriarchal and unequal in so many ways, but slowly gets better at least in west. It’s not the fault of the young men that get sucked into this, they never were taught better. That’s the problem more than anything.

    And before anyone comes in pointing fingers, I was assigned man at birth and am still an enby in part presenting as masculine. I know the privilege, and I do also know how hard it is to accept the fact that everything’s easier for us, when your heart feels like everything is hard. That’s just a bummer, but everyone has got it hard. More hard than me. A tough thing to see and recognize, because suddenly my struggle isn’t special. But really, it isn’t though. But that’s not the expectation young men have for some reason… Not always anyway.

    The toxic young men still are the minority, it’s worth recognizing that too. But they are very loud and very hurt little babies :-( we have to suffer through their incapability to adapt to reality by possibly even just dying in one of their mass shootings.

    It’s fucked up, and I’m not sure if there’s anything or anyone we can easily blame. And no easy answers either. I hate this part of reality.




  • Well, I lived in such conditions most of my adulthood before having a kid to care for, and it was possible precisely because it was just me. Either it was a small town not even close to a big city, or it was a small town at the outskirts of a big city, some 20-30km away. I loved it. Still do.

    But it’s so hard to uproot once you have all the other stuff like not only your own job, but also your partner’s. And kid’s school or daycare or whatever. And then having to work out the bus routes for the small humans and figure whether or not it’d be plausible for them to adjust to that and not get burned out or lost or confused or whatever.

    And once you need more space, it’s much harder to find places to rent in the small towns. Mostly for sale, if it’s beyond two bedrooms. And in that case it’s much more complicated since you need to go to the effort of getting the place evaluated, arranging the loans and finances so you can pull it off, and that’s a big decision since it’ll probably lock you in there for quite some while, because small towns don’t move houses fast if you decide to go, so you could be looking at years before you get the sale done and another mortgage.

    It’s just so hard. Once you are in the city, it’s hard to leave. And the more you root in the city, the harder it gets.

    I hate it. I hate the city. I hate most about it.

    But I love my family and would suffer in a city until my death if that’s what it takes to keep it together.

    But as a positive anecdote, in my life prior to rooting down, as a younger and more adventurous human, I found that maintaining a community and a good group of friends even somewhat far away from the rest of them is easy and most importantly, comes easy. Its natural. I never found community a problem, because I always had a few groups of friends and it was always enough for us to touch ground together only monthly or every other month, so our location wasn’t really a concern. Most of us lived apart anyway. And the actual day-to-day sense of community came from work or uni or that kind of thing. I was never alone, though I lived blissfully far from most everyone.

    So the only thing that really makes it difficult is trying to find a way and a good timing for not only one, but three+ people to move at once with all of them being happy with it. That’s a puzzle I’ve found near impossible to crack.

    If we had a lot of money saved or good enough jobs to get a nest egg going, the problems likely wouldn’t matter and could very easily be worked around. But alas, we are just lower middle class, and while we are well enough off, moving is a completely life changing and paradigm shifting thing. It’s not something to choose lightly.

    Maybe that plays a part within your group of acquaintances too? My work is even WFM and my partner could likely commute easily from most of the options we have within 100km. So technically we have a lot going for it. Should be easier.

    But it’s not. Life is complex.

    Edit: For context, I’m in Europe too.






  • Fair enough. I’m not going to, nor do I want to, dissuade you from continuing your search and believing what you believe, just wanted to get a better understanding on how you reason about these things. And initially I had hoped also to spark some questions and maybe second thoughts on your part.

    For the record, I’m not entirely following your chain of thought here, and I do not believe as you believe, nor do I really see the the distinction you posed just now, but who knows, maybe I’m wrong and it turns out you’re right.





  • Yeah, it’s a hard balance to find, trying to maintain your own mental wellbeing, career, social relations like friends and family, household, money with all that comes with it, and then also try and bring up a small human in as healthy and as encouraging an environment as possible.

    Sometimes you just have too much going on, especially in today’s world, so I also do get the occasional breaks given by some screen time.

    But it can also be productive, it doesn’t have to be mindless and meaningless content. But it’s sort of understandable to default to anything at all that can give them something to do for a moment, if you need to.

    But I’m not much of a parent either, in the way that I don’t really know what I am doing. I can’t imagine most do either.




  • Actually, the mobile/touch screen client side has gotten more love lately! I would recommend Luanti, especially with the mineclonia game, since Minecraft is so common they’ll have more to talk about with friends who play Minecraft, and not feel left out. The redstone stuff just recently got redone to the point it feels very similar to Minecraft, and I’ve found it’s actually a fun way for them to learn about programming, although mine, at 6, still struggles with the concepts and I’d be very surprised if a 5yo got a grasp on them properly. But then again it is entirely possible they are less logically inclined than their peers, and maybe they come more naturally to most other kids. But even so, it’s productive fun. It promotes imagination and sticking to a project in longer term. Building up things is fun for all kids I bet, but add to it the need to go gather, search and produce the tools and materials to build, it teaches some important life lessons too, that would not be so easy to convey otherwise. And with all this, it’s still just fun. If they get frustrated, they can just instead go sail across the seas and spelunk in some caves.

    Screen time has to be enforced a lot more though, since it’s so easily addictive. If one doesn’t put boundaries on it from the start, it’ll get unhealthy and hard to shake. A lot of grumpiness is bound to follow, unless really carefully keeping limits from the get-go.