Don't worry, I hate reading too
The algorithm knows you.
It knows what you’re afraid of, what makes you angry, and what makes you feel smart.
And it will use all of that to construct your opinions for you, if you let it.
Most people let it.
Here’s what I’ve noticed traveling: everyone has opinions about places they’ve never been and people they’ve never spoken to.
Europeans who've never set foot in the US have fully formed takes on Americans, and the conclusion is usually that we're stupid, have no healthcare or vacation time, and give all our money to billionaires while also using the internet, the iPhone, and half the things they touch every day.
Americans will tell Europeans their country is the best without anything to compare it to, while also bashing their own countrymen and women for disagreeing with them on 10% of issues.
I’m from rural western Pennsylvania. I’ve lived in California. I’ve spent years somewhere in between.
I know exactly what it costs to live in America, and I know what it costs to live in a place the rest of the country wrote off decades ago.
Nobody who hasn’t lived that can tell me about it.
They can describe it.
They cannot know it.
And that goes both ways.
People in rural Pennsylvania can’t fully understand the pressures of living in Los Angeles or San Francisco.
People in Los Angeles or San Francisco can’t fully understand what it feels like when the factory closes, opportunities disappear, and leaving means abandoning your family, identity, and community.
Neither side is stupid.
They’re solving different problems.
We’re all living inside our own bubbles.
The lazy read is, “Those people are just dumb.”
The actual read is that they have problems you couldn’t possibly imagine.
Not because you’re not smart enough.
Because you haven’t been there, and you haven’t asked.
The rural towns that lost manufacturing jobs were told to get re-educated.
Learn to code.
Move on.
Like it was simple.
Like the identity of a place and the people in it could be reformatted.
AI is coming for a different set of jobs now.
The cushy ones.
The tech ones.
The ones held by many of the people who once said, “Just re-educate.”
And when that happens, when your purpose gets yanked out from under you, when the material markers that made you someone are suddenly gone, maybe there’ll be a reckoning about what that actually feels like.
What it means to rebuild what you thought your life was for.
When competing with the Kardashians stops being possible or interesting, you’ll have to figure out what’s left.
But here’s the thing: even going to the source doesn’t guarantee you’ll find the truth.
It guarantees you’ll find a truth.
I’ve met travelers who visited the same country at the same time I did and came home with completely different opinions.
We walked the same streets, ate at the same restaurants, and saw the same landmarks.
But we met different people.
We carried different histories.
We noticed different things.
Everyone experiences the same country differently.
Different people.
Different places.
Different truths.
The nuance is the point.
No country has it figured out.
Travel long enough and you’ll realize every place solves some problems well and creates others.
The things people praise about one country are often connected to the things someone else struggles with.
Every system has tradeoffs.
Every culture has blind spots.
The goal isn’t to find the perfect place.
It’s to understand why people built the systems they did, who benefits from them, and who gets left behind.
Everyone has a different level of privilege, and I’m not interested in performing the speech about it.
Mine is this: I saved enough money to do what I’m doing.
I got scammed out of six dollars recently, and I’ll survive.
That’s the ballpark.
I’m educating myself constantly and having the occasional full crash-out because I genuinely don’t know what comes next.
What I do know:
I believe in myself.
I believe showing up for people carries actual weight, even when you’re miserable.
I believe the gut knows things before the brain admits them.
I believe speaking something out loud has a strange way of making it real.
I believe when people screw you, it comes back around, even if they’re too far gone to understand where it came from.
And I believe you have to go to the source.
Not the article.
Not the comment section.
Not the algorithm’s version of reality.
Before you form an opinion about rural America, about Iran, about Palestine, about Ukraine, about Kansas, about anywhere, talk to someone who has lived through the experiences.
Be the observer, not the expert.
Actually ask.
Then ask someone else.
Because no single person represents a country.
No single story explains a place.
Nothing will humble you faster.
Nothing will make you more useful.
Related
more intel
We Built the Machine and Forgot to Free Ourselves
The American hypocrisy is funny. We work so hard as a species to make life easier, to create comfort and progress, and then when we finally get there, it is never enough. Or worse, the system treats the progress like it was never the point. Take remote work. Humankind has literally figured out how to work from anywhere in the world. Anywhere. That should be one of the greatest achievements of modern civilization. I remember being a kid thinking, “Imagine if you could see someone on a screen and talk to them face to face. Wouldn’t that be insane?” That sounded like science fiction. Like something that would not happen in my lifetime. But now we are here. We have laptops with eight plus hours of battery. Video meetings. Cloud tools. WiFi in places that barely have running water. We can go to sleep and wake up on the other side of the planet and still show up to work. We can build careers from islands, coffee shops, buses, balconies, anywhere. No one truly understands what a feat that is. The world is smaller. Connection is instant. Cultures are more accessible than ever. Progress is happening everywhere, all at once. And corporate leaders are still arguing about whether people need to sit in cubicles in windowless offices for “team building.” What makes it even more absurd is the contradiction. You are told being in person is about culture and relationships. But then if you hang out with your coworkers outside of work too much, it becomes unprofessional. So what is the point? Why are we spending forty hours a week in environments no one wants to be in, with people we are not really allowed to connect with on a personal level, all in the name of culture? It is forced proximity disguised as leadership. Then comes the definition of success we are all supposed to accept without questioning. More money. The salary number is bigger, but usually it barely covers inflation. You get a raise, but rent goes up faster. Food costs more. Travel costs more. Debt increases. Insurance costs more. Everything costs more. So you are told you are crushing it, but in reality you are just treading water with more responsibility. That is the scam. You are not building freedom. You are maintaining survival. So people overspend on a nice dinner to get out of the house and out of the office. They buy small escapes to make the lifestyle tolerable. They purchase a new car on an 8 year loan because they can "afford" the monthly payment with their raise. Then they break even again and repeat the cycle. That is success? More money, more debt, and less freedom? And the job you built your life around could disappear tomorrow. Restructuring. Layoffs. Leadership changes. Budget cuts. Performance reviews. Suddenly you are stuck with more debt, fewer options, and the same freedom you had before, if not less. The bigger point is the one no one wants to say out loud. Advancing technology was supposed to mean building toward more freedom. That was the goal. Not just productivity. Not just efficiency. Not just squeezing more output from people. Freedom. Technology should have been the thing that gave us our lives back. Instead, it feels like we built a machine that made the world more efficient, but we did not reward the people who built it. We did not shorten the workweek. We did not increase vacation time. We did not cut hours while keeping salaries the same. Instead, we automated parts of jobs, laid people off in the name of efficiency, and asked the remaining workers to do more so companies could chase endless profit. And we called that progress. Working hard until you are sixty five, just to retire exhausted, sick, and too tired to enjoy what is left, is no longer an attractive dream. Not when the possibilities are endless. If that is not the goal, then what truly is?
Hippie Thoughts