- The irony...
I did this. I cashed out in my 20s, bought a $2m home in the middle of nowhere (that goes a long way out here), and live out my days in my workshop surrounded by singing birds, bees, wildlife, trees and gardens, with views across lakes and plains.
And some cosmopolitan wants to tell me, as they cram another million people into gridlocked high-rises in their smoggy grey hellhole, that we in the country are bad for the environment? Or that the soulless crowds you have to navigate through every morning and evening are friendlier than the neighbours and strangers who wave and chat everywhere I go?
If you're able, get out of the cities. Especially if you have children. You have no idea what you're missing.
- >a woman who grew up in China
That's an odd way to say what you're saying
- I learned to code thanks to Excel.
One day I discovered "Record Macro". That was handy to automate some simple tasks. Then I discovered I could make a clickable button, that would activate one of my macros. That was great. Then I discovered I could double-click (iirc) the button and there, in front of my eyes, was the code. A whole world opened up to me.
I made gigantic programs. Thousands of lines of code. Horrific code. I didn't understand variables or arrays but I had cells and columns! Imagine that.
I became the automation guru at my job. God I hope those Excel files no longer exist. I would die of embarrassment. I built automation tools in my own time. In Excel, of course. Before long I was making enough to quit my day job. Thanks, Excel.
- Do you mean the non-PoE version? I have the PoE version sitting in a box somewhere and I'm a ESP32 enthusiast so I'm wondering if that's what I'll be doing today. Surely they're using it just as a WiFi coprocessor? Or...?
- Occasionally it's fun to discover new devices.
"It thinks my WiFi dog feeder is a Technoelectrocom 56XR-2000? What the hell is (was) that?"
- >Building my offline smart home took the better part of a weekend
Yeah, right.
Nobody in their right mind should be making their home "smart" for the convenience or efficiency. It's a hobby. A frustrating, inconvenient, burdensome, potentially expensive, challenging, neverending hobby.
It taught me to love light switches.
Cruising through the countryside at top speed to a larger town with the windows down and the radio up for an hour on the rare occasion I need something urgently is a pleasure compared to sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic to and from work, or crammed into a train with everything around me being suspiciously sticky and slightly smelly twice per day. We have what we need. You'd be surprised how little you miss the overwhelming number of choices and conveniences you have in the city. Anyway, I'm not that remote - I do most of my shopping online so everything is delivered to the door (albeit a day or two later than for you).
It's the look in their eye, or their nature and priorities implicit in their choices. Cities are utterly bereft of soul, spirit, meaning, purpose, culture, etc. Whatever they do have in these respects seems to me like a cynical parody of their true form. They will convene a meeting for consultants to identify an urban area in need of beautification, commission an agendered hippie to plonk some monstrous perverted multicolour sculpture there for millions of dollars and boast about it like this isn't an insult to everything pure, and decent, and good in this world.
The baked goods trading sounds really wholesome, I'm genuinely glad you have that.
Still, there's a good reason city-folk come out here for rest and relaxation while I dread going into the big smoke and get the hell out as soon as I'm done doing what I need to do.