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Just finishing up my winter trip to escape the cold and dark Alaskan Winter. It's minus 39 today at my cabin in Alaska but here I am on the Cote d' Azur in Antibes, cozy in a cheap out-of-season room in a small hotel, having oysters for lunch at the funky oyster bar --huitres --- down at the daily market ----marche----and cheap but excellent plat du jour dinners with the nice vin de Provence in the evenings

My advice is that travel isn't just for the young

Great, post some pictures, but just remember before you do, I have a way to track any photo for duplicates and their addresses across the internet.

Pops wrote:
But I settled down about then and needed to make a living; it happens. As to your original point Ibon, yes, definitely do not have kids if you don't want to be encumbered. At least for me, I became the nest builder after the chicks arrived, LOL. Unfortunately, acquisition became routine for me, so that now that our kids are long moved away, I'm encumbered by stuff.

Great post Pops. Not much different here. I was 34 when our first daughter was born and it did coincide with the end of the that adventurous wandering chapter and the start of my professional career.

Having a family turns one inward and more conservative and it is when you find yourself most nestling into the status quo. The instinct as a parent to protect and provide for your offspring actually is one of the drivers of consumption. It certainly happened to us.

I sold my business in 2004 and we exited the world of commerce, home schooled our 2 daughters for a year. Sold our house and got rid of all our stuff. Felt great. We wandered through Nepal, India, Philippines, Thailand, back through Europe. Our family remembers cherishes this time and experience spent together. We were 90 days in Nepal, on the Anapurna trail at the heighth of the maoist insurgency there and there were only 10% of the normal volume of trekkers. We made friends that have lasted until today. Our youngest daughter when she turned 18 two years ago went alone back to Kathmandu and studied buddhism in a monastary for a month before trekking solo with one of our nepalese friends we made years before.

By the way, do you think my daughters will take my advice about not having kids? I doubt it. Maybe it is the parent still in me that wants to spare them and my future grandchild the traps and suffering of hard times ahead. At other times I see opportunities for my daughters in these times of decline because neither of them are assuming any resiliency in the status quo and they may indeed ride the waves and troughs with more grace as a result.

I really like what you said about those Three Boxes of Life. They should all be happening all the time if one is to live a virtuous life I think.

Here at 56 the actuaries would say I have maybe 20 productive years so I'm thinking it is time I finally unencumbered myself of stuff. I am in the somewhat unique position of being able to work from anywhere I can get a cell signal or McDonalds' WiFi, so why not do a little wandering around - albeit fossil fueled wandering? Learn/work/play.

When I exited the world of commerce and made the choices that eventually brought me here in Panama I did have to access once again that warrior traveling space of my youth. I drew from that past and added the sobriety of middle age to make the leap to where we are today. That is partially why part of my advice to youth is to abandon the status quo for awhile, hit the road on a bicycle or a backpack and see the consumption paradigm from the outside and recognize it in all its repugnance in the arrogant way that only youth understand. One day you might find yourself older and wiser but still nimble enough to jump..... thanks to the practice you did in your youth.

along the way we would stop occasionally to visit with this kid or that great grandkid

(hear that Mrs. Ibon? )
.

She heard it. She is smiling. She wants grandkids. At least one from each daughter. How can I not support her in this when she puts up with living up here on the edge of the clouds.....

careinke wrote:

farmlad wrote:I just came across an interesting article in BBC Magazine "A Point of View, See no Evil". I`m wondering what others make of this article.

Welcome farmlad.

Normally one posts a link to the article so people have a chance to read it before commenting. If you read it from hard copy, the Issue of the magazine would be helpful.

Save us the trouble of cut'n'pasting it into Google.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25680144

Lore wrote:Great, post... I have a way to track any photo ...across the internet.

Nice try but no way am I going to let you "track" your way to my little oyster bar in Antibes. One of the best things about travel off season is an almost complete absence of the usual hordes of tourists. I take a little pride in some of the unusual places I find while travelling over winter break, especially when I'm the only American there

I'll give you a hint though. The family that runs it owns their own oyster farm and also sell their oysters at a little booth in the daily market. If you see a waiter run into the marche, grab oysters off a counter, start madly shucking and arranging them on a serving tray and then lift them into serving position and proudly carry them back down a little side alley then try "tracking" him -- you just might stumble on something quite nice indeed.

Keith_McClary wrote:

farmlad wrote:I just came across an interesting article in BBC Magazine "A Point of View, See no Evil". I`m wondering what others make of this article.

Save us the trouble of cut'n'pasting it into Google.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25680144

BBC wrote:It's an attitude that hasn't gone away. A similar denial of reality prevails today in Britain and many other countries in connection with the financial crisis and its aftermath. The bankers and politicians seem genuinely to have believed that a new type of capitalism had been invented in which booms and busts would no longer occur. In the new era we'd entered, they were convinced, a level of prosperity had been reached that would only increase for the foreseeable future.

If you actually evaluate the facts on the ground it appears a large number of those same 'experts' still genuinely believe the small crash we had in 2008 was just a temporary aberration and their brilliant financial structure will still be triumphant in the end.

Self delusion is a common enough human trait that we should all be able to recognize it, yet part of its effect is we all to a greater or lesser extent delude ourselves into believing it isn't nearly as bad as rational review of reality says it is. We have struck the limit of what perpetual growth can provide, but we continue to try and force more growth and ignore our limits. Sooner or later Reality asserts control and our illusions will collapse as a result.

Happy Motoring!

There is a generational impact as well.

My Millennial daughter is blaming the Baby boomer generation for ruining her future. The boomers created a generation gap with those who came before them on the way in, causing all kinds of historical issues in the 60's and early 70's. As the boomers depart, the mess they are leaving behind is truly epic. My parents generation was truly a historical enigma, that will be remembered by history only by its aberration from historical norms.

It plays into the energy story. The generation with the peak education, peak resources, peak lifestyle, peak mobility, peak everything. Think of how boomer 20 something's rock n' roll stars with their own private jets in the 60's was a departure from the previous norm? They have fly in hamburger joints now for boomer millionaires who have their private planes. No generation before or ever after will have had these luxuries or excesses.

When the boomers are mostly gone by the mid 2030's our society will be unrecognizable from its current form.

https://youtu.be/VVlFtA8ZUJ0?t=8s

Rod_Cloutier wrote:There is a generational impact as well.

My Millennial daughter is blaming the Baby boomer generation for ruining her future. The boomers created a generation gap with those who came before them on the way in, causing all kinds of historical issues in the 60's and early 70's. As the boomers depart, the mess they are leaving behind is truly epic. My parents generation was truly a historical enigma, that will be remembered by history only by its aberration from historical norms.

It plays into the energy story. The generation with the peak education, peak resources, peak lifestyle, peak mobility, peak everything. Think of how boomer 20 something's rock n' roll stars with their own private jets in the 60's was a departure from the previous norm? They have fly in hamburger joints now for boomer millionaires who have their private planes. No generation before or ever after will have had these luxuries or excesses.

When the boomers are mostly gone by the mid 2030's our society will be unrecognizable from its current form.

https://youtu.be/VVlFtA8ZUJ0?t=8s

There is a lot of truth in that. Up until the 'Boomers' were born every generation for the most part had respect bordering on reverence for the prior generations. They might resent what dear old dad did to the nth degree, but Mr. Smith next door was treated as a wise neighbor and Mr. Jones, their boss at work was a good man trying to make a living and providing them a job so they could do the same. When the Boomer generation came of age all that respect went out the window.

Instead of respect bordering on reverence we turned to despite and distrust. This lead to an entire 'me' generation that were focused on their own wants instead of what the culture as a whole needed to be sound and sensible. IMO anyhow. The concept of Progress as a way of serving humanity was thrown right out the door and 'Progress' came to mean making the most money for the Boomers as quickly as possible no matter what the consequences to the neighbors or the workers would be. Mechanization went from a steady pace of improvement to the breakneck pace of focusing only on the bottom line.

Some century and a half ago there was a cautionary tale written about the difference between 'heartless capitalism' and 'Christian capitalism' from a fellow named Charles Dickens. At the time England was torn between the 'progress' from capitalism and the societal costs of pursuing money above all other goals. The people who looked at the big picture saw factory work as a way to employ the poor at useful work and provide a living arrangement for them at the same time. Others, represented by Mr. Scrooge, saw personal profit as the only value of running a company.

It is a lesson we need to learn again. The whole reason the elites want open borders is to bring in illegal aliens as workers who have no voice. If they speak up they are threatened with deportation, it is a case of work your behind off for slave wages or get shipped back to the country you came from.

If the Millennials would quit whining about the boomers, the police, capitalism (whatever that is) and every other goddam thing and crawl out of their safe spaces and get a haircut and wear normal clothes and turn down their music and get off their collective butts and get a job and go to work .....then maybe they could help fix things.

Until then--Get off my LAWN!


Cheers!

We ruined their future by coddling them.
https://www.facebook.com/FollowingHumor ... nref=story

Sorry to disagree, Tanada, but the Boomers did make this mess. It has to do with the flower children of the 1960's, their rebellion that began against the Vietnam War, and ended up being against everything that our parent's generation stood for, the painful lessons of WW2.

Of course, some of us never rebelled and never respected those that did. My Father was a W4 Warrant Officer in the USCG, he "ran a tight ship", supporting as he did six kids, his Mother, and his baby sister. We never had luxury vacations, fancy cars, fancy homes, and seldom ate out.

So the Boomers spawned the Millenials and listened to Dr. Spock when it came to discipline, and now we have a mess. Approximately half the country exists to pleasure themselves, spoil themselves, and to He!! with everybody else except me-me-me. They don't even save for the future, because they believe that they have a rich uncle named Sam who will be their Nanny, feed them, give them money, and wipe the drool off their chins. The other half the country has values, and the two halves pretty much dispise and hate each other.

YES it is today pretty much R vs. D. In my youth, there was indeed a much broader range of political philosophy, with both R and D ultra-conservatives, and ultra-liberals - kinda. Liberalism back then was bound up almost exclusively with civil rights for minorities, and the D's were champions of ethnic and religious hatred, the ultra-right-wing Dixiecrats.

Nowadays everybody except some minority groups think that Civil Rights are over with, and it's OK to demand free healthcare, free money, and free stuff in general, because you shouldn't have to work to have the same stuff and the same freedoms as those that do work.

Frankly, they ought to pay bounties on liberal D scalps, same as the D's used to pay on Native American scalps.

So the Boomers spawned the Millenials

Sorry, you missed a generation. I was born in 1970 to hippie parents. My dad had hair longer than my mother, and he'd regularly have friends over to watch hockey night in Canada, and then they'd drop acid together. My parents had an openly gay friend who would walk around in pink pants, and for awhile he lived in the basement of my house, when I was a young kid in the 70s, and I was brought up thinking this was perfectly normal.

Firmly identify as 'Generation X' here, my parents were boomers, who spawned Gen X (Me), and I spawned a couple of Millennial's. My whole life has been 'Walking in the shadow of the elephant', nothing that I or anyone my age could do could compare with the achievements, lifestyles, conspicuous consumption, and extravagance of the boomers. My kids see the incredible wealth of the boomers with justifiable envy. They are also loathe to the narratives of their grandparents generation; Guy McPherson sums this up nicely with this short quote:

https://youtu.be/ysR4OxSco-o?t=6m37s

No generation is monolithic. i.e. as a general rule, hippies aren't heavy industry industrialists, soldiers aren't pacifists, nuns aren't terrorists, etc.

It's easy to sit and blame someone, anyone else. It's a lot tougher to try to do something about the problems one sees with one's own effort and sacrifice (including living well below one's means, to curb consumption, or forego having children, to curb current and future consumption).

Until the vast majority of younger generations are actually doing something about the problems instead of continuing (with style changes like smart phone in hand) doing what the previous generations did (i.e consuming all they can afford AND borow) -- the whole exercise of generation "A" blaming generation "B" is pointless and rather silly.

the whole exercise of generation "A" blaming generation "B" is pointless and rather silly.

It doesn't mean it can't or won't happen. I think it will escalate, quite dramatically, in the years to come.

Rod_Cloutier wrote:

the whole exercise of generation "A" blaming generation "B" is pointless and rather silly.

It doesn't mean it can't or won't happen. I think it will escalate, quite dramatically, in the years to come.

Sorry if I was unclear. I didn't say or imply it "can't happen." I said it's rather pointless without actual change/action to FIX the things the millennials are complaining about.

Millennial's are great though, love my kids. Here is the most famous millennial comedian: (She's great)

https://youtu.be/sOfXd30vpVk?t=2s

When boomers were setting themselves up, migration was a very small element. Nowadays, rich countries prop up flagging bottom lines, pumping real estate bubbles, by importing people. Instead of competing with each other, in our countries, we now compete with the world.

I don't see any great improvement in the consumption patterns of the millennials vs the boomers. Per capita energy consumption today is more or less where it was in the 60s. Per capita co2 emissions today are worse than they were in the 60s. Household debt levels are much worse today than in the 60s. This is supposed to be an improvement?

US household debt levels

US per capita co2 emissions

US per capita energy consumption