Topix Question 23 "If You Moved What Would You Miss About Your Home" & 24 "What Will Future Generations Find Amazing or Ridiculous About Current Times"

Question 23/424:  If you moved to another area, what would you miss about your current home?

I’ve lived in the same city for 12 years, in three different apartments all within the same complex.  The city I live in is only 23 miles away from the city where I grew up and spent the first 19 years of my life.  That being said, I’m pretty sick of my current home and the city it’s in.  Honestly, the city I live in was never the city I aimed to move to.  There were a number of cities I wanted to live in, some local and some further away and far less feasible but never once did I ever consider the city I live in now as a goal, it's just conveniently located and reasonably priced.

I’ve talked about moving for a long time, never too far away, but I’ve been wanting out of my current apartment I signed my second lease in 2017.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with the city I live in, it was just never my dream to be here and at this point I’m bored of it.  I’m sick of the same give choices of restaurants, I’m tired of the stores we don’t have, I’m tired of the way people drive down main street.  Of course, any move is an adjustment, and I would certainly be adjusting since I’ve lived in the same place for so long.

My biggest hesitation when it comes to any move (even hypothetical ones) is how close or far I’m going to be from my people.  I have some friends that live an hour away, I have some that live thirty minutes away, I have some that live fifteen minutes away, and I have some that live five or fewer minutes away.  Needless to say my circle is pretty conveniently located.  I also recognize that people move, or can move, at any time and even if I plan my move to still be conveniently located centrally amongst my people that is no guarantee that will always be true.  I also want to stay within a reasonable distance from my job, and also within a reasonable distance from where I would likely apply for other jobs should that need arise.  Basically, what I’m saying is I’ve thought about this a lot.

I guess the main thing I would miss about where I live now is just the consistency, people know where I live and have known where I’ve lived for a long time.  I take some comfort in knowing that people can count on me to be where I’ve always been.  There are some restaurants and shops that are exclusive to this area that if I were to move far enough away then I would probably miss them eventually, but also I’d probably find new places to favor wherever I moved to.  I’ve never thought seriously about moving out of the state, mostly because I’m pretty dependent on my friends and family being reasonably close to me in times of crisis.  The idea of moving out of state and not having a network of people I can call if needed terrifies me even in the broad hypothetical.

Ultimately, though, there’s no much specifically about where I live that I would especially miss.  I pretty much already know where I want to move to and I see the pros and cons of both areas but I’m at a point in my life where I would prefer to live a little further away from the bustle of the city and be able to have the privacy and quiet that I don’t currently get to experience living in an apartment where most college kids move to and move out of in a few years.  There’s a lot of chaos around me and I hope that when I eventually move out I’ll just be so relieved to be away from all of that so anything I might miss will feel minor compared to what all I’ve gained.  It’s been quite the journey trying to work towards something new, big and scary like homeownership, but at the end of the day I know that is what will make me happier than continuing on this 12 year journey of apartment life.  I used to love the idea of living so close to everything but now I see the benefit of having to make the effort to go into the city versus just driving past everything on your way home from work.  I want the challenge of having to make due with what you have like I did when I was a kid growing up in the country.  Maybe I’ll change my mind about that once I’m living it, but currently it sounds ideal.

Question 24/424:  What will future generations find amazing or ridiculous about our current times?

This definitely feels like a loaded question, one that could easily upset people if not worded graciously.  The first thing that comes to mind is the fact that in 2023 people are still arguing about whether or not individuals have the right to have abortions, have the right to marry whomever they want regardless of gender or sexuality, or arguing whether or not people of different races or ethnicities should be treated differently.  I hope that future generations will be so far evolved from this way of thinking, it will truly seem like an archaic topic to even debate people’s rights to live freely.  Also, the way our current government handles issues like environment, public education, houselessness, healthcare and our foster care system.  Again, I hope that future generations and governments have figured out that the current system is not working and that ultimately more people are losing or dying from our broken system then are being helped by it.  I’m sure people will say I sound like a socialist and maybe I do, honestly my education when it came to history and politics was pretty pathetic so I don’t have a very firm grasp on the differences between the types of governments and their pros and cons.  At the end of the day, I guess I just hope that in the future less people hate their lives and live with fear and anxiety about how they’re going to survive from day to day and instead can rely on systems in place to care for them.

On a more positive or frivolous note I guess I think future generations will look back at the decades between the 1970s and 2020s and be amazed at how fast technology progressed during that time.  Even now, I feel like a lot of people talk about how wild it was to grow up in the 90’s going into the 2000’s because so much changed so quickly.  I feel like there is a little bit a of a plateau happening now, it seems like instead of getting new technology we’re mostly just refining what we already have.  I’m not complaining.  One of my irrational fears is A.I. taking over so I am more than happy to continue living in a world that is not reminiscent of I, Robot or Detroit:  Beyond Human.  I have no interest in having lifelike androids walking around becoming sentient.  I like having the world wide web at my fingertips, and I am very much pro wind and solar energy becoming or main sources of power but that is about where my love of technology ends.

Honestly thinking about future generations looking back on our current generation mostly just bums me out.  I feel like people who were coming of age in the early 1900’s were so hopeful and bright eyed for the future and it almost felt like things could only go up from there.  But since the 80’s and 90’s I feel like there has been a lot of negative growth in addition to the positive.  I guess that could be said of any generation in any place in the world throughout all of history, but I think the fact that we do have access to so much information that it makes it much more embarrassing that we keep allowing history to repeat itself or worse, encouraging people to allow our society to move backwards.  Ironically, I shared a quote on Facebook from Gilmore Girls the other day where Luke said that “Tradition is a trap that allows people to stick their head in the sand.  Everything in the past was so quant, so charming.  Times were simpler.  Kids didn’t have sex.  Neighbors knew each other.  It’s a freaking fairytale.  Things sucked then, too.  It just sucked without indoor plumbing.”  I think that’s something important to remember.  Kind of like how when someone dies, most of the time the only stories you hear about that person from that point on are the sweet and lovely stories about how wonderful that person was.  Every show or movie about a true crime murder starts by saying the victim was “A beautiful, loving person who never did anything bad to anyone and never deserved this”, you never hear anyone say that a victim was actually kind of an asshole.  I’m not saying anyone deserves to be murdered, my point is that we all have a tendency to romanticize things in the past or the things we cannot change.  I think it’s important that people look at the whole picture and remember that there is always bad alongside the good and we should all focus on what we can improve and do better for the next generation.  I have a lot of hope that the upcoming and future generations will do much better than our generation has done so far.