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Mike Sowden's avatar

>>"Beneath each successful person in America is a downline of unpaid and underpaid labor."

Not just America - and not just in traditional business. I felt this really strongly when I was immersed in travel blogging (circa Mike's career, 2010-2014). The loudly-trumpeted exceptionalism in aspirational digital nomadism, "LEAVE YOUR CUBICLE NIGHTMARE" and "DON'T BE A WAGE SLAVE FOR THE CORPORATE MATRIX" and so on, without anywhere near enough attention paid to all the people who make that nomadism possible, the ones in telecom businesses and in coffee shops and working at airports and on and on, to be grateful to them, and not see what they're doing as less or as inferior, but as a gift and a kindness and a thing to be grateful for, to truly respect. To not judge. A decade later, seeing that kind of stuff still winds me up. That's not the way.

(One of my favourite celebrity moments: Olivia Colman collecting her Oscar and telling millions of people that one of her favourite jobs was when she worked as a cleaner, a job she genuinely and unironically loved. Bingo. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, snobs of the world.)

>>"If society isn’t working for its most vulnerable, then it isn’t working."

This. This, so much.

It just hurts my soul that some people need to have it explained to them that they're supposed to care about other people in such situations. It's just...what went wrong, with you? What broke? Is it fixable? Can you be made to work again?

>>"Sometimes I don’t know how to describe what it’s like living in a place that’s so beautiful it can defy superlatives."

Me neither. But tell you what, I'll come visit your part of the world sometime, so at least in my case no words* are required. That'd be fun. I hope Montana is known for its coffee and pastries.

*I don't mean I'll be silent the whole time. That'd be...super-weird.

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Chris La Tray's avatar

"Something that I had to learn repeatedly while researching walking and walkability is at work in all these realities: if society isn’t working for its most vulnerable, then it isn’t working."

This is really it, isn't it? So simply, yet so difficult for people to understand, let alone act on.

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