[agentultra]

You could be surrounded by thousands of people at any moment who all have headphones on and keep their gaze at a 45 degree angle towards the ground. You too can walk past homeless panhandlers asking for money and ignore them. You can hang out at hip dive-bars and pretend to be cool until the neighborhood gentrifies and you have to commute farther out to the next spot. You can sit next to the schizophrenic on the bus that went off of their meds and everyone does their best to pretend e is the hallucination and not a real person. You can go to events where every clique but your own is present. You can rub shoulders with everyone who wouldn't give a damn if they stepped on you for their next big opportunity.

You can find loneliness anywhere.

Being "always connected," I'm beginning to realize, is not always the optimal state. You lose the ability to focus, to consider the future, and form thoughts of your own. As Douglas Rushkoff suggests: we all live in the present.

For better or worse this is the way things work... but I think it's rather amazing that we have the option to work on a terrace in a medina in some North African city if we want to. And yet so few of us, at the forefront of the technology that enables this lifestyle, take advantage of it -- even for temporary periods. There's something to be said about taking a few months away from the Valley to think for a while.

[dysoco]

As I said, it depends. Right now I'm young and eager to go work at a big company or a startup. Maybe 30 years from now I'll just want to come back and rest, who knows?

[agentultra]

We humans are terrible at imagining the future. Might as well seize the day and find out. You might like the city! I know I did when I was young. I still do and couldn't imagine living in a remote, rural town. However I've learned to appreciate remote, rural living more and like to visit it for periods of time.