Author of Modern Lives / Columnist - @mich_enjoyer, @theblaze / Style Advising - @NecktieSalvage / Steering - @foxandroot / Growing - @trunkville
~fotpun-hocful
Joined July 2019
- Tweets51.6K
- Following954
- Followers44.4K
- Likes84.2K
I record Pleasant Peninsula Podcast outside every week all year, rain, shine, or snow.
This week, outside in the lovely scenes of autumn, I discuss the glorious fragrance of fallen leaves and a 2 acre island in the middle of Lake Michigan.
Why hasn’t anyone bottled the smell of fallen leaves? O.W. takes in the fleeting beauty of a Michigan fall and a fragrance no camera can capture... @owroot
O.W. Root retweeted
Good morning, Monday morning.
In our style memo for this lovely morning we discuss the secret sauce, the special ingredient, the key to it all!
Old stuff.
When you are a child you rarely think of your mortality, all those accidents happen to other people, you are invincible and will be fine, and it’s naive and clueless and it’s beautiful.
The stuff that makes the real money is the slop. The higher brow or intellectual stuff is never the money maker. It’s true all across the board. Companies or people have portfolios and it’s the mass appeal stuff that brings in the money and then the legacy brands - the high touch high culture brands - barely break even etc…
This is just the nature of how the world is.
I think that is absolutely true. There is something about the overly restricting nature of everything in that middle space. I also think the entire world basically revolving around purchasing plays an interesting role. For example “the mall” as a place. It’s based on spending money. The only space to be “free” (after being dropped off) is commercial.
Yes. “Fun” that can only be purchased and activities which can only be organized. I believe it was @Empty_America who said that for life as a kid in the suburbs you live kind of as a prince always being carted around but adult life trying to recreate it is much worse which explains a certain amount of the malaise on here.
I definitely think that suburbs and other in-between areas are not a natural environment and are, ultimately, very bad environments to raise kids in with weird downstream effects (many of which we see here on X).
We live in the hinterland.
Raising kids in the city like he describes sounds interesting, and I'm not being facetious, but my kids are so used to spending so much time on grass and in woods and on and and in the water and in nature that it would take a real mindset shift to even entertain something else.
Last week, friends with young kids came to visit us from the suburbs in California.
As we ran around Manhattan together, they looked at us and asked, “How do you do this all the time? How do you raise young kids in New York City? Do you have to get in the car every time you go somewhere? This seems crazy.”
I smiled and told them that, for us, raising kids in the city is actually easier than raising them in the suburbs.
We never think about getting in the car.
The grocery store is two blocks away. The kids’ doctor is two blocks away. There’s a Barnes & Noble six minutes away on foot.
We walk to the Met, the Natural History Museum, and Central Park.
We walk to get coffee. There are playgrounds and playdates everywhere. Our building is full of kids their age, and so is our block.
Once you get past the idea that raising kids in the city must be complicated, the day-to-day reality is pretty simple.
We just walk out the door.
And honestly, raising kids in the city is actually a whole lot easier than raising them in the suburbs.