There are more people in the city, but are you sure there more truck purchases? I'm not, but all I'm saying is that I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't.
How many rural areas have you been to? I see small houses with a half-dozen pickups sitting around all the time when I get more than 100 miles or so out of a major city. And places like ranches, farms, and orchards seem to operate small fleets of them.
Of course, they usually span the past few decades of makes/models, but there are plenty of towns where the trucks outnumber the people.
I think one big issue will be that a lot of people are like 50 miles from the nearest major highway or town, which makes the range a bigger issue for daily use.
>One day the young man’s manager called her in a panic. The manager had asked him if he would like to complete a task that needed doing, and the young man simply said, “No.”
>Later, when asked why, the young man said he’d been working on another project on a deadline and didn’t think he should take on extra work. Scheiner explained to the manager that he needed to be more specific and directly tell the employee that he wanted him to set aside what he was currently working on and start on the new task.
I gotta say, I'm surprised that this needed to be explained to the manager. If someone asks a worker whether they want to do something and the worker say "no", the manager's instinct is to panic and escalate before trying to clarify anything?
I guess it's a good example for the article - it's easy to empathize with the person whose manager got confused, and easy to understand how dealing with those kinds of situations on a daily basis ends in the workers quitting or getting fired.
Everyone feels uncomfortable when a conversation goes off-script, but we as a society expect the 'abnormal' people to be the ones who bear the consequences of that discomfort whenever it arises. It doesn't seem fair, especially since the 'abnormal' people are expected to bear their discomfort in silence, but that's life for you.
I agree, a better title might be something like, "We Have Ruined Life". But I guess that's a tiny bit melodramatic.
Still, start with the subtitle - I'd be surprised if you don't relate to it:
"[A]an hour of free play is like a drop of water in the desert. Of course they’re miserable."
With just those sentences, there's nothing to indicate that the author is talking about children, and the article continues as it started. It says that children are more depressed than before, but who isn't? It says that suicidal ideation and attempts have increased among children since 2007, but that also sounds like something that adults have shared.
It points to the lack of a safety net and a lack of help for parents, but is that lack of stability really unique to parenting? Doesn't it suffuse every part of our lives, including our families?
I'm curious - does anyone here feel like you could actually rely on communal structures for anything in a time of need? Anyone in the States?
On a personal note, this sort of lack of a shared community is why I'm moving soon, although I don't seriously expect anything to be better in a different location. People are people everywhere, and maybe that's our problem - when our reward systems get hijacked to divert more and more of our time to the highest bidder, we end up collectively helpless and anesthetized.
Didn't Marx once say that "religion is the opium of the people"? Well, religious participation has been dropping like a stone lately - maybe twitter has supplanted that role. And to think that we used to use the term 'holy war' as an ironic way to talk about how people wasted their time with ideological internet arguments - it's not so funny now, is it?