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How far do you currently live from the town where you grew up?
| 17% | 76 votes |
| 9% | 40 votes |
| 5% | 24 votes |
| 13% | 58 votes |
| 1% | 6 votes |
| 3% | 13 votes |
| 1% | 5 votes |
| 48% | 209 votes |
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- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
- Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
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How far do you currently live from the town where you grew up?
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Let me put it this way: today is going to be a learning experience.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by janrinok on Monday December 15, @10:34AM (2 children)
I have lived for a period of at least 1 year in England, Scotland, France(19 years), Germany (total of 3 years), Russia (3 years), Gibraltar (5 years), and for lesser periods in Bosnia, the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) and Iraq.
I lived in England until I was 22, but I have now lived in my current home in France since 2007. Moving home is always stressful.
It gets harder to learn a new foreign language with each passing year but I have at various times spoken reasonably fluent French, German, Russian and Serbo-Croat (as the language was called at that time). There are dialects of English which are more difficult to master than some foreign languages.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 31, @03:18PM (1 child)
555
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday December 15, @11:46AM (23 children)
Even if you come back later, say, to take care of an aging parent, the act of leaving your hometown (assuming you can afford it of course) will change the way you think about "normal". Because a lot of what you think of as "normal" isn't statistically normal at all, and the only reason you think it is is that you haven't seen anything else. Check out places different from where you grew up: If you lived in a city, try living out in the country at least for a few years. If you were a country kid, try out a major city and see what that's really like. If you grew up near one of the seacoasts, try the middle of the country, and vice versa.
As an added bonus, it will get you well away from your school mates whose ambitions are limited to doing a crappy job to pay the bills, staying out of prison, and getting drunk on the weekends for the next 45 years or so.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 15, @07:15PM (19 children)
If you really want to blow your perspective on reality, go back and visit your elementary school sometime. The building, the classes, and even the playground and surroundings simply don't scale with memory. Junior high and senior high schools scale much better than your elementary school does. That huge playground that you ran across in first grade shrinks to maybe half of a baseball or football throw! And, the classrooms are downright claustrophobic!
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pTamok on Tuesday December 16, @08:06AM (4 children)
This is true: I have experienced it too.
I guess we have some kind of in-built scale that measures things relative to our current size. There's probably a Ph.D. dissertation in that observation somewhere, but it would be a long-term experiment.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17, @08:36PM
> There's probably a Ph.D. dissertation in that observation somewhere
It could be big or small depending on which side Alice eats of the Amanita Muscaria.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17, @10:01PM
And now you know the suspected origin of badly-scaled modern architecture, including McMansions. Ever notice how those buildings routinely have absurdly tall ceilings, more rooms than necessary, cavernously empty rooms, out-of-scale ornate decor, and other features that seem out of place? Not to mention the useless amenities strewn about the estates. Take note how most of that trend originally started in historically public areas of the house, most notably the giant "lawyer foyer." If you take the same house and shrink most of the proportions by a factor of two or three, it suddenly doesn't seem so bad. And what would have a perspective roughly two or three times smaller than the average adult? A child. So, in essence, you have all of these buildings designed for people remembering what the huge mansions of the rich were like when they were children. But the architects have to scale everything up to the size of an adult in order for those clients to be impressed compared to their memory.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday December 19, @02:33AM
Same. I remember the gravel road I lived on seemed a lot longer than it seems today. Last time I swung through, a couple of years ago, was a shock how quickly it seemed that each hill was topped and each valley crossed.
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Friday January 02, @05:57AM
The Science Behind the Shrinking School
There actually is a significant amount of psychological research—if not a full dissertation—on exactly what you’re feeling. Here are a few reasons why your old playground feels like a postage stamp now:
The Eye-Level Perspective: When you were in first grade, your eyes were roughly 3 to 4 feet off the ground. Objects looked "taller" because your line of sight was lower. Returning as an adult, you are literally looking down on things you used to look up at, which flattens the perceived scale.
The "Action-Scaled" Perception: Psychologists like Dennis Proffitt have studied how we perceive distance based on the effort required to traverse it. To a first grader, crossing that playground took a lot of steps and energy, so the brain encoded it as "huge." To your adult legs, it’s a five-second walk, so your brain re-categorizes the space as "small."
Memory Anchoring: Your brain stores the memory of the school relative to your body at the time. Since your body was the "unit of measurement," and that unit has doubled or tripled in size, the "ruler" you use to measure the world has changed, but the old "measurement" remains static in your mind.
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Friday December 19, @12:58AM
Can't anymore, as they tore it down a couple of years ago. Rural small town, they just don't have as many kids around anymore since family farms are on the way out, plus the district deliberately skimped on the building maintenance in favor of building a brand new big school in the neighboring town.
Oddly enough, after getting laid off a few months ago the job I'm thinking will come my way may result in my moving to that very small town.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19, @10:18PM
As a child I rode with my Dad past his elementary school. He had attended it in the 1930s, as the son of Polish immigrants. It had become an almost exclusively Black school in the inner city "hood", but it was still standing. What a change 40 years made (yes, I'm old and I had an old father).
I live 3000 miles away from the schools I attended. My public schools have also become more "diverse", but with Asians. Our local grocery store became Asian. The elementary school's original trees have mostly been cut down because they were a short lives species. The private school I attended for 3 years has transitioned from a middle-class evangelical school with modest buildings and programs, in to something more like an elite prep school. No need to go back, I found that out all online although I suspect there would be a different feel actually walking by it all.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 21, @02:51PM (7 children)
I went back to my high school after 2 years away in college... what didn't scale there was the sense of importance. While you were there everything was so important, 2 years later it was all such an obvious farce. "Fixtures of the community" (teachers, administrators) come and go, and nobody really misses them when they're gone.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday December 21, @04:42PM (6 children)
And even more so, the kids who were allegedly popular. They're gone within a few years. The teachers and administrators know that. If you know a teen kid struggling with dealing with the stupid silly popularity olympics in school, remind them of that, and also point out that if high school was in fact the best years of your life you almost definitely lived a super-lame adulthood.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 21, @05:06PM (5 children)
> struggling with dealing with the stupid silly popularity olympics in school, remind them of that
Easy to say from "the other side" - hard to hear when you're in it and have never known anything else.
> if high school was in fact the best years of your life you almost definitely lived a super-lame adulthood.
Which was so very true for our homecoming kings, queens and their courts - and I think more than a few of them actually saw the writing on the wall which made them bitter and (more) cruel even while they "at the top of their game."
By summer 2 years after graduation I was interning in an electronics production factory and they "got it" a little more clearly than the high schoolers. The factory hired about half a dozen summer interns every year, it was supposed to be an inside deal for employees' kids but I walked in and filled out an app and they sort of shrugged their shoulders and said "why not? It's not like being an employee's kid is an actual requirement for the program, and we do have an unfilled opening..." Anyway, the line workers used to rib the managers telling them "be good to these summer kids, in a couple of years they could come back as your boss." And it was true, once in a while one did.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 22, @02:50AM (4 children)
Some of us just didn't participate. Only ever belonged to one "clique", if you can call it that. All of us were woodsmen, hunters, and outdoorsmen. We only cared about school because that was where we met a lot of girls, and we all had to get passing grades and graduate. Even as kids, none of us had time for silly drama or politics.
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 22, @04:45AM (2 children)
> Even as kids, none of us had time for silly drama or politics.
Silly drama and politics are part of real life - choosing to ignore it while you're "in the soup" is missing an educational opportunity.
Maybe y'all hunter dudes were "too cool for school" and could recognize that you have no taste for drama and politics before ever learning much about them, but even if you never participate in them later in life, knowing something about drama and politics is a "window to the world" that a lot of your fellow humans live in.
IMO the most successful education in drama and politics is learning how to play in ways that don't impact you on personal emotional levels - which is very different from ignoring the games altogether.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 22, @02:59PM (1 child)
I found it was very useful to observe the games, but not play them. That way, I could and did knew how to play but only had to bother with it when the stakes actually mattered.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 22, @06:55PM
> I could and did knew how to play
It's weird when this knowledge becomes valuable - getting a building permit was a shockingly petty / catty game.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday January 01, @04:53PM
How about this perspective: Some of us just didn't participate in school
I know for a fact there were some kids at my high school who did "high school nonsense" exclusively with their fellow students quite literally 24x7 doing school sports, school performing arts, only hanging out with cliques from school etc. I know there were people who exclusively spent their teen lives solely doing school sponsored activities and only hanging out with students from our school. Sounds really boring and its not what I did.
I mostly did scouts, church, family, part time jobs, eventually Army Reserves (joined at 17 while going to high school), ham radio, some summer internship type jobs where my parents worked or had connections, bbs era modem stuff... I mean, yeah, I went to school about 6 or 7 hours in the mornings on weekdays if it wasn't summer or a holiday, but aside from sitting there, I didn't have much to do with high school. I met people from school and hung out with a couple but it was not a major part of my life. I think in total I dated slightly more girls who didn't go to my school than did (mostly met at work). I never got much into DnD but I played some and liked visiting my FLGS, so I met people there, also. Oh and the gym; the one I went to in high school was not very social (it was a YMCA) but I did meet some people my age there.
From my own experiences and watching my kids, some scout troops are much more office politics style political than others. I suppose work also.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 25, @03:46AM (2 children)
Many US people would blow their perspective on reality if they actually visited China:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlR9k64RWTc&list=PLZFifwX1CbmRsRJynkOpYCf7NlEfjeTNO [youtube.com]
Sure, sure, they're all underpaid slaves... But do they really look worse off than lots of muricans?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aedKShR1rA [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y5CqAHxGX0 [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgCQE6EGeGk [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snHDjUBu4Fw [youtube.com]
(Score: 1, Troll) by Thexalon on Thursday December 25, @03:00PM (1 child)
Of course there are nice places in China. That doesn't mean there aren't also terrible conditions in China. Just like how the Burj Khalifa is a gorgeous building with lots of respectable looking happy people around, and most of the enslaved people who built it and maintain it (try to) live only a couple of miles away.
And in case you are wondering, a decent amount of what I know about the terrible conditions that exist in a lot of China are from Chinese people I've known over the years.
But enjoy your propaganda film, and I hope the weather in Shanghai is treating you well.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26, @10:59AM
And in case you are wondering, a decent amount of what I know about the terrible conditions that exist in a lot of the US are from US people I've known over the years.
You can compare cities.
If you want to compare prisons maybe US would only do slightly better. The US also does prison slave labor.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 21, @02:49PM
> the act of leaving your hometown (assuming you can afford it of course) will change the way you think about "normal".
A LOT of what is "different" about the USA is that a LOT of USAians don't leave their home town, ever. In the 1970s there was an alarming proportion of my hometown that never left the county (50km radius.) Most of this was justified to themselves because they didn't have a lot of money, but more than money it was a choice - often I think a choice based in fear, fear of people they don't understand. Not so subtle irony: they don't understand those people because they've never gotten out of their own little cocoon.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by mce on Thursday December 25, @12:53PM
You don't necessarily have to move far, however.
After a roughly 35 year gap, I now live just 21 km from my childhood home and only 18 km from where I lived aged 2-4, and I also regularly go shopping in the town where I was born. And yet a different language from a different main language group dominates in the village that I call home today. There are more cultural differences between those two places, than between where I was born and the all places where I lived during the intermediate 35 years.
I do agree that people should move around and see the world if they can afford it or their employer pays for it (I've been lucky enough to see 19 countries on 3 continents and still plan on adding a few more in retirement), but sometimes the cheap and easy solution is laying on one's doorstep.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 15, @07:10PM (6 children)
I live 19307 football fields away from where I was born - give or take a little bit. Or, as the crow flies, 16,204 football fields. Why does the crow get to take such a big shortcut?
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20, @10:21PM
Topology
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday December 16, @10:30AM (17 children)
Where AC comments deserve a response they will find it in my journal:
https://soylentnews.org/~janrinok/journal/20021 [soylentnews.org]
Most flagged comments do not require a reply. They have been flagged for a reason which is also explained in my journal.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17, @11:45PM (6 children)
They have been flagged for a reason which is also explained in my journal.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 03, @08:12PM (2 children)
If I may, a plea for less stupid poll questions? The Micro$erf Linux virus scanner poll was bad, but this one is just banal. Please stop, Please?
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday January 03, @09:24PM
Submit your suggestions for poll topics as you usually would any other submission.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 03, @09:50PM
Over 300 votes, and 93 comments? OK, you don't like it.
(Score: 5, Funny) by turgid on Tuesday December 16, @04:56PM
It still looks overrated. I don't think I'll bother.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ingar on Tuesday December 16, @08:55PM (7 children)
I live in the house where I grew up. It has its advantages: I know the neighborhood, the neighborhood knows me.
It's a bit weird sometimes, there's this feeling of aging, belonging, change, with a hint of nostalgia.
Or maybe that's just me.
Love is a three-edged sword: heart, soul, and reality.
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Wednesday December 17, @10:09PM
I live just down around the corner on different street from where I lived as a child.
"Cervantes definitely was prescient in describing a senile Don fighting against windmills." -- larryjoe on /.
(Score: 2) by weirsbaski on Wednesday December 17, @11:43PM (5 children)
Isn't that a bit strange, if your bedroom now was your parent's bedroom when you were young?
(Score: 2) by weirsbaski on Wednesday December 17, @11:46PM (3 children)
Let me rephrase that a bit- doesn't it feel a bit weird to you, to be in that situation? My parents bedroom was "theirs", it'd feel weird to me if that was my bedroom now.
(Score: 2) by Ingar on Monday December 22, @02:28PM
A bit of redecoration does wonders.
Love is a three-edged sword: heart, soul, and reality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 27, @01:38PM
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 19, @03:58AM (15 children)
I have no recent problems with management, but a seperate area for complaints would give the site a sandbox for complaints. It would be public and disarm many avenues of complaints.
In modern day requiring comms via email is almost requiring self doxxing.
Props to current mod efforts, nothing I've had to complain about.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by janrinok on Friday December 19, @07:37AM (14 children)
To investigate complaints we need to have a 2-way dialogue with the complainant. We will have to have, in some cases, personal information or specific details to be able to find out what went wrong with attempts to connect to the site which failed. We cannot do this without some privacy. As I have already stated several times elsewhere we are happy to receive emails from secure accounts as long as they last long enough for a fault to be investigated and the complainant informed of the resolution.
A journal page or other fixed location for raising complaints is also not a good idea, IMO. It will quickly fill up with spam complaints all apparently coming from 'different' ACs. There will be no way of knowing how prevalent a fault actually is.
We have a perfectly reasonable procedure for reporting complaints. The problem lies with the ACs who refuse to use it - and they are very few in number. If a complaint isn't worth reporting on a secure and private email connection then it is not worth the few staff that we have poring over code trying to find out what caused a problem.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 20, @07:53PM (6 children)
He's here, isn't he, disrupting the discussion. Why is it old geezers have to tell us all about their lives? It is almost like they know they are going to die, and are afraid of being forgotten. Maybe if they plastered their name on a Kennedy Memorial, or such.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday January 01, @04:34PM (18 children)
I never understood the travel fetish because I moved a modest distance away for uni and also traveled the country for the Army, and as part of that I'd get to visit offbase or enroute quite a bit, got to travel for work all over. I've seen a lot of the USA, urban and rural, sat in a lot of little bars, wandered a lot of streets.
It's fun to see something new but I don't get the fetish that its "mind expanding" to talk to people in a different timezone or where its slightly warmer or colder.
They grew up watching the same TV shows on the same networks, reading the same books in school, listening to the same music on the radio, sometimes the same or very similar church, got the same professional career certifications, use the same tools at work. Now in their daily life they shop at the same nationwide chains and eat at the same nationwide chains. Most people are the same most of the time from NYC to Chicago to LA. Then you go visit Ireland and turn on the TV and they broadcast more American crap TV than american stations broadcast BBC imports. In the internet era its somehow 1000x worse. But dude, dude, you don't understand the climate is slightly different and its a different timezone its just soooo exotic. Dude you don't get it the corn imported from Iowa tastes so different and exotic when eaten off a plate in this city vs back home, and they haven't invented written language yet so you could never have food like this back home. Dude you don't get it, when a restaurant microwaves a package of food trucked in from Sysco Inc in LA it tastes SO different and exotic compared to when they microwave a package of food trucked in from Sysco Inc back home in Chicago its just so exotic and mind opening and the people who don't like it or can't tell the difference are just poor ignorant rubes.
Travel to experience culture is the same as audiophiles claiming writing a green marker around the perimeter of an audio cd changes the sound so much dude you just don't get it if you're not playing along with us let me sell you a nice $250 green marker that totally makes the bits sound richer and fuller and its just so culturally enriching and I guess people who can't hear the difference are ignorant deaf hillbillies who just fell off the turnip truck, not at all like us people who buy $250 green markers.
Architectural differences are nifty but that's been obliterated by the shared uniculture. A mcmansion in Florida is just as boring as a mcmansion in Seattle.
I know enough geology from my investing and engineering "hobby interests" that I like seeing stuff, but the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Is it really worth the $$$ to see the Permian Basin with my own eyes? Naah. Its still gonna be there even if I don't visit. Its not "just oil" there's a lot of halite mining going on too. I wonder about oil contamination of the mined salt; but I won't learn anything from visiting and merely looking at the surface, I would learn more about that from research, probably online.
On a somewhat separate topic when the kids were really little its nice living "a short drive" from the grandparents; they certainly like the grandkids, and I must have saved a cheap car's worth of babysitting costs over the kids lifetimes. I don't think I'd like the 1980s "everybody loves raymond" TV show thing where they live across the street but "next town over" or "other side of city" is just about right...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01, @06:14PM
There's some scientific evidence that traveling can be mind expanding for London cab drivers but not bus drivers, so maybe if you take new routes or plan the routes? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17024677/ [nih.gov]
😉
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01, @08:18PM
Well, this certainly explains the VLM unrecondite reactionary racism and fascist support! Like khallow, he is uneducable, not because of any disability, but from a profound lack of intellectual curiosity. Almost Trump/Bush-ishly so. (Note for janrinok the flagger, this is not a personal attack, just a neutral observation of the self-report.)
(Score: 2, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 02, @02:11AM (3 children)
If you're eating Sysco prepackaged meals, you've seriously missed out on a lot. During my truck driving days, I had many restaurants around the country marked in my atlas. Of course, said restaurants had to be accessible to 18-wheelers, so I missed a lot of great restaurants. Passing through Connecticut meant a stop at a fantastic Greek restaurant. Maine has little lobster restaurants everywhere you look, some better than others. I had a half dozen Mexican restaurants along the border that were outstanding. Seafood restaurants along the Gulf Coast, Florida, and northward into the Carolinas. Genuine Southern cooking in every state from Kentucky, on down south. Polski in Pennsylvania and north of Chicago. Oh, New Jersey - there's a pizza place on the edge of Trenton that NOBODY can compete with - I ordered their "White Pizza" more often than not. And, reservation eating? Native Americans just don't do Sysco except at the casinos.
And, I spent a great morning in a BBQ in Chicago. About 2:00 AM, my truck was unloaded, and I headed out to find a restaurant still open, that I could park at. I found it, walked in the front door and scanned, walked past the bar into the rear bar you might say. I can't remember his name now, but Admiral Richard E. Byrd's former steward was running the BBQ and restaurant. I only figured that out, because there was a picture of the admiral giving an award to a young man behind the bar. I looked at the old guy - same cheeks, same forehead, same nose, same same everything, just weathered. We swapped stories about the admiral and the ship named for the admiral for hours! And, the BBQ was delicious! No Sysco crap served in that little BBQ!
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 2) by ese002 on Saturday January 03, @01:51AM (11 children)
You didn't travel far enough or go anywhere different enough. Leave the USA. See Africa, India, and Thailand. Don't confined yourself to Americanised hotels either. Eat and sleep where the locals do. Talk to the locals. Even if you don't speak the local language, many people the world over speak English and can show you perspectives you may not have considered or even known were possible.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday January 03, @02:54PM (9 children)
LOL it doesn't work so you need to do it more, and the most important part is it has to be performative and expensive. Naaah.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04, @09:59PM
Let's try it this way, what are experiences you do enjoy or that you find provide for the possibility of personal growth, new cultural experiences, and retrospective life satisfaction?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 04, @11:20PM (3 children)
You gotta have an open mind for it to work.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 05, @02:16PM (4 children)
Where are the unredacted Epstein files? The US really needs the rightwingers to stand up for what they keep claimimg they believe in and demand accountability for all the child abusers.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/key-epstein-deadline-arrives-as-attention-turns-to-venezuela/ [thedailybeast.com]