Dreams and Goals

Today, after a few years and months of thinking about it, and a few months of being pulled away by instability in life, I am starting my blog. I have always been a writer, since I was small, so this was a long time coming. At my current age, I want to make something better of myself. Don’t want the world to think I peaked early!

There’s a little about me: I’m just on the very cusp of starting my independent adult life. I’m twenty-three, leaving no confusion here. I’ve accomplished one big award-winning thing so far in the world, a year or so ago, and I want to keep the momentum going. No, for the sake of anonymity I cannot tell you what that is, but it was political, and I proved I could really talk. And convince people of a good amount of things, and not lose them along the way. I learned to finish my conversations to their ends, and people in my community responded greatly.

Now, I am in a different community, and soon enough I will be in another. I left my old life behind, friends and family included, new and old alike, to enjoy the greatest break of my lifetime. This is not hyperbole. Do you know, when you are as stubborn as me, you plant your feet and don’t move until the very ground falls away beneath you? And you fall away, not run, from home, or what home was. I’m lucky to have a second home, but I’m leaving that soon too in favor of a third. Honestly I’m just glad I’m not homeless right now. Better than that even, I have a wonderful place to spend these next few months! I keep things moving very well in my life, I’m very adaptable, and I have a rational enough head on my shoulders to know to not let good chances go. So here we are, and here I am writing, using my chances!

The Foundation

This section, and the ones following, is what you need to know about me for my work. This includes my degree path and future career. This also includes my morality, a personal philosophy, and it is not a loose one. I keep these ideals close to my heart, and if they’re wrong, they need to be replaced by a better version of themselves, something more in-tuned with what the community needs or desires.

I want to make the world a better place. I plan to, absolutely, be a public servant. And my career of choice is particularly suited towards satisfying this request. I’m currently studying to be a civil engineer, and I am personally interested in the grassroots-level community involvement in my future infrastructure projects. I am interested in large infrastructure projects, not individual buildings. Not new developments. Not expensive things. Nothing flashy. But things that we all live in. The term “Walkable City” is only the start.

“Walkable City”

I never liked the term Walkable City, if I’m being honest. It’s such a strange way of cutting a perspective on our cities’ problems… an elementary lens, as if we had all never lived in a city at all. It’s too obvious and dumbed-down a term to feel useful in conversation to me. You take your years of education from life, and scratch it over and try to re-understand these modern urban problems through a very, very, very odd, very adult, lens. Walkable city? Obviously we want that, we all do! Think of being a kid. No shit, you want the chance to run freely somewhere or another, have your own conversations, get your own snacks, pick up weird rocks and look at weird people without your parents standing over, judging your choices because they know so much. Why relearn it all! We lived and learned just fine. Who are we trying to convince?

We all grew up, we all know in our hearts what more we would want from the world, no? It has always confused me. The lens they hold makes me feel stupid, like I am being spoken to like a child, and so much of urbanism feels that way to me too. As if we all live this way, in unwalkable cities, because we just haven’t used our brains enough yet. No!! There was once a time in all of our lives where we knew what we wanted. And on some small or big level we once fought for it, too.

I am of the opinion that if you provide adults with a taste of what they once knew they needed to be happy and live a full life, they’ll take to it, and accept the new infrastructure just fine. Even if it’s scary. I believe I have more authority than most to say that, since I spent a summer working a very grassroots-political job where I talked to the community daily, at least thirty strangers a day. I think I know how people take to an idea or concept, or don’t.

But… I would also like to say, here, that I am not of the opinion that free will changes a massively great deal in one’s life. You can’t build a life of your dreams by yourself, because you can’t build a utopian city (or whatever environment you desire) by yourself. You can’t even travel “by yourself”. Everything you want to do, you need to convince or pay people to get you there. Even if you can drive yourself to the opposite coast of the U.S., you couldn’t have laid those roads, you couldn’t have made that car, you couldn’t have refined that gasoline (or built that EV charger). Even if you have the resources to fly to the middle of the Amazon or to Indonesia or to the countless other rainforests to experience nature in purity, it doesn’t stop the logging, it doesn’t stop palm oil, doesn’t stop coffee. Even if you know the ins and outs of a problem in the world, it doesn’t change the world unless you convince enough people to change it with you. Know what you want. And… get your government to listen.

This issue with the term “Walkable City” also mirrors the problems with our own cities, at least to me. Both make me feel like a child. We copy the U.S., we globalized this Earth, and we scratched out everything from the pre-1950s America from our collective memory, save for novelties like costumes, period dramas, and our entire modern system of urban design. I really do believe these are all American-made or American-inspired novelties. We pretend like we can learn nothing from the past, maybe because we have built over our past. Historic buildings are parking lots. Avenues and boulevards and parkways are now just quirky, novel words for “asphalt lane”. We are acting like very bad stewards of our own environments… the built environment. And, seriously, what a shame!

To combat this hostile built environment we’ve made for our species across the globe, modern and moderate urbanists seem to make it simple. The use of the term “Walkable City”, to differentiate from the driving-only isolated landscape many of us live in. But this problem is so new! Less than a hundred years of bad design. To me, it’s absolutely silly to put our world’s very best urbanist minds towards simply counteracting a problem that just keeps coming—heavy investment in driving infrastructure—instead of building up something good, strong, and unique of their own for people to enjoy. Why spend your life on maintenance work? It certainly shows you’re on the right side of the fight, to use the term Walkable City freely, but it does not do much else. Same way those pink ribbons don’t actually raise money for breast cancer, they just raise awareness. As if we don’t know what cancer is, and similarly as if we don’t know what a bad or good city is—a good one makes us happy and keeps us alive!

I think people don’t understand how fast things could change, if they only let them. This again is from my time working in some sort of grassroots-political campaign. If you have a conversation with someone and they gave you nothing, they gave you nothing. But sure, maybe you made a friend along the way. But I don’t know why you’d settle for slowness and politeness when the things you want to change are so big, and those in charge on that side don’t wait to be polite to you when they make the world a little worse. They just do it. And they’re doing something bad! Global warming, deforestation, slicing communities apart and sinking them in debt with more unnecessary roads. Time is not on our side, and the term Walkable City is just too nice.

Inspiration

Very selfishly, much of my inspiration comes from my own wants and desires. But I don’t really mind. I’m of the opinion, and have always, always been, that I should be allowed to be as much myself as I want, and everyone else can take my ideas how they want them. I much prefer thinking of myself as a tiny little force of nature, when it comes to what I came to Earth to do. I happily change and move about to get myself to these goals. All good things, don’t worry. I’m inspired to build cities up better, because the suburbs to me is more hell than reality. I feel like I barely made it through my childhood. The isolation gets bad, real bad. Some of us as teenagers don’t make it. We all know that. But childhood suicide wasn’t really a phenomenon before we decided to build our cities these ways, before the 1950s in America. Imagine having a childhood where you never think of killing yourself! And a young adulthood, and an adulthood, and everything else too.

I don’t know the entire history of how we got here. But I know nearly none of us actively chose this. Or, I don’t know, maybe the Boomers did, with their entitlement towards the world. But they didn’t get the idea from nowhere, everyone has been lobbied against, especially since the 1950s. They were stupid and signing up for something new and shiny, but so do many of us today. The false idea of a better life with the same amount of work put in. That’s how you get a life made out of plastic. That’s how you get a Ford F-150, designer clothes made of plastic. I hope we run out of things to imitate one day, here in America at the heart of the problem. We’ve been imitating things that used to mean something for a very long time now. Probably since we took over this land.

This country I’m leaving is full of a bunch of children, sick on freedom, forever running away from their parents whenever they run into a problem. Trashing the house with an adolescent party that only adolescents think is cool. Did you know some of our landfills are getting close to filling up? Adolescents, feeling no connection to the land, in a permanent state of travel and soul-searching because there is nearly nothing here we built worth connecting to. There’s pockets of adults, but most of us are just consumers, thinking the world we see is somehow still just something to exploit. Like it’s still the Wild West or something. Like there is more territory to stake. No!! Your ugly fiberglass suburban house is just going to make you depressed and more likely to kill yourself, why would you ever want that life, and why give that hell to your children?

Global/Technical Lens

Let’s finish this up. The suburban-oriented method of urban planning is stupid. The amount of resources you need to supply utilities, roads/transport, and whatever else to a suburban (hellscape) subdevelopment is… a lot. We pretend to not know this. I think people just like the suburbs for privacy and a little green space, right? Well if the cost of these extra resources to the suburbs wasn’t so unknown, maybe we’d make more tame decisions… like, imagine if you had to be the one to pay to run a new water line, gas line maybe, electric line, et cetera to your new development house. Sure, that could be reasonable in some situations… but then add on a road that only is used by your community… do you know how much roads cost? And all that for some privacy? Who are you, a prince? Why is your privacy so important that you need to direct so many resources to it? Pipelines as far as a car can drive? Do you know how far cars can drive? Why couldn’t you just live closer? Where are you even getting this money from…?

Before I continue, I’ll be honest: This section is my greatest work-in-progress. It incorporates technical and worldly knowledge I don’t entirely have yet. So these opinions are going to change through my years, I know it, and probably will change sooner than I think. But this is where I’m starting, and I think that’s an important enough reason to document it. I will also be honest in that these technical beliefs of mine by-and-large come from online resources from modern urbanists. Especially the organization Strong Towns, who I really resonate with.

History and Education

I’m from America. I was born here. I know the states have a lot of extra money. I don’t like how they got it. We should have an at least medium-level understanding of the movement of money and labor throughout the last few centuries’ history. We all know who did a lot of the labor in building this country. We know who does a lot of the hardest, toughest labor now. We can point to the groups for each industry, past and present. Agriculture, clothing, domestic, hospitality, housekeeping. Factory work. Mining. Customer service. Split the groups up by race or sex or both. You have the picture.

Now, if you’re also from here… I think we all know a lot of left-leaning people with American money want to make the world a more equitable place. White guilt or whatever other reasoning, a lot of us do want to be better. But most of us don’t consider things very fully in the world.

I had a very above-average-quality education, and I’ve been attending a pretty good university and I’m about to go to a better one, and from comparing experiences I do think a lot of the problem in Americans’ lack of understanding is education, but not all of it. For example, I am certainly a person who thinks much more fully about the world than most, because I want to, and it makes me happy: It’s in my nature, since I was small, to search for it. Education just helped it come faster. Also, most of us don’t want to be city planners or civil engineers one day, I get that too. We do need better education in this country, but right now, having still lived here, I can’t bring myself to say that us Americans are in this terrible urban environments just because we don’t know any better! Maybe someday I will believe that it’s really just our poor-and-getting-poorer education system, but not today. Bear with me, this section is just me working my mind.

I do not believe that it is in most of our human natures to think extremely deeply about the world. I believe this is true, by a certain age, whichever age we end our educations at. I think we are products of our environments. Very, very direct products of our environments. Another example… I have only met one other person who was as in-tuned with every little detail going on around her as me, and she could only do it sometimes. I’m built to do it for everything. Manage all the moving parts of something as organic as a city someday. (Yes, and I know I’m not graduated yet, but so far I’ve been incorporating this technical knowledge just fine). Not everyone wants to mess around and pick apart the world they live in. I’m pretty sure most people just want to live. And I want to help them live better, fuller, and not have to search for the answer to feel better and more human in the world—I want to build a world where the answer is sat right on their doorstep. Or at least you can see it from your window. A world worth living in. Biodiversity, shop/market diversity, human diversity, whatever sort of mental stimulation is more your style… or a mix of all three. It really is tough to try to find happiness for yourself. Even tougher to build it. But I want to build it. Build something nice to live in, in a world where most people got too tired out already by life, even my peers at 23, to find or build it themselves.

I know that doesn’t touch on how education affects how much the average citizen is willing to change about their own world/life. I know a better education means a better hold on your own life. But in terms of how to fix it in this country… I don’t think that’s as much in my hands one day to fix. And anyways, I will not be in America for long. But, well, I gave myself a problem, and so I want to give at least a preliminary answer:

My preliminary answer to the problem of under-education (in America) and how we got here would be as follows: If you grow up in a community which has a desire to educate themselves, you will also want more to educate yourself, because you have to like at least some of the people you live around, and you as a kid will at least somewhat want to do what they do. That’s just statistics. You’re gonna base a lot of yourself on someone special when you’re learning to grow up. So… my answer to “fix under-education” is that adults have to pretend they care about being educated about the past when they talk to their kids. Give the little shits some mysteries to solve that only research and reading about the past hold the answers to. Or just give them a super potent fun-fact or historical tidbit that’s local or flashy enough to care. Or tell a really good story. When children catch onto something, they’re gonna hold it way closer than an adult coming into the idea will. And that energy goes a lot further. For a kid, it takes up way more space in their character than us. The new idea or goal can dye their whole character a different color than what you grew up with it, if you only let them hear. You can make someone grow up completely different than yourself this way, if you want.

Better Way to Grow Up

I have some more things to say about raising kids and the role that plays. My expertise as I see it here comes from helping raise my significantly younger siblings from when I was 13 until I was 23. I was the second parent for my own single parent, who could barely do it without me. So I also know how children grow up, and all these developmental stages they pass by.

If you grow up in a community where you care about the people who built what you now live in, because 1. you actually get to see and interact with them sometimes or at least hear them talk or see their faces (even online) and 2. You actually like what your community looks like, then you’re more likely to be curious about how they got here, to do what they do that you like so much in your community.

You’ll also be happier! Especially if you’re a kid. You’ll feel a sense of connection that’s hard to come by today. And nowadays the internet could really help: Instead of asking a parent and them not knowing how the world got here (who made these urban-planning decisions you like or hate so much??), you could as a kid just search it up, see for yourself. Be inspired. Hopefully.

And it’d be pretty sick if instead of just idolizing people who put in new shiny roads, or people who drive the garbage trucks, we could grow up seeing a bunch of much cooler things installed, like, literally anything interesting and mentally stimulating to human beings, and idolizing those people who install them. See them making something beautiful, maybe planting some odd choices for street trees or something else to make your childhood walks a little more lively and a little less gross. Just a tiny bit more creativity into the infrastructure—not just cheap decorations!!—would go an insanely long way. A kid would feel like they didn’t have to leave their town because there was nothing there for them to do or see. A kid also quite frankly wouldn’t so easily want to kill themselves, if the world didn’t feel so damn hostile and cold.

The Plan

Not a time-based one. This is no five-year, ten-year plan. This is a checklist. I do these things nearly as soon as I am able.

First, I am going to get my degree, a bachelor’s in Civil Engineering with Honours.

Later, I am going to do my part in building up the world we live in, in the way I want it. Exert my own will on the world, as I like to say, to the best of my own abilities.

Eventually, I will have made a name for myself. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll work in the world that no-one sees for so long that I won’t even have to worry about getting known. That might be more my style.

Conclusion

This post doesn’t really have one, except The Plan. It is titled “Dreams and Goals”, after all. And those don’t really end.