Great news! Killing the Esmeralda 7 solar project is the right decision. People don’t realize how massive it was, over 110 square miles, bigger than Las Vegas itself. It would’ve scraped up pristine Great Basin desert, wiped out wildlife habitat, and trampled culturally important land not to mention diverting massive amounts of water which is a tight resource out here. Renewable energy is great, but we don’t need to bulldoze entire ecosystems to do it. Killing this one might actually push solar developers to think smaller and smarter next time.
Viewing exercise as interesting time spent is probably where the outliers of "people whose instincts defy millennia of evolution" come from. My wife and I truly love trail running and usually running more than 99% of users in Garmin (according to the charts). During race training season we're frequently in the 50 miles per week or more range which, as older and slower runners, means we might be running 10 to 15 hours per week. But, we love it, so no more interesting things for us to do than that.
> I can’t stop myself from thinking that working on a book for 6 months, doing its projects, is a huge waste of time for me, and because I already feel late, I find myself, yet again, in a cycle.
That’s such an important observation. Many of us have become so fooled by the notion of fast consumption and immediate gains that we have all but stopped putting in the meaningful work.
