99.9% of the people I meet want to be kind and help. You just need to "tune into that frequency." Fantastic anecdotal article that speaks to the goodness of humanity.
It takes only one bad apple to spoil the entire barrel. (Literally: the bad apple produces ethylene which spoils the rest of the apples in the barrel).
Examples of this phenomenon are everywhere. One bad cop makes the entire force untrustworthy, two to three unruly kids can make a classroom unteachable, et cetera.
And a 0.1% chance of a bad encounter with a stranger as a vulnerable person can make it not worth approaching strangers at all.
You're gong to throw away a life of living above fear if you focus on the 0.1%. And you'll never know what you were missing.
You can stay at home your whole life, avoid travel, avoid meeting people. From my experience (60+ years now) the best times of my life have involved taking those "chances".
Me too. But is it the privilege of being large, male and white with a small but real family safety net? I specifically specified "vulnerable people" in my comment.
That's fair—and it's true I wasn't addressing them. Although I feel like vulnerability, in my experience, is a thing that absolutely elicits sympathy, compassion from strangers.
Part of why hitchhiking works is because you are putting yourself out there at the mercy of a stranger—making yourself vulnerable as it were.
I know several women who've travelled alone at various places in South America.
My sister had her credit card blocked by her bank while travelling in Belize just before coming home. She got a ton of help from locals who understood her predicament.
Sure, lots of women travel alone, and most of them have excellent experiences.
But you generally don't have to talk to a lot of them before you encounter one that's been sexually assaulted on her travels.
Does that mean women shouldn't travel alone outside of "safe" countries? I am not in any sort of position to make that call. But I'll be supportive of my daughters if they decide to do so.
Not traveling alone on foot in a country in which you barely speak the language does not mean staying shut in your house and never traveling at all and never meeting people. There is a middle ground.
Everything you said here is selfish, do you understand that?
"From my experience (60+ years now) the best times of my life have involved taking those "chances"."
You are not focused on giving, it is all about getting. And why is staying at home your whole life something looked down on? Just think of all the carbon it saves going into the atmosphere, if you can that is.
Just don't push your luck. There are a lot of people -- usually women -- who travel the world to prove the goodness of humanity and get killed by some rando along the way. Look up Pippa Bacca.
I wonder what the rate of "getting killed by some rando along the way" actually is. Sure, lots of anecdotes, and I don't really know how you'd measure it, but I'm curious how it plays out by the real numbers.
For men I suspect the “killed by a rando” number is pretty low, but robbery/theft is very high. Of course if you have nothing to steal, that does insulate you a little.
For women I suspect the “killed by a rando” number is low, but the sexual assault number is higher.
The rate of being killed is pretty damn high in your circle? What is s/killed? Or is it just a harassment issue? If it's so high, why keep doing it? I'm struggling to understand the risk/reward, and what the risk actually is compared to what it's perceived to be.
s/foo/bar/ is search & replace foo with bar. So yes, they're saying the rate of harassment is high. Even if we posit that >99% of men aren't harassers, a solo female traveler is going to encounter a lot more than 100 men, so is quite likely to be harassed.
>There are a lot of people -- usually women -- who want to travel the world to prove the goodness of humanity and get killed by some rando along the way.
"Wont someone think of the (lots of?) women?"
Honestly: how are you defining "a lot" here? A dozen or two? That's a vanishingly small proportion of humanity, my friend. And would you even hear the tales of those who travel the world and don't get killed? I am just saying that you are making a big claim, but provide no evidence.
Of course they're human beings. I think the point is, should you, statistically, live a life of fear based on possibly negligible odds of death or assault?
Negligible odds of death I'll buy, but a very large number of my women friends over my life have been sexually assaulted (and probably far more than I realize, it's not like it's something you bring up during holiday dinner). I'm often shocked by how few men realize how prevalent this is.
The idea that "women who aren't comfortably traveling the world alone depending on the kindness of strangers are living a life ruled by fear" seems naive at best.
Even back in the days when hitchhiking was much more common you would almost never see a single woman by herself, for good reason.
It is also more likely than not for assault victims that their assaulter is known to them, which goes back to the original point: how much more likely is a woman traveling the world to be assaulted or killed than one who is just existing in her everyday environs?
My original point still stands: the commenter made a big claim: world travel is (more) risky for women (than not world travel), but provided little evidence to support said claim.
>99.9% of the people I meet want to be kind and help. You just need to "tune into that frequency."
Jesus.
The only people who say this are white men.
"You just need to "tune into that frequency."" Is especially gross. You were raped and murdered by a stranger? It's your fault for tuning into the rape-and-murder frequency instead of the give-me-stuff frequency. That's what the implication is. Ewww.
Oh....what's the frequency Kennith? I have a hard time tuning to frequencies though, due to my severe mood disorder, so can you offer me some help on getting my tuner repaired first?
Goodness of humanity? Possibility of it, yes, yes, but have you seen the homeless counts rise in the U.S., richest country in the world?
Targeted Ads done correctly provide value. I found my favorite clothing company, for example, thanks to an Insta ad. I also appreciate well crafted copy. Mindless firehose ads, however, aggravate me. (I use Kagi).
Public speaking plus blog posts did more for my career than my advanced engineering degrees. They lead to my past three places of employment. I did a talk or wrote a blog post, posted it to LI and then the decision makers reached out to me. This got me employment at workplaces I loved. I only write/ talk about things I enjoy, and they needed people with skills in the topics I wrote/ talk about. Perfect fit. I highly recommend this approach.
Exactly what I was going to say. I didn't even see it in the still photo until I looked carefully. The eye focuses on the main action, and that area is relatively small. The brain "fills in" the detail around your center of vision. Illusionists exploit this regularly.
There was a post here maybe a month ago that exposes how small the actual "high definition" center of vision (fovea centralis) is. You can really see detail only in a small area at the center of your vision. Outside of that, the brain fills in what it thinks should be there.
I own and make my own website. But Google search stopped ranking me high about two years ago (down from 3k/day to about 70), and sometimes I feel that my life's work just gets reduced to small icons at the end of GenAI responses. But I continue to do it because I love to write and create, and sometimes readers (if they find my site) reach out. I got a "thank you" from someone in the Congo!
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