Hail the Lories of this world! Community is what makes the work worthwhile - with my friends I’m willing to spend a week shoveling a trench. For corporate profits, fuck off and hire an excavator. I still come to this forum, and care about everyone’s updates on the pubski. Just the plain support and reality checks have influenced my life in a tangible way. 5 years ago I had an opportunity to go drive around the states as a photographer and get paid for it - but I was scared to accept the job and had about 5 different justifications. Kleinbl00 told me I was an idiot if I didn’t go for it, and it has been one of the best jobs I ever had :)
I was so excited for you to do that photography job, too!! And yeah, as I get older and look ahead towards retirement in the next 10 years or so, I'm taking a much closer look at what "success" is, and how I define it. This leads me to shopping at small independent stores, almost 100%. Even if I am buying from Amazon, the stores I tend to buy from are small shops set up to sell via the Amazon engine, not big box retailers. I have come to appreciate that "success" is a 3D scale with many variables. And people can set those variables to whatever they want to define as "success", so each person's definition will be slightly different than everyone else's.