On the other hand, maybe your purpose in life is to serve as a warning for others.

Or maybe that you’re not so special that you’re worth endangering others following an unpaved path.

Multiple points along the Nepalese approach to the summit are crevices that have not been charted or mapped, or developed to facilitate rescues in case you fall in.

Those crevices are crossed by laying a fucking home depot ladder down over them to act as a temporary bridge.

This is not a climb that is ready for regular visitors. It probably won’t ever be one so long as we continue letting people just be a fucking mess all over it instead of putting down the actual infrastructure that would be needed for the approach to handle the volume of demand it has.

It would even benefit the locals, they get well paying jobs developing the infrastructure, anyone who wishes to keep doing guide work has a far safer job ahead of them, and after the infrastructure is developed there’s now also the newly made safe work of rescue jobs and in maintaining the infrastructure.

Back when I last worked in Tech Startups, at the point in my life when I was already a salty old dog of the programming world, Founders were all about wanting to hire “enthusiastic” people, which I found hilarious.

“Enthusiastic” was me at the age of 12 in the swimming pool not really knowing how to swim properly because I hadn’t been taught how to properly swim yet, so basically my “swimming” throw water all over the place to move very little, which metaphorically also describes my mode of work as a developer in the first couple of years of my career.

Whilst “motivated” isn’t the same thing as “enthusiastic”, it’s quite often used almost as a synonym by the Tech Bro types in the Startup world when it comes to the kind of employee they want, so that meme made me think of this.

On some National Geographic article in the 90s about the Los Angeles area, there was a photo of a gym class, maybe Tae Bo or spinning, can’t remember, with a gloating caption from the instructor - “We get a lot of very driven, type-A people around here”, and I cannot for the life of me imagine anything other than being bored half to tears and maybe death, in that… intensely shallow environment.

Imagine all those SUVs and BMWs in the gym parking lot. Yuck.
Hot! Core! Power! Yoga! “We get a lot of very driven, type-A people around here.”