Experiences with animals. Includes the family business (riding academy) as well as having pets, managing a beaver population, observing birds, getting pissed on by a racoon in the woods, etc.

> you can do basically whatever you want when you want, with only the slight inconvenience of having to pay for it

Well, there's the catch.

I've grown up around programmers my whole life, and we really forget how lucky we all are given enough time. The "slight inconvenience" of paying for things becomes a lot more pronounced when you don't make a six-figure salary and can't claim unlimited PTO. The relative accessibility of cliff-jumping in Norway and visitng Burning Man is quite high for programmers as opposed to average blue-collar workers.

I recently did a RTW trip and I’ll tell ya I met a lot of blue collar folks, from every continent, doing the same. It’s really just a matter of how you organize your life, because I met a lot of _single_ folks of all backgrounds, but I met by comparison only a handful of couples and even fewer parents (but I did meet some, traveling with children who ranged from newborns to teens). Maybe I’d have met more of them in resorts or hotels compared to the hostels I frequented.

Inertia is a bigger killer of “doing whatever you want,” far more than income. It’s much easier to defensively react to life’s attempts to disrupt your short, established journey than to seize the reins and direct them off the beaten path even for a brief detour.

I was in fact maimed by disease at the age of seven. It has been profoundly isolating in ways that I am only starting to appreciate as I approach middle age. At this point my main goal is to try and have my body repaired to the point where I can do things that most other people take for granted. Given the nature of my problems, this may actually be possible, but for many it will never be.