Tropical islands nobody's heard of. A train journey nobody's completed. A marriage "deal" that millions of women have decided isn't worth taking.
This month: the places, ideas, and life choices hiding in plain sight.
And as always, your chance to win $100 is below π
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Congrats to Peter, our latest 3x3 winner!
"My favourite place is the lakes of the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec. I paddled through many of them in my youth. The pristine waters and the rolling hills really made for truly halcyon days." |
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You might think that making life more convenient would make it better. Silicon Valley certainly thinks so. But what if the thing they're trying to eliminate (friction, inefficiency, the mess of dealing with actual humans) is where all the good stuff lives?
That's Rebecca Solnit's argument in this Guardian long read: that a life of outsourced decisions, chatbot friendships, and algorithmically smoothed edges isn't optimized β it's hollowed out. The awkward conversation, the wrong turn, the slow meal with someone you disagree with. That is living.
And getting it back will take more than deleting an app or two.
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When a Korean matchmaking company asked single men what women should fix to be better marriage material, the top answer was "feminism."
Women, meanwhile, said they wanted men to do more housework.
That disconnect sits at the heart of South Korea's "bihon" (willfully unmarried) movement. Nearly 2,000 women recently turned up to Seoul's first No-Marriage Fair for knitting clubs, home repair workshops, and real estate tips for solo buyers. The country already has the world's lowest birth rate (0.72), and 38% of married women say they wouldn't marry at all if they could do it over.
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Nobody has ever done it.
The route requires the Trans-Siberian (currently suspended because of the war in Ukraine), a 15km taxi ride in Laos where the railway just kinda stops, and the kind of scheduling optimism that borders on delusion. There's even a pedantic argument about whether Lagos is the correct starting point (rail nerds insist it should be Vila Real de Santo AntΓ³nio, a few km further east, because the routing through Lisbon makes it technically longer).
It's the greatest trip you can't take. Yet!
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Where could a $100 store credit take you? Somewhere pretty great, that's where.
Enter here π
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As always: let us know what you liked, what you'd like to see more of, your favourite radio station, that sorta thing.
J, D, & the Minaal team
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Altai Mountains, Mongolia |
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Made with β€οΈ all over the π by the Minaal crew.
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