Post tour thoughts #1

I've been meaning to say this for a while, but before I forget: We are living lives of enormous luxury! After you're out there on the bike, with nothing but your own energy to get you places, camping, etc. you come to realize that "normal" life is quite luxurious. All of our needs get fulfilled with very little effort on our parts. You won't believe this, of course, but its true! I think this leads to the next observation, which is that people have an innate need to complain or be dissatisfied with things. The better off we are, the more trivial the things become, but we still *feel* the same sort of dissatisfaction. Studies show that if you make a million dollars a year, you will still feel unhappy if you think your friends are making two million a year. That makes a kind of psychological sense, of course, but from an objective viewpoint, its silly. And... its a sad (but also wonderful) aspect of human existence that we are anything but objective!