log entry ID: a.....m.. 2026-07-16 15:14:30 EESTPeople ask me this a lot, especially people in Canada, so here’s a general update for this target audience.
I’m generally bored with life and all of my hobbies, including physics, music, and programming. This is a notable change from eight years ago, when I could do physics in my room, on my own, undisturbed for weeks on end.
I think society might collapse in 50 years. Nobody talks to each other, least of all between neighbours and across wealth, political, and other divides. Such countries cannot make good decisions and will eventually stop functioning entirely. A huge social movement is needed urgently, to restore the local communities that have been neglected for decades.
It is an uphill fight, though. Political choices were made in decades past, which have set macroeconomics against such a movement. Cheap travel has made it easy for people to seek jobs anywhere. Sometimes, they have to because there are no jobs in the towns where they came from. Even if there are jobs they could take, they’ll still prefer to move somewhere where there is a higher paying job. Friends, family, and the community come last.
And yes, I just moved to Finland for something I could probably have just done in Toronto. But the community in Goderich Onterrible where I grew up was basically gone anyway. If I am to start a community from scratch, it might as well be somewhere with full democracy and good urban planning.
And a full democracy will be needed to fight this. Canada’s partial democracy is not up to the task. Because of the dismal mechanics of first-past-the-post, people there aren’t free to vote in what they actually believe in. With only two realistic choices, real political change is impossible.
For a country to change its social priorities, it needs to change its economic priorities. For example, it could offer business loans at lower interest to owners who set up their businesses in their home town or home city. With jobs available in all of the places where people grow up, there is a chance for people to balance friends, family, and community with economics. Such loans would perform worse, probably, and lead to a lower GDP, probably. But who cares? It is the prioritisation of GDP above all else that led to this mess in the first place. GDP worship is mainstream in both of Canada’s main parties, therefore neither would consider such loans or any other social remedy likely to lower GDP. These parties are incapable of change, therefore Canada is incapable of change. Finland and all of the other full democracies still have a chance, though.
So, I guess to answer the question, I’m not so good, but I maintain hope in a more social future for Finland. Not so, for Canada. It’s not that I don’t want Canada to get better. It’s just that I don’t think it can.