James' World 2

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With ice-blue caves, kaleidoscopic lakes, and confusing rock formations, Earth is capable of producing some over-the-top scenery. These transportive landscapes are escapes from modern life—sometimes to what feel like other planets altogether. Below are some of our favorite otherworldly natural wonders across the world, from the marvelous to the strange.

Lake Natron, Tanzania

Don’t let the ring of salty marshes along the edge of Lake Natron fool you: This body of water is one of the most inhospitable areas on Earth. Colored a deep red from salt-loving organisms and algae, the lake reaches hellish temperatures and is nearly as basic as ammonia. Although most human settlements throughout history have formed around lakes and rivers, the barren landscape around Lake Natron tells a clear story of a place no one has ever wanted to live in.

Chile Marble Caves, Chile

Carved into the Patagonian Andes, the Cuevas de Mármol are located on a peninsula of solid marble along Lake General Carrera, a remote glacial body of water that spans the Chile-Argentina border. Formed by 6,000-plus years of waves washing up against calcium carbonate, the smooth, swirling blues of the cavern walls are a reflection of the lake’s azure waters, which change in intensity and hue depending on water level and time of year.

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You begin shopping for your future the moment you become an adult in New York City. Rich and well-furnished lives are aggressively paraded about. Parlor windows reveal Noguchi lamps the size of small horses, couples sit for brunch, families haul exploding bags of farmers’-market produce back to their lairs. People are furiously refreshing Resy to pay $27 for spaghetti pomodoro (!) and going, constantly, to Mexico City. Sure, it’s always been ludicrously expensive, and the “what you could get for the same price of this Chelsea studio in Ohio” game is our little way of torturing ourselves. New York is the most expensive city in the world, according to one recent report. Half the households that live here simply cannot afford to, according to another, which says you have to make $100,000 just to reasonably get by — to afford food and transportation to work. A one-pound container of strawberries at Eli’s costs $30.

We decided to put a price tag on the dream lives of a wide range of New Yorkers, all 30 and under and childless. We spoke to dozens of people but narrowed it down to a handful, each reasonably en route to the upper-middle- (and, in two instances, just plain upper-) class life they picture in their heads. We were surprised by how many people fantasize about a life with a partner and kids in brownstone Brooklyn — we expected more to plan lives as single artists or to build households of friends and throuples. We expected a few more to actually want to live in Manhattan. Instead, we heard a craving for high-end domesticity; so many people told us they wanted to be married with “between one and two kids,” a shocking number said they wanted three or more, and nearly everyone said they wanted to own their homes.

We went deep with these nine people on their aspirations for their lives in 15 years. We asked, What, would a “nice life” look like? Do they want extreme levels of well off, or bourgeois comfort, or simply freedom from financial worry with the time to pursue a hobby?

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The dream-life calculator

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Four months ago, while laying under a beach umbrella on vacation with my best friend in Mexico, a complete stranger walked up to us and asked if I was okay. I was reading a book called Regretting Motherhood, recommended by my friend Jordan, who is also child-free. A liter-sized bottle of what looked like tequila—it was sparkling water—sat beside my beach chair. I was two weeks past my initial egg-freezing consultation, and despite my wishy-washy stance on parenthood, I knew I was going to do it. I just wasn’t sure about the rest of it.

My partner and I have been together for more than three years and though I just turned 35, he’s just nearing 30 and we’re just not ready to decide on, let alone have, kids yet. Both of us come from Italian families with inquiring minds, so holidays and get-togethers often meant we’d be pressured to talk about our plans for reproduction. Friends, family, and strangers always told me, often with a hint of condescension, that I’d “just know” or it’d “just happen.” (It hasn’t.) We figured freezing my eggs wouldn’t just be an insurance plan for later, but it’d also take the pressure off us to plan our lives according to my biological clock—and it’d get my aunts off our back. I’d started looking into it again last year, two years after being told at an NYC clinic-that-shall-not-be-named told me that at 32, I was almost too old.

Like a lot of women, I told myself that because I’d been on the pill for 20 years and because I messed it up so many times and still never been pregnant that I must not be fertile. I actually put off my consultation for so long because I could “come to terms” with my inability to have kids, a fact that I completely fabricated and had conflicting feelings about. At the same time, I’d spent years trying to sort out my views on motherhood, as well as how they mingled with my complicated relationship with my own mother: Did I only think I didn’t want kids because she may not have wanted them? Despite being a co-parent for my nephew, could I ever see myself as truly maternal? It’s a crazy feeling to not know if you want to have kids, but to know fiercely that you want to have the option. Apparently, hoards of women had the same thought—or so I’d find out when I shared my first transvaginal scan on Instagram. We decided to move forward with freezing only my eggs rather than embryos, even though we knew that meant accepting a success rate of about 50 percent rather than 70 percent. I’d later find out from one of my nurses—as well as at least a handful of people in my DMs—that it was mostly single women that went that route.

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In July of 1838, Charles Darwin was twenty-nine years old and single. Two years earlier, he had returned from his voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle with the observations that would eventually form the basis of “On the Origin of Species.” In the meantime, he faced a more pressing analytical problem. Darwin was considering proposing to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, but he worried that marriage and children might impede his scientific career. To figure out what to do, he made two lists. “Loss of time,” he wrote on the first. “Perhaps quarreling. . . . Cannot read in the evenings. . . . Anxiety and responsibility. Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment and degradation into indolent, idle fool.” On the second, he wrote, “Children (if it Please God). Constant companion (and friend in old age). . . . Home, & someone to take care of house.” He noted that it was “intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working. . . . Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire and books and music, perhaps.”

Beneath his lists, Darwin scrawled, “Marry, Marry, Marry QED.” And yet, Steven Johnson writes, in “Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most,” “we have no evidence of how he actually weighed these competing arguments against each other.” Johnson, the author of “How We Got to Now” and other popular works of intellectual history, can’t help but notice the mediocrity of Darwin’s decision-making process. He points out that Benjamin Franklin used a more advanced pro-and-con technique: in what Franklin called “Prudential Algebra,” a numerical weight is assigned to each listed item, and counterbalancing items are then eliminated. (“If I find a Reason pro equal to some two Reasons con, I strike out the three . . . And thus proceeding I find at length where the Ballance lies,” Franklin explained to a friend.) Even this approach, Johnson writes, is slapdash and dependent upon intuition. “The craft of making farsighted choices—decisions that require long periods of deliberation, decisions whose consequences might last for years,” he concludes, “is a strangely under-appreciated skill.”

We say that we “decide” to get married, to have children, to live in particular cities, or embark on particular careers, and in a sense this is true. But how do we actually make those choices? One of the paradoxes of life is that our big decisions are often less calculated than our small ones are. We agonize over what to stream on Netflix, then let TV shows persuade us to move to New York; buying a new laptop may involve weeks of Internet research, but the deliberations behind a life-changing breakup could consist of a few bottles of wine. We’re hardly more advanced than the ancient Persians, who, Herodotus says, made big decisions by discussing them twice: once while drunk, once while sober.

Johnson hopes to reform us. He examines a number of complex decisions with far-reaching consequences—such as the choice, made by President Barack Obama and his advisers, to green-light the raid on Osama bin Laden’s presumed compound, in Abbottabad, Pakistan—and then shows how the people in charge drew upon insights from “decision science,” a research field at the intersection of behavioral economics, psychology, and management. He thinks that we should apply such techniques to our own lives.

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