Can confirm. As someone living on well water in an area with semi-frequent power outages in winter I have periodically been given renewed appreciation for the value of power, central heat and running water.
Now I have a great standby generator, though, so I'm sure I'll start taking it all for granted again soon.
I live in an 1850s farm house with a spring up the hill and a backup well with a pump for those Augusts where the trees pull all the water out of the ground (not quite this one!) Our main heating system is two wood stoves with a small propane heater as a backup.
The power goes out a lot in the winter but at least we are cozy, particularly with today's LED/Lithium lights.
Back when I had ADSL from the central office my internet would stay up when I lost power so I had enough power to run a cordless phone and one (of two) DSL modems off a small UPS -- so I could keep 21st century comms. Once I got fiber-to-the-node most outages would affect the node so I gave up on the UPS. They're supposed to get FTTH to my house soon but I have no idea how that is going to be affected by outages.
I also used to be affected by node outages on a cable network, but now I have Starlink and as long as I can generate some power, I can be online. I wouldn't go back; you might consider it.
> They're supposed to get FTTH to my house soon but I have no idea how that is going to be affected by outages.
That would depend on the source of the outage and if your power has single points of failure in common with the comms infrastructure. One would hope the exchange has generator backups to cover short complete outages, but I'm not so sure about equipment between there and your residence (does the local cabinet have a power source, perhaps a battery or its power feed being provided by the exchange and its backups, that would survive at least a short area-wide outage?).
I've certainly had full internet access when power has dropped for my (very urban) home and the rest of the local area, so at least in cases like me the exchange and infrastructure between kept running (and my laptop battery & the small UPS protecting the ONT, router, switch, and AP, kept my infrastructure going even though the desktop PC dropped as it isn't on the UPS).
> As someone living on well water in an area with semi-frequent power outages in winter
After a few of these outages and typically two to three nines of utility power availability, I got a portable generator for my well (we have an automatic generator for the house, but the well is on a separate meter); but we've also had a well pump fail. That was "fun", I think the well company came out the next day to troubleshoot, and then the 3rd day to replace the pump, which took pretty much all day because of the depth of the well. At least it happened during good weather.
I was in the same boat. When I bought this house it had a standby generator, but not on the same meter as the well and not enough power to run my central heating. I recently upgraded the generator to be able to power everything and switched the well onto the house panel. Such a huge improvement.
My well is pretty far from the house. Would have to trench a lot of large electrical cabling to get it connected to the generator. Too much hassle and expense for now.
I've been seeing aliexpress battery + hybrid charger deals that could probably support my pump, at least for a little while, will probably do one of those eventually, especially if we build a pumphouse.
I live in an area of the US where the only alternatives are 3.5 megabit DSL which stops working when it rains or Hughesnet, so basically no real competition at all.
"Quietly," like in "has quietly become the biggest/best X" is silly and everywhere, but "quietly" in this sense of "they didn't announce it and people just happened to notice the change" is fine and descriptive I would say.
It sounds to me like their "trick" is simply not acting from the psychological position that you need to do something you're not doing in order to realize your authentic or best self. Wu wei?
But is that not also "following a path laid out by someone else?"
How do we know when we "are [...] being the "authentic you"" when so much of our early lives have been conditioned by our environment if we never challenge that by looking for other ways; be that through exploring western "self-help", Chinese philosophy, or both (and others).
Maybe it's through that action, the West's obsession with "self-help" that demands they do things to realize their special-ness, that allows them to actually discover the way, or non action, or their way. To say that another persons self-cultivation, or development, journey is the wrong way and that what is best for them is to do nothing is a mirror of the thing you disparage.
> But is that not also "following a path laid out by someone else?"
Not really. I'd use the analogy of breathing. Imagine you're convinced that you need to breathe properly, so you consciously obsess over each breath (congratulations: you are now breathing manually). Then someone comes along and says "you know, you can just breathe without thinking about doing it right."
Is letting go of that manual breathing and just breathing without thinking about it following a path laid out by someone else?
Not a great analogy* tbh, I don't really follow but I think I understand what you are trying to get at. Forgive me if I am off the mark here
I think it misses the point of telling someone in search of self-help that the true way to self-help is "non-action/do nothing" to get there -- well you are now telling someone in the middle of a search for something they may not completely understand that they are looking in the wrong place and the correct place is "over here".
Now they are following your directions and still searching. When it's the searching that keeps them up at night.
*(as in someone becoming obsessed with breathing starts manual breathing -- to get their breathing stronger because they were unfulfilled with the previous way -- to support their weaker lungs [or why ever they started], and are told you don't have to do that you can breath without thinking (except that was the og problem), will not all of a sudden be, wow you are right I can breathe on my own like before and my previous issues that led me to try different suddenly disappeared when I went back to improper automatic breathing where I was breathing too short, too fast and through my mouth)
I could say "most people" are also unsatisfied. We follow what is given to us and at some point, usually near mid-age people are sick of it and try to find another way...others just keep on keeping on; some satisfied, some pretending to be -- we really can't know, but given the age of my circle, I find it's a lot of pretending. So it may look like they found 無為 without knowing or searching, but overcoming that part that was given to us thats says they should be happy because where they are turns out to be another mask.
On a smaller scale I have seen the realization of that, then the search through western self-help (or religion) happens that ended up leading to 無為 without ever knowing it. Usually because at some point it pushes them over the "f-this edge". While not an observation of most people, they are patterns I keep coming across getting older.
I bring it up because sometimes we simply need to let others follow their own "self-help" (self-cultivation) path without interfering or telling them how they are doing it wrong. When you tell them they need 無為, and not their "self-help" books, and if they listen, then they focus on trying to achieve it. Which as you say, defeat(s) the purpose.
Reminds me of the book "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning" and its comparison of spaced repetition and cramming.
Cramming often feels more satisfying, more like you're learning, but actually leads to worse retention. Spaced repetition that includes the struggle of recalling something just at the edge of being forgotten, on the other hand, feels worse but leads to much higher retention.
Even with the latest version of LM Studio and the latest runtimes I find that tool use fails 100% of the time with the following error: Error rendering prompt with jinja template: "Cannot apply filter "upper" to type: UndefinedValue".
EDIT: The issue is addressed in LM Studio 0.4.9 (build 1), which auto-update wasn't picking up for me for some reason.
Now I have a great standby generator, though, so I'm sure I'll start taking it all for granted again soon.