Ontario

Maybe there's a better life... in Ontario. A life of bicycling and public libraries and Dwarf Fortress.

Ontario

Everything is bad, but I want to remind my readers that it doesn't have to be this way. A scant few hundred miles to the north, in Ontario, you can almost imagine a gentle, enlightened life. People enjoy a kind of understated dignity there. It's liberal in the classical sense. The state is limited and most areas of human life are left for private ordering. But there's also a sense of shared responsibility for the welfare of everyone, so for instance health care is publicly provided. More importantly, maybe, people conduct themselves in a more humane way. And they aren't constantly bickering and being terrible. They spend their hours quietly reading books, caring for their pets, cooking vegetables, things like that. Is it exciting? No, not often. But it is the life we long for, that we can never have.