Small Worlds

Recently I attended another Church of Perpetual Life video conference that was attended by a dozen or so.  There I bumped into a couple of people I knew from years past from the cryonics community.  It was apparent that they were not regular attendees at these monthly meetings so it was neat that they were there when I was.

A month or so ago I was telling a sailing friend stories about another friend who had moved away from Dallas to Florida some time ago.  By coincidence that night, I was looking at sailboat tours on YouTube and came across a video made by that same Florida friend.  When he moved, he had switched from selling insurance to selling boats.

 

A few years after I graduated with a Masters degree from Caltech, I got sucked into the dot com boom and found myself working in Silicon Valley.  By happenstance, I bumped into two of my former Caltech computational neuroscience teaching assistants, one at a restaurant and the other at a startup meeting.  They had authored doctoral theses in esoteric subjects but were now, like me and many others who had been drawn into this same vortex, in the business of launching e-commerce websites.

On such occasions, people will frequently greet their friends from the past with the expression, "Small world".  I like to say instead "Small worlds" plural because I think it is a big world but that people with similar interests tend to run within the same small circles.  "Birds of a feather flock together" might work here as well.

After my Silicon Valley experience, I noticed trends over the years where multiple friends would be drawn into the same areas of the country at around the same time.  During those trends, I considered following some of my friends to regions like Phoenix and the Pacific Northwest but I never did.  Now I know of at least three that have moved to Florida, possibly because it is where people want to be as they approach retirement.