• After a packed spring, I didn’t have the energy for an elaborate family vacation.
• We rented a house an hour away and deliberately made almost no plans.
• My older kids loved the slower trip and unanimously said they’d do it again.

My family had an exceptionally busy spring. This year, we threw in an early college graduation, a high school graduation, and a wedding. Each week was full of senior events and wedding plans. I was tired. My kids were tired. As much as we wanted a family vacation, the idea of planning something felt overwhelming.

Instead of our normal weeklong road trip to someplace like Niagara Falls or Maine or even the adventurous cruise we took to Bermuda, I decided to plan a vacation that would truly feel like a rest. I’d never done anything like this.

We needed a place that felt like a break

I started by deciding what we needed. I’d be traveling with my husband and my three kids, plus a spouse and a girlfriend. A trip with five kids aged 17 to 21 is not for the faint of heart, and there were a few non-negotiables.

Everyone needed their own bed and enough space to decompress without getting on each other’s nerves. I also wanted a place with on-site activities. If we had to get in the car every time we wanted to do something, it would just mean more running around.

We wanted to be away from home without a long drive, but the most important thing was avoiding a tourist area. I knew if there were too many attractions nearby, we’d spend the whole trip running around. I didn’t want to come home more tired than when I left.

I found a vacation home one hour away that checked all the boxes

Leading up to the trip, I worried we would miss out on that vacation feeling. The house was only an hour away, and we weren’t even leaving Connecticut. But I kept reminding myself and my family how much we needed to rest. Thankfully, everyone was on board.

Before we arrived, I made a few decisions. I sent out a family text outlining the sleeping arrangements and expectations for meals and cleanup. Getting that out of the way ahead of time ensured we were all on the same page and prevented bickering when we arrived.

Our days were filled with simple things

We cooked burgers and ate watermelon. I played volleyball in the pool with my kids. My son caught two bass in the pond. I even took afternoon naps. We played games of pool, tossed some darts, and learned to play shuffleboard in the game room.

I finished a book I’d been meaning to get to. There was even time to sit and scroll without feeling guilty about it. There was no pressure to be somewhere or do something. On our last night, we sat around the bonfire roasting s’mores. There was no deep conversation, just laughter and the comfortable feeling of being together.

We did leave the house each day, mostly for ice cream or coffee. We drove through woods and farms, and we found a hike with a river to swim in. We only ate out once when we went to a favorite spot from my husband’s college days that we’ve taken the kids to before: takeout calzones eaten at a rickety picnic table by the horse farm at UConn.

There were no bucket-list activities

There was no big attraction, no bucket-list activity, and no dramatic vacation story to tell. Mostly, we just spent time together. As my kids get older and our schedules pull us in different directions, time together takes more work.

This trip may not have been epic, but it did give us what we needed. After we got home, I asked everyone the same question: Would you do this again? Everyone said yes. Even though they felt the pressure of busyness, the trip gave them a break they didn’t even know they needed.

Before the trip, I worried a vacation one hour from home wouldn’t feel like a real vacation. By the end, I realized distance had very little to do with it. What made it perfect wasn’t where we went. It was that for a few days, nobody had anywhere they needed to be. We could just be together.

• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says negative public perception of AI is a “big problem.”
• Amodei said AI companies have overpromised and undersold on what the technology can do.
• He said the best way to earn the public’s trust is for AI to deliver major scientific advancements.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the best way to win over AI skeptics is to deliver on the hype.

In a rare post on X on Saturday, Anthropic’s CEO acknowledged the public’s mistrust of AI and said the industry can only change that by delivering tangible scientific breakthroughs.

“At this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliché than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive,” Amodei wrote. “The most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world.”

“The thing that will work is actually curing cancer,” he added.

The AI industry is facing a growing public backlash as it builds huge data centers in communities across the country, scrapes often copyrighted online data to train its models, and upends the workforce for many industries. A recent Pew Research Center study found that about half of Americans felt the increased prevalence of AI in their daily lives made them feel “more concerned than excited.”

Amodei, meanwhile, has repeatedly warned on podcasts, in essays, and in Anthropic blog posts, about the dangers posed by AI’s rapid development. In a June essay, Amodei wrote that the company’s new Mythos models present “very real risks” to cybersecurity, the financial sector, critical infrastructure, and national security. Last year, he warned that AI would cause half of all entry-level jobs to vanish.

Some other AI leaders have criticized the kind of rhetoric for which Amodei, who left OpenAI in 2020 over concerns about the company’s attention to safety, has become famous. Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis said earlier this year that his peers had been “way too certain” about their dire predictions and encouraged them to dial it back.

As OpenAI and Anthropic gear up for expected IPOs, they have followed that advice, pivoting from doomerism to boomerism. Amodei, however, said in his Saturday X post that he doesn’t think his warnings are the cause of the public’s distrust of AI.

“I do not agree that my messaging has been disproportionately negative,” he wrote.

“I wrote Machines of Loving Grace because I didn’t feel the AI industry was painting an inspiring enough picture of how the technology could radically transform the world for the better,” he added, referring to a lengthy 2024 blog post in which he laid out how he thought AI could make the world a better place.

Instead, Amodei said that the public’s distrust of AI companies reflects broader skepticism among Americans toward corporations overall. “The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it,” he wrote.

Anthropic’s decision not to open-source any of its frontier models, which it says is out of caution, has contributed, at least in part, to the public’s wariness. Anthropic drew ire last month for being the only major AI developer not to sign a letter advocating for open-weight AI as Washington considered restrictions on some Chinese models.

Yann LeCun, the former chief AI scientist at Meta, has long argued that keeping frontier AI technology closed-source, as Anthropic does, contributes to public distrust about AI more than anything else.

In an X post responding to Amodei, LeCun wrote that the “only way forward” is for AI to be “widely available, shared, and open.”

“We need diverse AIs for the same reason we need a diverse press,” he wrote.

As for Amodei’s argument that a major scientific breakthrough could turn the tide of public opinion, not everyone agreed with that either.

Angel Brodin, an applied AI architect at OpenAI, wrote in a response to Amodei’s post that despite routinely delivering advancements in public health, the pharmaceutical industry is “still one of the least trusted industries.”

“People also won’t judge AI companies solely by their breakthroughs,” she wrote. “They’ll judge them by pricing, access, lobbying, opacity, how the economic gains are distributed, who gets to participate in its benefits, and who ultimately holds the power.”

Amodei, for his part, said Anthropic is ramping up work in the biological and medical fields to test that theory.

“We hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months,” he wrote. “When we’ve actually accomplished something real, the whole world will hear about it, as loudly as possible, you have my word on that.”

• I moved to Palm Springs temporarily, with the goal of returning to Los Angeles within a few months.
• However, I quickly fell in love with the desert city’s nature, cultural scene, and community.
• Six years later, I’m still here — and though there are things I miss about LA, I have no regrets.

When I lived in Los Angeles, I considered Palm Springs a sunny respite about a few hours away from the hustle and bustle of the city. I made a point of visiting the desert city a few weekends a year to enjoy perfect winter weather and laid-back, poolside hangs.

I never imagined living there, though, until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Suddenly, Los Angeles felt claustrophobic.

Like many others in the city during this time, I wanted to find a place with more breathing room. Since most of my work was already remote, I was not tethered to a location and decided to make a move.

Palm Springs offered a lower population density, plenty of wide-open vistas, and a slower pace of living, all of which appealed to me.

I planned to just “wait out” the pandemic in Palm Springs and return to LA when it was over. So, I negotiated my lease down to a six-month stay.

Pandemic-related restrictions lasted well beyond that initial period, but I didn’t want to leave. I’d started truly falling in love with the desert, so I kept renewing my lease on a month-to-month basis.

I quickly fell in love with the city’s nature and arts scene

One of the biggest immediate perks of living in Palm Springs was the easy access to nature and hiking. Even within the city limits, there were great, secluded trails to explore, not to mention spots like Joshua Tree National Park just over an hour away.

In those early days of social distancing, I took full advantage of these hikes — as well as neighborhood walks, which offered so much Modernist architecture and gorgeous desert landscaping.

Once physical-distancing restrictions were lifted and we could start sharing more spaces again, I began working for the Palm Springs International Film Festival, which remains one of my favorite local events.

I developed friendships within the community of coworkers and volunteers, and built several meaningful intergenerational relationships that continue to this day.

As things continued to open up, I frequently attended live music events throughout the region, including shows at Pappy and Harriet’s and the Coachella festival.

As someone who has always worked in arts, music, and culture, these places provided great opportunities to meet like-minded people in town and get a cultural pulse on the city.

Community, friendships, and work helped me decide to stay in Palm Springs

By the time the peak of the pandemic had passed, LA had changed — many of my friends had also moved elsewhere.

Plus, I’d become deeply ingrained in Palm Springs’ community through work and new friendships, and fallen into routines here. I didn’t want to leave.

So, I didn’t. And six years later, I’m still in the city.

There have been benefits I didn’t necessarily expect. Compared to living in Los Angeles, drives are short, traffic is light, and parking just about anywhere downtown is easier (and free!).

You also simply cannot beat the winter weather here, with mainly sunny days and temperatures in the mid-70s.

Though I miss many things about Los Angeles — like the amazing, varied food scene and late-night culture — Palm Springs has a lot to offer for everyday life.

And it doesn’t hurt that I’m only a two-hour drive away from my old home, so I can head back as often as I need to for work opportunities or visits with friends who still live there.

I’m not ruling out a return to Los Angeles eventually, and I always like to stay flexible and open to new opportunities. For the foreseeable future, though, Palm Springs is home.

• I became a mother at 19 and spent much of adulthood focused on my family.
• At 35, I challenged myself to try 35 new things, from hiking to embroidery.
• I’m learning that hobbies don’t have to be productive or profitable to be worthwhile.

My husband looked at the towels spread across our back porch. “Why paper making?”

My 13-year-old didn’t even hesitate. “Paper is so cheap,” he said.

I had spent nearly two hours on my knees on the hot concrete, scooping watery paper pulp into a frame, sponging out the excess water, and laying each fragile sheet onto a towel as if I were preserving ancient documents.

Instead, it looked like wet, nasty oatmeal.

Just as I finally stood up, my hip bumped the bucket, and over she went. Cue the sound of dirty paper water pouring straight into the grass.

Was I making paper? Was I making papier-mâché? Honestly, I wasn’t sure anymore.

My back hurt. My knees hurt. My grass looked like a kindergarten art class had exploded. By the time I finished cleaning everything up, I had exactly one thought:

I am never doing this again.

But the paper had never been the point. Heck, it didn’t even look good.

At 35, I decided to try one new thing for every year I had been alive. Some of those things would stick. Others, clearly, would not. The point was to remember what it felt like to do something simply because I wanted to know what it would be like.

I had spent years putting myself at the end of the line

I became a mom at 19. My first son was born before I had fully figured out who I was as an adult. By the time many people my age were learning what they liked, I was learning how to keep a tiny human alive.

Now I have three kids, ages 15, 13, and 6. For the last 15 years, motherhood has been the center of my life.

I love being a mom. I love my family. But somewhere along the way, I got very good at being useful.

I work from home, which means I am almost always available. Available for school pickups, snacks, laundry, appointments, and the “Mom, where is my…” questions that somehow only I can answer, even when the item is directly in front of everyone.

Everyone in my house had something that belonged to them

My husband coached our son’s soccer and football teams. He volunteered with the church band. He played golf with friends.

My kids had sports, friends, activities, and their own growing lives.

I had laundry. That is not entirely fair. I also had dishes.

It was not that my husband was stopping me from doing things. When I told him I was frustrated, he encouraged me to try new things. My family wanted me to be happy.

The problem was quieter than that. No one had taken my identity from me. I had just slowly moved myself to the end of the line.

A birthday trip reminded me I could still discover new things about myself

Earlier this year, we took a birthday trip. During that trip, I went hiking and was surprised by how much I loved it.

I expected to tolerate it. Maybe enjoy the view. Maybe complain once or twice about my legs in a way that felt charming but was probably just annoying.

Instead, I felt awake. I had discovered something new about myself.

I liked hiking. I liked being outside. I liked feeling capable in a way that had nothing to do with being needed. When we came home, I kept thinking about it. If I could still discover that I loved hiking, what else had I never given myself the chance to enjoy?

So I decided to try 35 new things during my 35th year.

I made clay magnets. I decorated planters with Mod Podge. I planted a vegetable garden. I baked bread. I made peach cobbler. I started a book club. I tried cyanotype photography. I embroidered pictures of my dogs. I hemmed a dress. I sewed a toddler skirt.

Some projects made me feel proud. Some made me feel ridiculous. Some left my yard covered in soggy paper pulp.

I am learning that joy does not have to be useful

Embroidery has been my favorite so far, even though it has been one of the most complicated. There were so many moving parts to learn: the software, the machine, the thread, the stabilizer, the files, and the mistakes. At one point, I stared at a machine, a hoop, and a tangled mess of thread and thought, “This is why people buy things from stores.”

But I loved it.

As a mom, I am used to measuring time by usefulness. If I am making dinner, folding laundry, working, helping with homework, driving someone somewhere, or cleaning something up, I can justify the time.

But spending an afternoon making paper I did not need felt almost suspicious, like someone was going to walk outside and ask to see a permit for joy.

Maybe that was the point. Some things are worth doing simply because they remind you that you are still a person who gets to try.

At first, making time for these things felt selfish. There was always something else I could have been doing, and usually something more useful. But I am learning that taking up space does not make me less devoted to my family. It just reminds me that I am part of the family, too.

I do not regret becoming a mother at a young age. I do not regret building my life around my family. My children are the best part of my life. But I am starting to understand that loving them well does not require disappearing.

In fact, I think my kids need to see me as a whole person. They need to see me try things I am bad at. They need to see me laugh when something flops. They need to see me make space for joy, not only responsibility.

• As much as I loved living on Miami Beach, I decided to move inland to Miami after three years.
• Miami Beach’s spring-break crowds got intense, and settling so close to the coast felt too risky.
• The city seems to have taken some steps in the right direction since I left, but I’m glad I moved.

As a kid growing up in West Virginia, living in Florida felt like a sunshine-filled dream. So when I finally secured a job down here after graduating from college in 2017, I was ready to move.

Over the years, I’ve lived in various neighborhoods throughout Miami-Dade County. I spent a few months in Edgewater in Miami proper before relocating to North Beach, one of Miami Beach’s quieter neighborhoods, where I remained for several years.

After years landlocked in Appalachia, it was exciting to be close to the city’s pastel-colored buildings and the ocean. However, living in Miami Beach wasn’t perfect.

Although I really enjoyed my three years in North Beach, there are three key reasons I ultimately decided to move off the beach in 2021 and settle down in mainland Miami instead.

I didn’t have the risk tolerance to buy property in Miami Beach

One of my favorite things about living on Miami Beach was how close I was to the ocean. However, when I considered buying property in the area, I found the location to be more of a liability than an asset.

Many coastal cities across the US are slowly sinking, and Miami Beach is no exception. For example, a recent study found several beachfront high-rises on Miami’s barrier islands were sinking faster than experts had predicted.

This is a long-term concern I considered when I was ready to settle in Dade County. I wanted to invest in a place where I could hopefully see myself living for many decades to come, and this meant looking in areas less vulnerable to coastal flooding and erosion.

So, when it came time to finally purchase my first house, I chose a spot farther inland, where land sits highest.

Tourism could be a problem, especially in the spring

For years, Miami Beach has had a reputation for being a major spring-break party destination. With this has come crowds (and sometimes chaos) in popular spots throughout the city.

Naturally, traffic also increased on the Beach during this time, and public-transportation options, like the city’s free trolley, would be swarmed by visitors. This sometimes made it more difficult for residents like me to ride the routes we relied on.

During spring, I felt like a lot of the benefits of living in Miami Beach were negated. It was nearly impossible to comfortably visit the beach because of how crowded it got, and the traffic to reach beautiful destinations on South Beach was terrible to navigate.

Now that I’m further inland, life’s a bit quieter, and I don’t encounter as many tourists come springtime.

My parking situation also felt far too stressful

Right before I ultimately decided to move from Miami Beach back to the mainland, I bought a car. I had gotten a new job teaching in Miami and needed a vehicle to commute.

During my final months in Miami Beach, finding parking was incredibly stressful. I was living in a compact two-story complex that, like a lot of smaller condos on North Beach, didn’t have a parking garage.

Each night after work, I had to search for free parking spots near my building, sometimes circling blocks for a half hour or more until a space opened up.

One morning, when I went out to get my car for work, I was packed into my spot so tightly by a car that squeezed in front of me, I almost couldn’t get out of the space.

Miami Beach is also a popular spot for locals to visit on the weekends, which means there was a lot of new traffic in the neighborhood on Saturdays and Sundays.

So, if I’d found a good, free parking spot on Friday, I often wouldn’t move my vehicle at all on the weekends. I didn’t want to risk someone taking my spot because if I couldn’t find anything, I’d have to park in a paid lot until the beach cleared out for the day.

Parking in Miami still isn’t always a breeze, but being further from a popular coastline has definitely helped.

Miami Beach wasn’t my forever home, but I appreciate some of the changes the city’s made since I left

For what it’s worth, in the five years since I left, Miami Beach seems to have taken steps toward making the city better for its residents.

For example, in 2024, Miami Beach officially “broke up” with spring break and implemented measures such as DUI checkpoints and curfews to help address common issues throughout the season.

In recent years, North Beach has established new resident-only parking zones throughout the neighborhood, which could lessen the competition for certain spots. Miami-Dade County has ongoing projects to help deal with coastal storms and rising sea levels, too.

Ultimately, I am still very happy with my decision to move back to mainland Miami, even though the city definitely has its quirks as well.

Although I’ll always love my time in Miami Beach, I save my visits for special occasions only — and I’ll still totally be avoiding the area during spring break.

• A version of this story originally appeared in the BI Tech Memo newsletter.
• Sign up for the weekly BI Tech Memo newsletter here.

One of the oldest rules in tech pay still looks like one of the smartest.

Levels.fyi, a company that tracks compensation across the industry, recently analyzed what would have happened to the same senior Microsoft software engineer pay package in two scenarios.

In one, the employee sold their stock as it vested and reinvested the money in the S&P 500. That person would be about $50,000 better off than the colleague who held onto all of their Microsoft shares.

That’s a reminder that even in the AI era, diversification can pay off. The biggest AI winners, like Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic, have delivered extraordinary gains.

But for many tech employees, spreading investments beyond a single employer remains the safer, and sometimes more profitable, strategy.

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.