Life in general was more whimsical before ~Late Gen X. Talk to any Boomer and they were getting up to some nonsense. It’s harder to recover when you leave the straight and narrow track nowadays.
People used to do random things for long stretches of their life. Presidents did stints as dockworkers in their 20s and rural teachers in their 30s
Today, if you're not published in reputable journals in HS and did the right internships in college, you may as well kill yourself
@AlanRMacLeod I asked ChatGPT: “Create a world map of socialist/leaning socialist, and Muslim/leaning Muslim countries. Exclude China and Russia” - and this is what I got: