Some of them don't like it when they do.

For seven years my wife and I lived ~6 miles north of our small town. On nights with a lot of humidity, skyglow from both our town to the south, and the next town to the east, would affect things -- but around here, nights with high humidity are fairly rare most of the time. Many nights were crystal clear with no visible skyglow. Dark, and the most spectacular stars, and satellites etc. (was it in Shockwave Rider that somebody pointed out that one of the advantages of living in the modern world was more stars, moving faster, than ever seen before?).

My wife hated it and wouldn't go outside at night unless I was with her or it was absolutely unavoidable! She never said why, but she was brought up in the city (Southern California) and gets uncomfortable if there aren't any street lights.

Now we live in a small cluster of houses much closer to town; it never really gets dark here.

The impulse must be fairly common. Nowadays when you travel across country, you can see *everywhere* the so-called "security lights" that the power companies have conned people into. It sometimes seems even the high desert is hardly an f-stop darker than the cities are... and once you're used to it, traveling over Brazil e.g. at night is startling, and even for me a trifle creepy. No lights at all except for the dim glows of the scattered ranchos.

Me? I have very little trouble, can get around in the dark reasonably well. But I'm an oddity anyway.

I've only ever encountered one set of outdoor lights that I consider "security lights".

The guy in question mounted 1KW halogens around the underside of his house eaves. The system was connected to motion sensors, zoned. He spent quite a bit of time locating and tuning the motion sensors to minimize false alarms from deer and the like.

Now that's a security light. When it came on, the occupants of the house were able to see -- whereas anybody approaching was pretty well guaranteed to be blinded by the light :-)

OTOH my mother, who lives ~1/2 mile from town, pays the power company $9 a month for her "security light", a 75W mercury vapor which is located where any glance out a back window includes the lumeliere. You could hide half a company of troops in the dense shadows around the pole, and nobody in the house would ever see them... this seems to be pretty well the default version of a security light installation; IOW the point is revenue for the power company.

My neighbor has such a light in his back yard, but so much vegetation has grown around it that it's hardly noticeable. It does cast a skyglow, and there are enough similar ones nearby that I don't have a dark sky at night; in fact, I can walk around fairly well twenty-four hours a day.

Fooey. Ashton, you don't know how lucky you are to have such cooperative neighbors.