I am moving for a promotion. Just a couple hours away, not a huge move. I am remaining in the same state, same relative distance from family. I am leaving the area but I will probably be back down the road. Might be back in six months to a year when my contract ends. Up to God not me. People are acting like it is the end, like I will never see them again. It's really not that far away... At least I don't think so.
For context, I live in WA. For our foreign posters WA State is about half the size of Germany and a third the size of France. Bigger than England but smaller than the sum total of the United Kingdom.
I drive a couple hours every other week to visit my family. Once upon a time a lot of my friends and family made similar drives to visit each other but this seems to have died post covid. Am I a modern outlier, or do people just not travel anymore? Even to visit friends or family? Is this just a byproduct of the Covid lockdown, increased expensiveness of America and anti social nature of this country (the Bowling Alone phenomenon)?
Maybe but there's probably another cause and I hate to be the one to break it to you.
You and your friends are getting older. As people settle more into routine, especially when they now need to run plans by a spouse and/or figure out what to do about the kids, the house, or whatever, the logistics of travel become bothersome. The annoyance of planning for travel is enough to tip the scales towards indefinite procrastination.
Pretty much this, a couple of hours drive to visit becomes something you do maybe on holidays and birthdays.
I've thought this for as long as I can remember. Traveling is an annoying job you get to pay for, the most overrated waste of money and time ever.
Oh great, the weather, food and plantlife are a bit different. Traffic, parking, payment systems, public transport, mobile internet, wall sockets, laws and customs are different too so have fun learning everything from scratch without speaking the language. You'll also enjoy paying quadruple for everything because you're a filthy gringo or farang or gweilo who gets a special price for you my friend. That'll be $8,000, six months of planning and being treated like an inmate every step of the way.
Driving for a few hours is not the same as international travel but it's still enough to destroy friendships. I've had friends move a few hours away and we never talked again. Out of sight, out of mind.
That is a very good point. I don't feel or look all that different from even a decade ago but I am technically near middle aged. But I don't have kids or a wife. Probably won't ever at this point. All my attempts to do so have failed. Maybe that is the difference. Everyone else has slowed down or gotten a family that slowed them down.
In the end, there is something of a cost vs benefit ratio to factor in, combined with how much a person can reasonably maintain without it adding up and becoming a time consuming or chaotic mess.
Plus, there's just the natural drift as peoples' goals and interest shift over time, and no longer sync up with that of friends and acquaintances.
I'd also add travel costs as part of the equation too, and that's two fold from both the perspective of raising prices as well as just general financial awareness as you get older (for most people, at least).
Between the idea of planning, time being more valuable, increasing costs and general financial awareness, it's not unreasonable to see that people are travelling less. Which is a shame, because the more paranoid part of me wonders if this will lead to greater adoption of things like 5 minute/walkable "cities".
Insurance is expensive, fuel is expensive. Soon with labour they might introduce a per mile tax. They want to price people out of driving.
I used to drive from the Bremerton area to Spokane for college (EWU). I'd come home for winter and summer breaks. 314 miles one way, door to door.
Nice. I did the same thing when I lived in Boise.
The travel from Seattle to my family (~150 miles) was bad enough. I think with 314 I would give up.
It wasn't bad, I would leave for fall semester, and come home for christmas, then go back for winter and spring. 3-4 times a year.
Depends on several things. The first big one is military service. If you or your parents were in the military you're likely to have moved around a lot. I've been to almost every state in the nation and four continents.
The second is highly skilled labor. There aren't a lot of places where someone in my profession can actually get work. For most of my adult life I've lived near somewhere that does offer work.
For people who don't fall into those categories, a large chunk will die in or adjacent the zip code they were born in.
During the Dark Times of 2020-2022 we lived in Kansas which was (thankfully) pretty normal. We drove all over: denver once a month (8 hours each way), we did a loop down to the Grand Canyon and back in a week, and we went south towards Arkansas and up to the Dakotas.
I put 65,000 miles on my car in 2.5 years and none of that was a commute.
But I have noticed people cannot fucking drive anymore.
Every normies has an SUV or a truck now, which makes driving harder as those take up huge amounts of room. I agree with thepalagoon that there are a lot of shitty drivers. People who get slowed down even slightly and start honking reflexively, as if that helps anything. It is not just immigrants though, a lot of white people cannot drive. No empathy for others, taking stupid risks, going far too fast on windy and steep roads during the dead of winter, etc.
I’m not sure they ever did. I moved anywhere from 3-8 hours away by car (depending on which family member) about 15 years ago. I can count on two hands the amount of times anyone has visited me. Since Covid clownery, I think my Dad has visited once and that’s it. I’ve even tried to entice them with going to the big city, sporting events, drive them all around, etc. as that would be novel to them.
A lot of these same people I visit twice a year. Some of them, like my mother, is a bit of a chore but I do anyway. Others are fun. I enjoy trips seeing my brother and nephews or some of my cousins.
As was already posted, much of this has to do with growing up and having your own life to deal with. Additionally, however, we've created a culture of the spiritual 15-minute-city already, which is why the physical idea is pushed so heavily these days. The importance of Family and family gatherings are minimized, many young people don't know how to drive, and the idea of "effort for payoff" is nonexistent. We live in an intolerable TikTok'd society of second-long attention spans, why would you assume someone wants to spend hours on a road to see someone they're obligated by blood to acknowledge?
We did Boston in a hostel. It was cheaply priced and good, clean accommodations. This was post-pandemic as well. Not for everyone but an option.
Everything got more expensive so people have less to spend. Travel is an easy category to cut back on.
When I lived in Washington, I drove everywhere. The PNW has tons of diversity in ecology that it's different every few hours. I miss it greatly. But there's also people who have never left Kent.
My guess is Seattle is gone, and the travelers are going somewhere else.
You got me thinking and I suppose that I am guilty of that as well. I don't actually visit my out of town friends all that often. Having said that, I do call them all the time. So most of my catching up is over the phone. Also, we tend to meet at destinations rather than go to each other's homes. Like we'll meet up in Las Vegas or Nashville, etc.
Western Australia is a fuckload bigger than Germany, cunt.
He means Washington state, in the USA
I guess that would make sense if you assumed everyone lived in the USA.
OP mentions the United States by name, draws attention to “WA State” for “foreign posters,” and refers to the essay “Bowling Alone,” which is a famous commentary on the changing civic life in the United States.
I’m sorry you’re too retarded to catch any context clues whatsoever
No worries buddy!
BTW, can you name two states in Australia? Or two provinces in Germany? How about any city in Italy that isn't Rome?
Here is one for you. What does ACT stand for? Remember to work it out with context clues!
What are you, twelve?