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".