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)?
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.