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.
Are they of an extremely foreign persuasion by any chance? Or are they generally just shit? I'm curious as to how it is in normal parts of America. I've ranted in the past about the width of cars for example and how many problems they're causing on the roads. People are just fucking dumping them there rather than parking them properly and they're almost blocking everything off, I hate it.
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.