The Inner Monologue

For centuries, distance shaped destiny. A person born in Sussex in 1750 would almost certainly die within twenty miles of Sussex, surrounded by the same church bells, the same market stalls, the same gossiping neighbors. Geography wasn’t just a fact of life; it was a prison of identity. The same was true in rural China, in Mesoamerica, in the steppes of Central Asia. Human history is fundamentally a story of immobility.

Then, seemingly overnight in historical terms, we learned to fly.

Air travel didn’t just shrink the globe—it detonated the meaning of “far.” A voyage that once demanded months of planning, hardship, risk, and the willingness to abandon everything is now a matter of credit card points, airport security queues, and choosing between aisle or window. The world folded in on itself like a map closing.

And yet, culturally and emotionally, we pretend it didn’t.

The Myth of Staying Close

A common refrain echoes in family conversations every year:

“I don’t want to move far. I want to stay close to family.”

It’s a noble sentiment—rooted in connection, loyalty, and continuity. But when those same families move six, eight, even ten hours away, something peculiar happens. They talk as if they preserved the closeness. As if the car somehow maintains a psychic umbilical cord that a plane would sever.

This is the great modern illusion of geography:
an eight-hour drive feels “close,” while a ten-hour flight feels impossibly far.

But functionally, they are the same.
A day is a day.
Time is the true currency of distance, not miles.

If visiting your parents requires luggage, planning, time off work, house-sitting arrangements, and an overnight bag, you are not “near.” You’re in the same emotional location as someone who moved abroad. You simply drove the distance instead of flying over it.

And let us be honest: nobody makes that drive casually. It is not “in the neighborhood.” It is not “just around the corner.” If you can’t attend a birthday without logistics, you don’t live near family. You live in the same nation, and that’s it.

Local, Day-Trip, World-Trip

We cling to a binary world—local versus far—because our social instincts evolved before aviation, before interstates, before global networked identity. But in practical terms, modern life has three zones:

1. Local
   Your neighborhood. The two-hour radius—home, groceries, kids’ school, your doctor, your coffee place. You can respond to emergencies. You see each other without planning. This is the real “near.”
2. Day-Trip Distance
   Six to ten hours. Driving exhaustion. Overnight bag. The “I’ll visit when I can take time off work” zone. Emotionally, this is not proximity. It is a commitment. A sacrifice. A full-day project.
3. World-Trip Distance
   Twelve to twenty-four hours, airports, planes, customs maybe.
   Functionally? The same cost as the day-trip.

Modern mobility collapsed categories two and three into a single unit of time: one day. The only real separation left in life is between where you live your daily existence and everywhere else.

The difference is psychological, not practical.
A steering wheel feels like control.
A plane feels like surrender to the universe.

But time doesn’t care what vehicle you’re in.

The Emotional Geography of Control

Why do we cling to the illusion that driving distance is close even when it’s not?

Because the car is sovereignty. In a car, you choose the route, the pace, the music, the stops. You leave when you want. You feel in control. A flight demands compliance—gates, times, rules, strangers’ elbows, announcements spoken in a tone of faint condescension.

The car preserves the myth of agency.
The plane exposes the truth of interdependence.

So we tell ourselves that driving distance maintains connection, even though its practical cost is nearly identical to flying halfway across the world.

The Hidden Opportunity Cost of False Proximity

The consequence of this illusion is profound. People restrict their life choices—jobs, adventures, relationships, entire futures—because they believe they are “staying close” to family. But in reality, they’ve already accepted functional distance. They’ve accepted the day-trip category where spontaneity dies, emergencies strain, and visits shrink to holidays and obligations.

If it takes a day to visit your parents whether you move to the next state or the next continent, then what exactly are you clinging to by staying merely regionally distant?

A flag, not a bond.
A perception, not a reality.
A fear, not a presence.

This is not an argument against family closeness. Quite the opposite. It is a call to recognize when distance is already there—and to be honest about it.

In a One-Day World, the World Is Open

Accept this insight and a strange thing happens: the globe becomes smaller, not larger. Portugal is as close as Portland. Seoul is as accessible as Sarasota. The only real division is between the places you live daily life, and the places that require a day of effort to reach.

Once you internalize that, you face a liberating question:

If I am already living far away, why not live anywhere?
Why not choose a dream instead of a default?

Some will still choose regional distance, and that’s fine. But they should choose it consciously, not as a comforting illusion of proximity. Because in a world where a day gets you almost anywhere, distance is no longer a matter of geography; it’s a matter of intention.

The Future: Identity Unbound by Soil

Our grandchildren may look back in bafflement at these decades, when humans could cross the planet in hours yet still behaved like medieval villagers guarding a ten-mile radius of meaning. They will live in a world where family is chosen as much as inherited, where proximity is digital more than physical, where mobility is normal, and where the map of life is drawn by ambition, not accident of birth.

Until then, we live in a transitional world: a one-day world inhabited by minds still wired for the ox-cart era. The question is not whether we move far from family. It is whether we admit when we already have.

And once we do, the world stops feeling divided into home and away. It becomes continuous, accessible, and surprisingly small. A place we can actually roam. A place where choosing the life you want is not synonymous with betraying where you came from.

We are not bound by soil anymore.
We are bound only by time.
And time—at least a day’s worth of it—belongs to everyone.