The trip is always the same trip. I get off the plane and the airport is the airport, the same terminal with the same shops selling the same neck pillows and the same overpriced electronics, the same walk to the same rideshare pickup where I stand in the same spot and watch for a car that looks like every other car. The Uber comes and it is a clean quiet sedan and the driver has the route already and we do not talk. Out the window the road from the airport is the road from every airport, the same chain restaurants in the same order, the same car dealerships, the same billboards for the same personal injury lawyers, and then the hotel, a Marriott, and the lobby has the wood and the warm light and the low music that is playing in every lobby, and upstairs the room has the same bland art over the bed and the same runner across the foot of it and the same small bottles lined up on the counter in the bathroom, and I put my bag down and I could be in any city in the country and for a second I cannot actually remember which one I am in.
The rides are silent and I prefer them that way, and they blur together so completely that I could not tell you a single driver I have had in the last five years, except for one, in Orlando, and only because my wife and I made the mistake twice.
The first time we were being friendly and we asked him how he was doing, which is the kind of thing you say without meaning it as a real question, and he answered it as a real question. He told us about his money, which was bad, and about a relationship that was falling apart, and about not being sure anymore about his own sexuality, and it went on, the whole ride, and my wife and I sat there and made the small polite sounds you make and underneath them we were both counting down to the hotel, wanting the door of the car to open, wanting to be out. We got out. We were relieved. Six months later we were back in Orlando and we got in an Uber and we asked the driver how he was doing and it was the same man, and his money was worse and the relationship was over and everything had gotten heavier, and when we finally got out of the car we looked at each other and laughed.
I used to think the problem was that the places were the same, that Dallas and Phoenix and Atlanta had become one city, but that is not right, they are not the same, they are all different if you go and look. What is true is that each of them now has everything, the Thai place and the sushi place and the tacos, the same stores, the same everything available in all of them, and a place that has everything gives you no particular reason to be in it rather than somewhere else. I can eat any food from anywhere in any mid-sized American city now, which sounds like abundance and mostly it is, and it also means that being in the city tells me nothing. The city has stopped being information.
There is a feeling that comes with getting older, or it came to me anyway, a low sense that there has to be more than this. A philosopher, Agnes Callard, has a theory that gets close to it. She calls it the unicontext. Her starting point is that a context is a set of circumstances that tells you how to behave, and for almost all of human history those contexts were local and there were many of them, so a person moved through a day changing as he went, solemn at a funeral and loud in a bar and careful in church, fluent in each room because each room was its own place with its own rules and none of them pretended to be the whole world. Her claim is that these rooms have collapsed into one room. Everyone is now in it, all at once, and there is a single set of norms that applies everywhere to everyone, and that is why so much of modern life feels the way it does, exposed and flattened and strangely the same everywhere you go.
When I first heard it I recognized the feeling, though I had felt it in a place she does not really talk about. Her one room is mostly the internet, all of us pushed into the same online conversation. Mine was physical, the airport and the highway and the hotel, and I had been feeling it for years before anyone was worried about algorithms, which makes me think the collapse she describes is older than the internet and has more than one cause. Where I part from her is on why it makes people unhappy. She reads the misery as something social, that we are all miserable together because complaint and bad news are the things that travel between us most easily, misery being more universal than joy. I do not think that is it. I think the feeling that there has to be more is simply correct. It is a real perception and not a mood, and the trouble is what happens when you go looking for the more and find that it appears to have run out.
Except it has not run out. This is the part I was slow to understand. The more is still there, the actual elsewhere, the place that is only itself and nowhere else, it still exists and you can still go to it. What happened is that somebody built a version of it that is closer and easier and good enough, a facsimile, and put the facsimile in front of the real thing, and the facsimile asks nothing of you. Think of Epcot. You can stand in the France pavilion and eat a crepe and look at a small Eiffel Tower and you have not been to France and you know you have not been to France, but it is right there and it is clean and pleasant and you do not have to fly for nine hours or get lost or fail to find dinner or feel stupid because you cannot read the signs. Disney did not fake France. Disney improved it. They took France and they removed the difficulty, and the difficulty is the part I keep getting wrong, because the difficulty was the experience itself, the getting lost and the failing and the nine hours are the thing, and a version with all of that removed is a version with the thing removed, which is why you can stand in the pavilion eating the crepe and feel nothing.
So the real elsewhere costs effort, it always has, it costs the nine hours and the discomfort and the friction, and it always will, that never changed. What changed is that we built a way to feel like we went without going, and we all took it, and I took it, I take it constantly. I fly into the city and I get in the silent car and I go to the Marriott and I eat at the place near the hotel that I already know will be fine, and I tell myself I have been somewhere. I have not been anywhere. I have succumbed to the same dream everybody has, the dream that you can have the reward without paying for it, that the friction is just overhead to be cut, and it is the most reasonable thing in the world to want and it is exactly the thing that empties the reward out, because the friction was never overhead, it was the whole point, and I know this and I do it anyway.
Which brings me back to the driver in Orlando. He was the one thing on either of those trips that was not a facsimile. He was a real person with a real and worsening life, three feet from me, and the universe put him in my car twice, which almost never happens, and both times I wanted out and the second time I laughed. He was the elsewhere. He was the friction, the difficult uncomfortable real thing that asks something of you, and I did with him exactly what I do with everything, I wanted the quiet clean room where nothing is asked, and I got it, and I felt nothing, and I made him into a funny story I have now told at a few dinners.
I would like to tell you that I have changed, that I now seek out the friction and skip the facsimile and talk to the driver, but that would be its own kind of facsimile, the tidy version where the man learns his lesson. I have not changed. I will fly somewhere next month and the airport will be the airport and the car will be silent and the room will be the same room and I will probably eat at the place near the hotel. The only thing I can say is that I see it now, and seeing the flaw is supposed to be the first step toward getting past it, and I am on that first step, and I have not taken another one, and I am not sure the seeing is enough.
I'm Keith Bossey, founder of Bossey Research Partners, where I work with idea-led firms and help them turn expertise into commercial performance, on the principle that thinking is free while movement costs something. More of the work is at bossey.com.