Serendipity And Proximity
Thoughts on the psychological costs of distance
I recently wrote about exurban sprawl, and basically asked, what’s the problem? A big new house for a good price along with a long commute? Some folks accept or have to accept that trade-off. There’s plenty of undeveloped land at the edges of most American cities. Maybe a few hundred trees or a farm field or two just doesn’t matter. Etc., etc.
The real downside of this choice that convinces me against it on an individual, personal level isn’t the environmental question. It’s the fact that adding even 10 or 15 minutes to your commute each way rounds down to zero in your head, but can become crushing in real life. It’s the fact that actually getting yourself to drive somewhere that’s more than 10 or 15 miles away takes a mental lift that you don’t appreciate until you have to do it. And that suddenly finding yourself in a position where everything is that far away is lonely and isolating, far more than it should be or feels like it should be when you simply count up the minutes/miles involved.
I wrote, imaging escaping to the far-flung exurbs of D.C.:
You come here for homeownership, thinking that you’ll always just ride or drive back to your job or your friends closer in when you feel like it.
But once you’re there, you realize it exerts a sort of mental gravitational pull. A 10- or 20-minute drive can be done on impulse. A 40-minute drive is much harder to justify. You have to affirmatively choose to take that time and gas expense. More of your trips and outings and errands involve this friction. You’ll find yourself alone, and the much lower density of stuff out here means it’s harder to build a “thick” network of friends and acquaintances. Everything is physically spread out, in a different direction.
This is the one thing I don’t love about living in western Fairfax County in Virginia compared to my previous home in College Park, Maryland: the sense of distance and spread-outness.
There’s something analogous to this that I’ve also been thinking about, which I wrote in my recent piece on restaurants after COVID:
Expectations of higher tips on top of inflated prices have pushed the price of a single ordinary entrée to the point where the whole psychology of dining out changes. At $15, you’re arguing for the food. (“These fries are a little soggy, but they taste pretty good!”) But at $25, you’re arguing against the food. (“Almost 30 bucks for cheap soggy fries? What a rip-off!”) Once that switch flips, it becomes difficult to feel good about what you’re spending. Dining out becomes an internal conflict, a psychologically unpleasant experience.
And of course, when you consider the actual cost of driving a mile—somewhere, all estimates considered, from about 40 cents to 70 cents—you add significant real money cost to your time cost. At the low end of the cost-of-a-mile estimates, a 20-mile car trip costs $8. That’s very hard to accept, but when you count gas, plus insurance and wear and tear divided by mile, it’s in the right ballpark. (My car is on the small side, cheap to insure, and pretty fuel efficient, so that number can go up considerably.)
My observation here is that the interplay of actual costs and psychological reckoning with costs is such that at a certain point, you can no longer just hop in the car and go somewhere. Back to Maryland vs. Virginia: I remember in College Park, often just going to a handful of local stores—a Big Lots, a couple of thrift shops, my favorite of the area grocery stores—and just killing some time not really looking for anything in particular. Boring, empty afternoon, 3pm? Drive the six or seven minutes to Big Lots and just browse. Sometimes at 5 or 5:30 I’d decide I wanted to go to a Chinese buffet for dinner, and I’d just go. The furthest of a few in the area was about 20 minutes away. Later, after I met my wife, sometimes we’d just drive the five minutes down the main drag to go to dinner somewhere, often just on impulse.
That’s all much harder when the trip alone is eating up 20, 30, 40 minutes and a measurable amount of gas money. (Like if I want to drive to one of my old haunts in Maryland, or to any of the decent buffets in Virginia, for example. Or to any of the large thrift shops.) By the time you’re halfway there you’ve already had too much time to think and decide maybe you don’t even want Chinese food anymore. That’s what goes on in my head—that nickel-and-diming of every decision—whenever I decide to drive anywhere that isn’t immediately local. The ability to just go somewhere is always filtered through this feeling of needing to weigh the value of the thing you want to go to versus the time and cost of getting there.
On paper, this doesn’t sound particularly important. I suppose it isn’t. There are lots of things more important than going to a thrift store on a slow afternoon, or eating at a mediocre Chinese buffet. But I definitely underestimated the psychological cost of needing to particularly justify every individual trip, as I feel I have to do now, versus just deciding to go somewhere and being able to round the cost—a few miles, a few minutes—down to zero in my mind. Or being able to walk to a bunch of places and only needing to “spend” the time.
And it isn’t just the thrift store or the buffet. It’s the difference between deciding you feel like going out to dinner and five minutes later being on a commercial block with 15 restaurants, versus mapping all the different places 5, 10, 15 minutes away and trying to figure out how much you really want to bother with it.
I wonder now, having been in both of these environments for a few years, how much of what we perceive as getting older or slowing down is just what living in separation from stuff does to you. Do we “feel young” in college partly because proximity gives rise to serendipity, and separation basically makes it impossible?
This, I’ll now spell out explicitly, is a key reason why urbanism is important to me, and it’s a key argument for getting folks who don’t care about sprawl or transit or farmland preservation or whatever to see urbanism as an amenity for them and not an ideological question.
There is simply no way to capture that whimsy and serendipity of hey, I got home a little late, let’s go out to dinner tonight! without a certain amount of density to support a sufficient number of enterprises. Density is proximity. Proximity is serendipity. Distance is loneliness and isolation. We want all of these things at once—a choice of restaurants and shopping, wide empty roads, free easy parking right in front of every destination, large houses with private yards—but we simply can’t have all those things.
And while density may not guarantee them, they are not possible without it.
Related Reading:
That Damned Elusive Parking Spot
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I have commuted almost every way it's possible to commute in multiple places and have come by some hard-won wisdom. First, commuting time, within normal parameters, is less relevant than you might expect. What matters are commuting frustrations. A 40 minute drive with no traffic or red lights is better than 30 minutes of stop-and-go. A 40 minute subway ride down one line is better than a 30 minute ride where you have to change trains twice. In automobiles, most frustrations relate to traffic. On public transit, frustrations include i) filth, ii) crime, iii) stress over finding a seat, iv) standing around waiting, v) running to make a train and missing it by 2 seconds (see also "standing around waiting"), vi) changing trains (and more waiting), vii) having to expend mental real estate on optimal door positions and station standing locations, and viii) distance between stations and destinations (you might figure a stroll through a few city blocks is pleasant, but it loses its pleasantness fast when you do the same stroll twice a day for years) (that said, I used to find the subway ride from 72nd St to 49th St so aggravating I eventually started swallowing the extra 20 minutes and just walking the whole thing).
Anyway, I say all that with no larger point in mind, but I do confess that for me personally the mental lift of public transit is much worse than the mental lift of an extended car ride. Having a guaranteed comfortable seat in your own car where you can blast your own music counts for a lot.
Have you read Nick Paumgarten's commuting article? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/there-and-back-again This and his elevator piece are two of the finest pieces of long-form journalism I've ever read.
“Proximity is serendipity.” Yes 🙌 This became crystal clear to me during the initial Covid lockdowns. Whereas normally, I would’ve walked a few blocks to browse a used bookstore for new material, suddenly enjoying an afternoon of “browsing” anything was not really an option. I was surprised at how many simple joys I’d found in my days when just getting out to walk in a city and browse a store might introduce me to new ideas, new books, new people or a sign for an event happening that I was interested in. Suddenly, everything required a deliberate plan and spontaneity, joy of discovery, the joy of something new, was much harder to find in real life interactions.