I have been blessed with the opportunity to travel all over the world and across the U.S. Some of my best friends and greatest moments are the results. Today one of my employees (a 32 yr old woman) told me that she has never been more than 30 miles from the house she was born in and she was very proud of that fact.
I was struck dumb. I couldn’t believe or understand her attitude.
Am I wrong? or is she just (hopefully) in the very small minority?
For a while I was living on Long Island, and I encountered many people born and raised on Long Island who had never been to NYC. No concert, no sports event, no museum, no play, no great restaurants, nothing. The reason? They were afraid of getting mugged. One of them, in fact, did wind up getting mugged . . . near her home on Long Island.
Some people are like that, for reasons I cannot understand.
My theory is that some people don’t travel, or don’t travel far, because of two reasons:
- They don’t have enough money.
- They’re afraid of flying (or don’t like other modes of transportation, for whatever reasons.)
If you really enjoy something (anything), it can be real easy to overestimate how enjoyable that thing is to others (i.e. maybe you are the exception). It’s also easy to fall into the trap of saying “Well, if only you experienced it, surely you would love it as much as I do.” I’ve never been clubbing (don’t like crowds/loud noises/drinking/dancing, so why would I like them all together?) but every once in a while a friend of mine starts in with “but how do you KNOW you don’t like it if you’ve never tried it?”. Trust me, I know.
FWiW, I am 42 but have lived within the same 30 mile radius since I was about 5 (extend the radius to about 50 miles and you would capture everywhere from birth). But I have traveled, out of state and out of country (once to France, once to the Bahamas). When I travel, I enjoy the experience, but I always look forward to coming home. Some people are homebodies, some aren’t. You can’t make a value judgement about either.
This assumes that everyone WANTS to travel, but is just limited in some way. Obviously that is true for some people.
I propose the possibility that some people simply have no desire to travel. Being happy with who (and where) you are is not a character flaw.
Rome if you want to, Rome around Lazio.
Not travelling more than 30 miles is pathologically weird. On the other hand, insisting that people who haven’t spent 6 months touring Europe are losing out is another level of strange/sheltered/ignorant.
Yeah, you’re right.
you could take your backyard and spend a lifetime of studying it in awe and fascination if you were a science type.
a person could take a lifetime learning and enjoying a craft or skill in their locality.
magazines, tv, movies and now the net can show you a lot of world.
there would always be some wonderments that i would like to see but won’t due to time or money.
She’s never been more than 30 miles from home. I’d wager you’ve never been more than 30 thousand miles from home.
It’s a difference of degree, nothing more.
I have relatives like that. Once when I went to a family funeral one of my second cousins asked me what I had been doing. I said I’d just got back from a business trip to Thailand. She turned her back on me without any pretense of politeness. Salt of the earth people, the nation needs more like them, but if you’ve done something that they haven’t done you’re considered ‘uppity’. (My mother considers me ‘uppity’ if I use the word ‘lunch’ for the midday meal instead of ‘dinner’.) I also had an aunt who had a lifelong dream of going to Hawaii. She made it in the 90’s, stayed 48 hours and went home. I think what she had was a dream of going to the Hawaii of the 40’s or even 60’s. When she saw what it really was, she left.
Now, when I’m home I don’t talk about anything that’s more than a hundred miles from them.
Only if you have a really wide variety of experiences and opportunities within 30 miles of home.
The reason travel is great is that there are still differences among people. Not everyone does everything the same. They serve different things for breakfast in different places. It really helps if you’ve been forced away from home for college or work or in my father’s case the army.
Now living the same place forever is different. I’m glad I haven’t had to do this, but sometimes it works out. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have other experiences.
Personally I think the bias here, is on you.
The implication is that she is a less a person for not traveling, for whatever reason. Just why is it that people who have traveled are “better”, than those who don’t ?
To be stuck in one narrow vision of what is possible would be, to me, a horrible fate. Travel has shown me how amazing and diverse the possibilities for your life can be. But I guess there are some people who when faced with many choices retreat to what is comfortable and familiar. I hope I never completely give in to that outlook.
You must work a white collar job and she doesn’t, so you shamed her to be able to afford to buy clothes at Tieland.
Is that a southern thing? I know it’s a Belgian/Swiss/maybe Canadian thing. Where lunch is déjeuner in France, dîner elsewhere (and dinner is dîner in France, souper elsewhere). In English, “supper” seems uppity to me. As in, “Papa, may I be excused from supper? I would like to play with my expensive toys in front of the housekeeper’s children.”
This. Not so much because she hasn’t traveled extensively, but because a radius of 30 miles is absurdly small. It’s almost like large scale agoraphobia or something. People routinely go further than that for restaurants, clubs and other things without it being any sort of big deal at all.
“I have traveled extensively in Concord.”
– Henry David Thoreau
… and he didn’t have television, the internet, or Amazon.com.
I don’t think the issue is never having traveled, but rather, being proud of that fact.
I think that voluntarily never once leaving one’s hometown shows a certain lack of intellectual curiosity. I don’t see it as any different as a person who reads one book, and decides that’s all that they really need of the written word.
While not everyone is going to prioritize travel, I do think it’s a virtue to challenge one’s comfort zone on a regular basis. New experiences are a prophylaxis against narrow mindedness.
Having just moved to LI, I can confirm that attitude. It’s a puzzlement to me.
Not at all. I would argue it’s difficult to never move more than 30 miles from home. You might need to buy something that is not available in the vicinity, or visit relatives, for instance. If you’re interested in anything at all, you’ll have at some point some good reasons to move farther than 30 miles.
I think you have to be actively avoiding to move to not ever have “traveled” more than 30 miles.