Why do we travel?

I mean really. Do we go somewhere to see it, or do we go to come back with stories, and to hear other people’s? Strip the photos out. Strip out the part where you tell someone about it afterwards, or do it with someone. Is the mountain still worth the flight? Maybe for some people. Honestly, not for me.

I started pulling on this thread thinking about my father’s village. It’s remote, small, agrarian. The kind of place where nothing is optimized and everyone knows everyone. And I noticed that almost everything I chase in a city, when I push on it, bottoms out in people. The “good life” I’m supposed to be earning toward is, when I’m honest, just the people I’d share it with. A doctor is a person I pay. At the core, even that is a relationship. I just paid to skip the part where I’d have to actually have one with him.

That last sentence is the whole essay, so let me slow down and earn it.

The clock is not your master

First I have to clear something out of the way, because there’s a story we tell that’s mostly wrong, and it makes us feel like victims when we’re not.

The story is: modern life made us slaves to time. The Industrial Revolution put a clock on the wall and a bell on the factory and now we live by the schedule instead of the sun. There’s truth in it. E. P. Thompson’s famous essay traces exactly this shift, from “task-oriented” work (you work until the thing is done) to clock-time work (you sell hours), and how the factory drilled it into people.¹ “Remember that Time is Money,” Franklin wrote, in 1748, like he was announcing a law of physics.²

But here’s the thing the story gets wrong. The clock didn’t start in the factory. Lewis Mumford pointed out that the clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the industrial age, and it was perfected in monasteries centuries earlier, to call monks to prayer on time.³ Jacques Le Goff wrote about the rise of “merchant’s time” against “church’s time” in the medieval town, well before any factory.⁴ Industrial capitalism didn’t invent clock-discipline. It scaled it, and made it universal.

And the worse problem with the story: we are not actually time-poor.

This one surprised me when I read it, and I’ll grant the measurement is contested. But the best time-diary studies show people in rich countries have more free time than they did in the 1960s, not less. We just feel more rushed.⁵ A study of UK diaries across fifteen years found no objective rise in time pressure at all; “busy” mostly functions as a status symbol now, a thing we perform.⁶ So the “no time” we complain about is, to a large degree, a feeling we have decided to have. We have the hours. We spend them somewhere.

So it isn’t really capitalism that put us on the clock. The Soviets were just as obsessed with it: Lenin denounced Taylorism in 1914 as “man’s enslavement by the machine,” then ordered Russia to adopt it in 1918, once he was the one in power.⁷ So what did capitalism do that’s specific to it?

It commodified the relationship itself. That’s the verdict. Industrialism owns the clock. Capitalism owns something else, and it took me a while to see what.

Money buys the function and skips the bond

Here is the move, and once you see it you can’t unsee it.

In my father’s village, if you get sick, you go to the man who has always been the one you go to. He helps you. And now you owe him. Not money, necessarily. You owe him in the open-ended way that humans have owed each other for all of history: you’re in his debt, you’ll be there when his roof goes, he’ll be at your daughter’s wedding, the thing between you doesn’t close. Marcel Mauss spent a whole book on this. A gift creates an obligation to give back, and the obligation is the point. It binds people together precisely because it is never quite settled.⁸

Money is the technology for settling it. David Graeber put it perfectly: “Money is something exchanged on the spot, bringing the relationship to an equilibrium state and allowing both individuals to walk away. And a debt is just an exchange that has not been brought to a completion.”⁹

Read that again. Allowing both individuals to walk away. That’s not a side effect of paying the doctor. That’s the entire product. You don’t want a relationship with your doctor. You want your knee fixed and you want to be quits, owing nothing, bound to no one, free to never think about him again. Money gives you exactly that. It lets you buy the function of a relationship (the care, the food, the help, the company) while skipping the bond (the obligation, the being-known, the never-quite-settled).

 THE VILLAGE                         MONEY
 the healer fixes your knee          you pay a stranger
   you owe him, open-ended             you're quits, on the spot
   the thread between you holds        the thread is cut as it's made
   function and bond are welded       money splits them apart

A favor leaves a thread. Threads pile into a web. The web is the community. Money’s quiet genius: no thread survives it. We didn’t lose human interaction, by the way. We interact more than any humans in history: the barista, the driver, the support agent, the doctor. We just made all of it terminal. It ends when the money changes hands. Nobody is owed anything forward. Nobody is bound.

What we actually skipped is a worse word than “relationship.” It’s interdependence: needing, and being needed by, particular people you can’t replace. The doctor is fungible. Any doctor will do, you’d switch for a cheaper one. The village healer was that man, irreplaceable, embedded. What money sells us is fungible humans. Maximum contact, near-zero dependence.

Want to actually measure it, instead of waving your hands about “connection”? Don’t count how much contact you have (that number’s going up). Count how many people would notice if you vanished, and who you can’t replace with money. That’s the number that’s collapsing.

We don’t crave dependence. We crave being needed.

Is it too much to say we want this dependence? To be honest I think the opposite is the risk: it’s so deeply true it’s almost embarrassing.

We are the only animal that stays helpless for years as infants, and dependent in some form for life. But “we crave dependence” sounds pathetic, and rightly so, because our culture has trained us to read needing-people as weakness. We pathologize it. “Needy.” “Clingy.” “Codependent.” So nobody will admit to it.

The word is wrong, though. There are two things hiding in it:

 to DEPEND on someone    leaning, needy, exposed     nobody wants only this
 to be DEPENDED ON       needed, missed, "I matter"  ← this is the one

What we crave is not dependence (helplessness) and not independence (the self-sufficient atom). It’s the middle: to be a load-bearing strand in some web, where your absence would actually tear something. Psychologists have a name for it, “mattering,” the sense that you’d be missed, that someone relies on you.¹⁰ My vanish-metric from earlier, who would notice if you vanished, is just mattering with the polarity flipped.

Now look at what modernity sells as the goal. Independence. Self-sufficiency. “Financial freedom,” which when you read it literally means the freedom to need no one. We chased that, hard, and a lot of us got it. And independence turns out to be loneliness wearing a victory medal.

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the spot where this kind of essay goes stupid. I am not saying we secretly want connection without knowing it, and that every yacht is really a cry for a hug. That claim explains everything, which means it explains nothing. People genuinely want mastery, and achievement, and to stand on the summit alone, and those are real and not disguised loneliness. The honest claim is narrower. We chase meaning, happiness, a life we’d call good. And connection is a far bigger input to all of that than we price it. We under-buy it. We substitute it away. Not the secret object of the chase. The ignored ingredient.

What’s missing has a name, and it was free

In Assamese, there’s a small thing people say on the street: bhale aase ne? Roughly, “you doing okay?” You say it to people you know, in passing, without thinking. It is nothing. It is also the entire thing: the free, unbought, daily acknowledgment that you exist and someone clocked it.

A lot of that is just… gone. Not for everyone, not everywhere. But you know the feeling of moving through a city where nobody would say it, because nobody knows you, because there’s no reason they should.

And here’s what’s grimly funny. The market noticed the hole. So it sells the thing back to you. That’s what the gated society, the “lifestyle community,” the apartment complex with the clubhouse and the residents’ association actually is: community, as a product. Zygmunt Bauman called these “peg communities” and “communities of shoppers,” purchased safety that asks no real reciprocity of you.¹¹ And it doesn’t work, on its own terms. Setha Low’s ethnography of gated communities argues they’re no safer than comparable open suburbs, and plenty of residents end up feeling more isolated, walled in with rules.¹² You can’t buy bhale aase ne. The entry fee sorts everyone by wealth, so it’s homogenous instead of organic. Nobody actually needs their neighbor, since you both just paid your way in. And, as my own observation: the apartment is houses stacked on houses, and its shelf life isn’t even one generation. Mattering needs permanence. The web has to outlast you for your absence to tear anything. The complex forgets you in a year.

The village had belonging and surveillance, by the way. I don’t want to romanticize it. Everyone knowing you means everyone keeping tabs, judging, never letting you out from under your family name. John Stuart Mill warned about that social tyranny a long time ago, the village deciding who you’re allowed to be.¹³ Belonging and surveillance are the same thing. You cannot have everyone-cares-about-you without everyone-knows-your-business. So when money let us buy our way out of the surveillance, the belonging walked out with it. That’s the actual mechanism of “communities break apart”: not malice, just that nobody needs the village once they can pay strangers.

Value for whom?

Step back and ask the question that I think sits under all of it. We follow the customs of the modern world. We enjoy the medicine and the convenience and the machines, all of which are real and good. But what for? Is the life we lead actually worth more than one without all this?

Careful. The honest answer is not “the simple life was better.” It wasn’t. The village had caste, and disease, and dead children, and no exit. I would not move back, and neither, probably, would you.

The sharper answer is that the scoreboard only counts capital’s points. GDP up. Convenience up. Lifespan up. Square footage up. And the things that bled out, interdependence, bhale aase ne, the answer to “what for,” have no number, so they read as zero. We are winning, on the only scoreboard anyone keeps, straight into a poverty the scoreboard cannot see.

Simon Kuznets, who basically invented GDP, told the US Congress in 1934 that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.”¹⁴ Robert Kennedy said it better in 1968: the gross national product “measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”¹⁵ We built our entire definition of a good life out of the one number that was designed to leave out the good life. And the value of all that growth accrues, mostly, to the owners. We get handed “convenience” as our cut.

We did this. That’s the part that’s hard.

Here’s where I have to turn the knife on us, including me, because the comfortable version of this essay blames “the owners” and lets the reader off the hook. I don’t think the reader is off the hook. I don’t think I am.

We are not sheep being farmed. We choose this. Every single day. The convenient order instead of the errand that would’ve meant seeing someone. The better-paying job in the city instead of the smaller life near people. The app instead of the knock on the door. Each one of those choices is individually rational. Of course you take the better job. Of course you order the thing. And the sum of a million individually rational choices is a life nobody would have chosen as a whole.

The economist Alfred Kahn named this in 1966, the “tyranny of small decisions”: a pile of choices, each one sensible on its own, cumulating into an outcome that is “neither optimal nor desired,” that no one actually picked. He even saw the trap in it: “each selection of x over y constitutes also a vote for eliminating the possibility thereafter of choosing y.”¹⁶ Every time you take the frictionless option, you’re voting, quietly, to make the other one a little less available next time, for everyone.

Which is why this is genuinely hard, and not just a matter of “try harder.” It’s hard for a stack of reasons:

 the bond is WEIGHT      to need people is to be encumbered, to owe, to carry open
                         debts. money sells you weightlessness, and weightlessness
                         honestly feels like freedom.
 the bond is SLOW        it's built in tiny unbankable increments over years, and
                         we've trained ourselves (the clock section, reaching back in) to hate slow.
 the bond needs NEED     it asks you to admit you're not self-sufficient, to drop the
                         armor everyone is taught to prize.
 and the real one:       you can't fix it alone.

That last line is the one that matters. This is a collective trap, not a personal failing. Even if you, by yourself, decide to choose the bond, to leave debts open, to knock on the door, there may be nobody home, because everyone else also opted into convenience, and the village only ever worked because everyone was bound. You cannot unilaterally rebuild interdependence. A whole literature on collective action says why. The commons gets wrecked even when everyone can see it coming. The free rider waits for someone else to go first. Nothing ignites below a critical mass.¹⁷ You are one person trying to restart a fire that needs a crowd. Which is also why I won’t hand you a solution. A trap with no individual exit has no honest individual fix. Any “just move to a village” I gave you would be a lie, a personal patch on a structural hole.

The two objections I owe you

If I’m going to claim we’re built for each other, two people in the back of the room have their hands up, and they’re right to.

The first says: what about solitude? The best things humans do, they do alone. Deep thought, art, the monk’s enlightenment. Aristotle thought contemplation was the highest activity precisely because it needs others the least. And honestly, as someone who’s read the Gita and is still arguing with most of it, this one lands for me, because the sannyasi, the renouncer who walks away from the whole web, is held up as the spiritual peak. Being alone isn’t a wound. It’s a capacity.

I’ll grant all of it, and I think the objection actually doesn’t refute the thesis, it presupposes it. The “capacity to be alone,” in the psychology of it, develops out of having been securely held.¹⁸ Chosen solitude and imposed isolation are not the same animal at all. The monk who renounces the web is standing on a lifetime of having been inside one. You can leave a room you were never in.

The second objection is sharper, and I can’t fully answer it, so I won’t pretend to. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argues that ethics comes before the self: that you are responsible to the other person before you are a free, sovereign “I,” that their face makes a claim on you that precedes any choice you make.¹⁹ This cuts directly against everything I personally believe about owning your own verdict and being the only judge of your life. If Levinas is right, the self-made man deciding his own truth is a fiction, and we are claimed by each other from the start.

I’m going to hold that in tension rather than resolve it, because resolving it would be dishonest. Maybe both are true on different axes: I own my verdict, and I’m already on the hook to you before I get a vote. I genuinely don’t know. I just don’t think the guy who wants to own his own life gets to walk past the one philosopher built to take that away from him, pretending he didn’t see him there.

The slave mentality

So here’s where it lands, and it’s not where I expected.

We’re not really slaves to time. That was a story. And we’re not even, in the end, simply slaves to relationships, much as we need them. The deepest cage is something I’ll call the slave mentality, in my own sense of it: the comfort of pretending we’re sheep.²⁰ Because owning that we chose this, every day, in a thousand small frictionless votes, is unbearable. So we don’t. We say “no choice.” We say the system did it to us, the owners, the algorithm, the times we live in. And there’s a sour relief in that, the relief of the victim who at least doesn’t have to look at his own hand.

That’s the slavery. Not the clock. Not even the loneliness. The lie that we’re not the ones doing it.

And now the one thing I will say that sounds like a way out but isn’t. You cannot choose your way out of the trap. I meant that. But you can choose whether to own that you’re in it, or to keep pretending a shepherd drove you here. The trap can take your exit. It cannot take that. You can keep ordering the app and taking the job and moving to the city, and still refuse to call it no-choice. The seeing is the only act left, and it’s a real one.

I have to fence this hard, because it is one sentence away from something ugly. “You chose this, own it” must not become “stop whining, it’s your fault.” It isn’t your fault. The menu is rigged. The exhausted single parent with two jobs did not freely choose isolation off some fair list of options. Owning that you chose every step is not the same as saying the steps were free, or fair, or good. The slave mentality I’m pointing at isn’t noticing that the menu is rigged. It’s using the rigged menu as an alibi to never look at your own hand at all.

I don’t have a solution. I told you I wouldn’t. All I’ve got is the gears, laid out, so it’s a little harder to keep sleepwalking through them.

Somewhere in a small town in Assam, right now, someone is passing someone else on the street, and saying bhale aase ne, and meaning it, and it costs nothing, and it can’t be bought. Most of us traded our way out of having that. We got a lot for it. We keep the receipt. And we call ourselves free.

References

A note on the science: the claim that loneliness is bad for you is real but mostly correlational. The big studies linking weak social ties to worse health and earlier death are observational,²¹ and the causal arrow is genuinely tangled (does isolation cause depression, or does depression cause withdrawal, which causes more isolation?). The US Surgeon General has called loneliness an “epidemic,”²² but an advisory is an advocacy document, not a neutral review, and whether modern loneliness is even objectively rising is contested.²³ And cross-culturally, whether more individualistic societies are lonelier is a real fight in the literature, not a settled fact.²⁴ I lean on the timeless human need, not on a clean modern decline, precisely because the decline is the part that’s hardest to prove.

Footnotes

1. E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967): 56–97. The shift from task-orientation to clock-time labour discipline. ↩

2. Benjamin Franklin, “Advice to a Young Tradesman” (1748), Founders Online, U.S. National Archives. “Remember that Time is Money.” (The phrase predates Franklin; he popularized it.) ↩

3. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934), the clock chapter. “The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age,” with origins in the medieval monastery. ↩

4. Jacques Le Goff, “Church Time and Merchant’s Time in the Middle Ages” (1960), in Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages. Precise hourly time-discipline arises with late-medieval merchants, before industrial capitalism. ↩

5. John P. Robinson & Geoffrey Godbey, Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time (Penn State University Press, 1997). Free time rose since the 1960s even as people report feeling more rushed. ↩

6. Oriel Sullivan & Jonathan Gershuny, “Speed-Up Society? Evidence from the UK 2000 and 2015 Time Use Diary Surveys,” Sociology (2018). No objective rise in time pressure across fifteen years; busyness functions as a status signal. ↩

7. V. I. Lenin, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government” (1918), reversing his 1914 article “The Taylor System: Man’s Enslavement by the Machine.” Clock and time-motion discipline arose under socialism too, so it tracks the factory, not private capital. ↩

8. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925; trans. W. D. Halls, Routledge/Norton, 1990). The obligations to give, receive, and reciprocate; gift exchange binds people in ongoing obligation. (The stronger “an unrepayable gift binds” reading is a later gloss, not Mauss’s own claim.) ↩

9. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, 2011), ch. 5. Note that Graeber treats the quantification of obligation as something imposed, often by force, not as a neutral good. ↩

10. Morris Rosenberg & B. Claire McCullough, “Mattering: Inferred Significance and Mental Health Among Adolescents,” Research in Community and Mental Health 2 (1981): 163–182. “Mattering” is the perception that one is significant to, and would be missed by, others; later work (Flett) distinguishes a reliance facet, others depending on you. ↩

11. Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Polity, 2001). “Community” sought as purchased safety yields thin substitutes that demand no real reciprocity. (Interpretive social theory, not empirical measurement.) ↩

12. Setha Low, Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America (Routledge, 2003). Gated communities are no safer than comparable open suburbs, and many residents report alienation. Pair with Evan McKenzie, Privatopia (1994), on homeowner associations as “residential private governments.” ↩

13. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859). On “social tyranny,” the conformity the public itself enforces, often more inescapable than the law. ↩

14. Simon Kuznets, National Income, 1929–1932 (U.S. Senate Document No. 124, 1934). “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.” ↩

15. Robert F. Kennedy, Remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968, JFK Presidential Library. GNP “measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” ↩

16. Alfred E. Kahn, “The Tyranny of Small Decisions: Market Failures, Imperfections, and the Limits of Economics,” Kyklos 19 (1966): 23–47. Individually rational small choices cumulate into an outcome “neither optimal nor desired”; each choice is also “a vote for eliminating the possibility thereafter of choosing” the alternative. ↩

17. On why there is no individual exit: Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Harvard University Press, 1965) on free-riding; Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243–1248, where the escape needs coordination, not individual virtue (use the commons mechanism, not Hardin’s contested population politics); and the critical-mass / threshold models of Pamela Oliver & Gerald Marwell (1985) and Mark Granovetter (1978). ↩

18. Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self (Free Press, 1988), drawing on D. W. Winnicott’s “the capacity to be alone” as a developmental achievement that grows out of secure relationship. ↩

19. Emmanuel Levinas, entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Ethics as first philosophy”: the self is responsible to the Other before it is free. ↩

20. I’m using “slave mentality” in my own sense, but I should say it has neighbours. Jean-Paul Sartre’s “bad faith” names almost exactly this move, lying to yourself that you have no choice when you do, in Being and Nothingness (1943) (overview); and Friedrich Nietzsche’s “slave morality” in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) names the part where powerlessness gets dressed up as virtue and worn with a strange pride. I arrived at it from my own side and only noticed the company afterwards. ↩

21. Julianne Holt-Lunstad et al., “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review,” PLOS Medicine (2010); and the 2015 follow-up. Strong association; observational, so reverse causation and confounding are not fully resolved. ↩

22. U.S. Surgeon General, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation (2023). Reports that about one in two US adults experiences loneliness, and likens the mortality impact of disconnection to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. ↩

23. Claude S. Fischer, “The Loneliness Scare” and Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970 (Russell Sage, 2011). Argues there is no clear modern loneliness epidemic across the data, with the exception of spousal relationships. ↩

24. Manuela Barreto et al., “Loneliness around the world,” Personality and Individual Differences (2021) finds individuals in more individualistic countries report more loneliness, but the effect is small and country-level studies have found the opposite, the so-called “loneliness paradox.” Don’t read it as settled. ↩