Anytime I’m tempted to complain about the “inconvenience” of travel—the flight delays, cancellations, uncomfortable seats, sketchy wifi, terrible airport food, and general annoyances of airports—I simply look up the distance of my journey and divide that number by 15. In this case, Naples to Phoenix is 2300 miles.
For millennia, before the invention of the internal combustion engine, humans could realistically only travel about 15 miles a day. So my 2,300 mile journey to Phoenix would take me 150 days.....that’s FIVE MONTHS one way.
This means I would have needed to leave in September to arrive on time for my meetings tomorrow. Round trip, my 72 hour business trip would have taken nearly a full year....and that’s assuming I wasn’t mauled by bears, attacked by bandits, or my personal favorite, dying of dysentery.
So whenever you’re feeling tired, annoyed, or frustrated with airlines, remember that for most of human history, travel was downright dangerous. It was cruel. Only because of free people living in a free society did we experience the innovation of the industrial Revolution, which severed the link between time and distance.
So here I am, typing this essay on my phone sitting at my gate. I have the instantaneous ability to publish my ideas with literal worldwide distribution. And I’m about to fly somewhere that would have taken Lewis & Clark 5 months to travel to....in about 5 hours.
Giving credit to capitalism for “GDP growth” doesn’t quite do it justice. We’re living in a world our great grandparents could have never dreamed of. Modern life is a miracle.