What Distance Does

And the value of getting closer.

How many fewer chickens do you think would die each year if every person had to kill every single one they ate with their own two hands? How much less pork would you eat if you had to kill the pigs?

One of the most universal pieces of life advice is to get up close. To appreciate the nuances, understand the complexities, see the subtleties, you have to get closer. Things look different from a distance.

It’s amazing what we can imagine, how we can come to live in a world of abstractions. How easy is it to eat a burger, without ever even thinking for a second about the death of a cow. Eat bacon without the thought of a squealing pig. Is it a heaven we live in? Or a hell?

I still remember, years ago, reading a Wired article about a hacker who came to regret his online scamming. Eventually he realized that the faceless nature of the crime was a mirage. That of course the victims were real people.

But what stuck with me most about that story was how long it took. How easy it was to pretend otherwise.

Pretend isn’t even the right word. That implies that it was somehow willful, when in fact it’s even easier than that.

The default, at a distance, in the abstract, is to simply not think about it at all.

To do the opposite is what’s hard—to love, to care about and consider, at a distance.

During the early days of the pandemic, my best friend who lives back home had twins. And I just remember constantly trying to consider what that must’ve been like, how much his life must have changed, how much stress he must have endured. But I’m certain I never scratched the surface of what the experience must have truly been like. I was too far away.

I feel similarly about my eldest sister, who lives in Victoria with chronic health issues. I try to care, try to imagine, try to think about her, but the extent to which she would occupy my thoughts would be entirely different if she lived next door.

Ditto for my sister who lives in Australia. Somehow being that much farther away makes it that much harder.

And of course, that’s not to say that distance can’t be overcome. I work for a startup in California and it seems to be going quite well even though I only make it out there a few times a year.

But even then, I’m constantly looking for ways to get closer. Hopping on video calls with coworkers and customers. I try as hard as I can to get up close, to stay up close, to fight against what distance does.

One of the great ironies of our time is that we are more interconnected than ever, while increasingly living under the illusion that we’re all independent.

Back in the day, you knew who you depended on. The villager who caught the fish, who baked the bread, who built the roof you lived under. The people you relied on had faces and names. And when they got sick, that mattered, meant something, made a material difference.

These days we rely on millions of people from all over the world—farmers in far away places, faceless factory workers, software engineers you’ll never see. And when they get sick, you will not know or care or think twice, because they’ll be replaced by someone else whose name you do not know and whose face you would never recognize, and you’ll be able to go on believing you depend on no one at all. No one in particular, anyway.

Peter Singer famously argued that there is no moral difference between allowing a child to drown nearby and allowing a child to starve half a world away. And yet, the practical difference is vast. We could not live with ourselves if we let a child drown, yet the fact that children starve every day rarely weighs on our conscience.

Distance is dangerous like that. It eats away at our humanity, allows us to be apathetic, even monstrous at times. It distorts who we are, how we see the world, how we behave. I can never get over what some people are willing to say online, as if they aren’t speaking to real people, as if somehow what happens online is separate, not a part of real life.

And that’s because it takes energy, care, thoughtfulness to see it otherwise. To close the distance, you have to do the mental work of bringing the other people to mind, imagining what they look like up close.

Because up close, you’d realize they're not so different from the people you know and love. Up close, you'd say something different, act different. You'd be more kind, more gentle, more measured.

It’s easier to hate at a distance, harder to love. Easier to judge, harder to understand. Easier to take for granted, harder to truly appreciate.

So much of modern life removes us—from where our food and water comes from, from where our stuff gets made, from our neighbours. So much of life is lived at a distance.

That’s why it’s so important to understand what distance does. And to do your best to get up close instead.

You’re a better version of you up close. More grateful, more understanding, more caring, more connected.

Look at what distance is doing to you.

Don’t let it. Fight against it. Get closer, closer. Closer.

Getting up close is a revolutionary act in a world that’s more and more determined to pull us all away.

Steele