On Wanting Distance
Lately I keep thinking that when people say they hate humanity, that’s not quite true.
What they hate is proximity.
The closeness. The constant exposure to the worst impulses of our species, brought right up to our faces and held there. Not through lived experience — which is often surprisingly gentle — but through screens. Through feeds. Through the strange intimacy of being made to witness everything, all the time.
We weren’t meant to live like this.
To wake up already surrounded by noise, outrage, cruelty, certainty.
To carry the weight of distant suffering before we’ve even entered our own day.
In real life, most encounters are small. A conversation. A shared silence. Someone holding a door. Someone trying, imperfectly, to be kind. These moments still exist, quietly, almost stubbornly. They just don’t travel well. They aren’t clickable.
What travels is distortion. The sharpest edges. The loudest voices. The things most likely to provoke a reaction rather than reflection. Over time, that kind of proximity does something to a person. It blurs scale. It makes the world feel both unbearable and inescapable.
So the wish to disappear to a mountain isn’t really about escape. It’s about breathing space. About finding a distance at which the human world becomes legible again. A distance where you can remember that humanity is not a headline or a comment section, but a series of fragile, ordinary lives.
There is a grief in being this close to everything. A quiet exhaustion that comes from seeing too much, caring too deeply, and having nowhere to put it all. Sometimes what looks like cynicism is actually a nervous system asking for mercy.
Maybe the task isn’t to harden ourselves against the world, or to love it unconditionally. Maybe it’s simply to choose how close we stand. To step back when the nearness becomes corrosive. To protect the part of us that still notices small goodness, still feels tenderness, still wants to remain human.
Distance, in that sense, isn’t rejection.
It’s preservation.
Abdolutely, what you say so beautifully resonates with something I have been feeling my way into lately. Something about the lack of perspective that makes the capitalist system and the tyranny we live under seeming all powerful and much bigger than it is. The way it (whatever it is), needs us claustrophobically close to it so that we lose perspective; so that the delusion of its size is believed, when it is all so much smaller than we believe. There’s something about our being so choked up in it, and feeding its grandiose sense of itself, when there are so many other ways that life exists on this planet, even human life, even within this system let alone outside it. Yet, without distance to give us perspective, this machine, based on some very spurious beliefs and rationales and often false constructs seems all encompassing.