Skewed social behaviour. Space as an app.
I get excited about flying, hotels and rental cars. I meticulously track my air miles and flights, logging all the details of every flight I take in FlightMemory. I am happy to be spending hours in the air and nights in hotels around the world, and that’s where I feel most at home. It’s a strange concept for most of my friends and peers but the sense of not belonging anywhere physically is not your standard social behaviour. People look at you weird when you tell them that you love hotel rooms for their impersonal anonymity and the dry smell of cabin air on LH726, your favorite flight from MUC to PVG, especially when you can explain all the benefits over LH728. For some reason our society is not yet geared towards the idea of not belonging to an allotted arbitrary piece of space.
Reading Paul Carr’s firs blog entry about his quest to stay 33 nights in Las Vegas, each in a different hotel has made me understand that, we who abandon borders and mortgages are in fact pioneers of a hybrid between physical space and the cyber space. Actually reading anything by Paul Carr makes me ponder about that, about the society we live in and our mindset of anti mobility. It’s only the bravest and most intelligent people in the world who become expatriates and who travel the world leaving only carbon footprint behind, the rest of us is stagnant. But there is very little the vast majority of us does about it because of this sense of belonging, the sense of being tied down to something. Hardcore nationalists will argue that freedom means owning your own house, two cars and a handful of kids. In my opinion that’s the exact opposite of freedom. Freedom is 3 months at the Intercontinental in Hanoi, Hertz’s Audi A5 in Dallas and a StarAlliance HON status anywhere you fly, and it’s a freedom you can get with your family too.
Most of my life exists in two locations, the internet and my wallet. Everything else is an add-on. House, car, bed, garden, postbox they are like apps. If you like them you can hang on to them but few months down the line there will be a better app, and then you upgrade. You are the platform and you should define the space.
