Eye-popping improvements in technology and industry have brought about the annihalation of space through time, meaning we now live in a deeply globalised society, where borders are mere olde-worlde whimsy when confronted with our online highways and tuppence plane fares.
Of course, the massification of global travel means that we, the idle consumers flitting from city to city, are legion, and thus the onus is on the transport providers to get us to our destinations in such ample numbers as to provide them with, well, a whole load of revenue. And here, I feel, is where it all comes crashing down. Our souls are eroded by the lack of the very thing the global market wishes to rid from our lives – space.
Everyone knows the weepingly awful state of London’s Underground network, for example. But really, every other mode of public transport teeters daily on the margin between service and torture. Train seats. Plane seats. Aisles. The emphasis is on getting you sat down and shut up, although there is always the sop towards freedom of movement within the marketing. The reality is that the passenger is reduced to an inchoate, sedentary, sardine-tin rage when anything goes wrong. There is enough room between the individual and the company to allow the company to diminish its consumer responsibilty to a considerable level, even when keeping up benchmarks, targets and so on.
Private transport, on the other hand, has become morally disastrous. Rivers of stationary traffic are the natural end to our society’s techno-commercial objectives. Human activity is like fire in a lift shaft – it expands to fit the empty space. Thus, if there is demand and space, suppliers will supply and demanders will purchase until saturation point.
Business travel is the epitome of this. So much energy and resource is expended travelling from place to place by businesspeople of every level, merely because they can, not because they need to. It infers some dodgy sense of status on someone if they have to travel for work – although they are merely cattled around the country, taking up time and space because there is too little willing to approach a problem pragmatically and economically. Video conference technology is now available outside of Books of the Future. Why do people not use this?
Evidently, at times, there is no replacement for dear old face-to-face communication, and there are many exciting, exotic corners of the world which can enrich your life experience. But I fear George Mallory’s famous riposte has come to have enormous relevance to almost every aspect of our life – ease of use and affordability means that people buy, do, eat, go, just ‘because it’s there’, and because they can. We could do wonders for our states of mind, our bank balances, our waistlines and above all, our environment, if only we would consider the path less travelled – the one that involves no travelling at all.