Growing up in Colorado there was a way that we measured distance and it was with distance

distance measurement units.

If somebody was like, how far is it to that place,

you would be like, that's 20 miles.

And then they were expected to do the math

and their brain about how long it would take them

to travel 20 miles,

given whatever kind of means of travel they would employ.

But then I went to college in Chicago,

well the north shore of Chicago,

and I was hanging out with a bunch of people from Wisconsin and Michigan and Illinois as an 18 year old kid just out of high school

and I noticed that whenever I asked somebody how far away something was they would give me a time unit.

Ah that's 45 minutes. That's about an hour. And maybe

that was because of the traffic around Chicago land, maybe it's a cultural thing. I

never got to the bottom of it, but gradually I adopted that. And then eventually I moved back out to the

west and I realized that category doesn't work that well as technology changes, as laws change, because when I was going back and forth to Chicago as a kid,

it was 65 miles an hour going through Iowa.

But now it's 80 miles an hour on the interstate in Wyoming, and I don't know and people do 90 if they have Wyoming plates and nobody seems to really care

It's a very different amount of time that it takes and at some point it occurred to me that all of the old habits I'm in of oh yeah there to

there is about that many minutes it's all wrong now it just isn't how traffic

works it's not how time works I need to go back and I need to re-evaluate all of

that because my old mental categories don't fit the new realities that I'm dealing with anymore.

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