I didn’t realize how much distances were affecting my decision-making until I noticed my meal plan balance last week: $40. Of the $155 redeemable dollars I had for Autumn Quarter, I had spent $115…in just four weeks. The culprit? Olives, that wonderful bearer of the quick bite to eat, nestled in the basement of Building 160.
Almost all of my classes and meetings are within 300 feet of Olives, so I’m consistently self-satisfied at having found the closest, most convenient option. I congratulate myself on avoiding the rush of cyclists — and on avoiding the extra effort needed for locomotion to a dining hall. And so, much like many ancient peoples and civilizations throughout history, I find myself beholden to the powerful gravitational pull of proximity.
How close things are has been a driving factor in the formation of human society for thousands of years. In early hunter-gatherer communities, social networks were formed to facilitate cooperation (essentially, working together to forage for their own version of the Cheesy Waffler with tomato soup). Being part of a social network was crucial for survival. However, the probability of being part of any given social network significantly decreased with greater geographic distance. In other words, who your friends were — and who you shared meals with — was determined by how close together you lived.
That might seem like common sense, but our world today looks pretty different. We go to a university with a campus that’s roughly a quarter of the square mileage of the entire city of San Francisco (12.78 square miles, to be exact). That feels pretty big, especially when you’re mostly traveling from one end of campus to the other on two feet or two wheels, and yet it pales in comparison to the size of even the most modest of ancient empires.
Consider, for example, ancient Phoenicia, an approximately 8,000-square-mile civilization in the eastern Mediterranean. Made up of a system of city-states, Phoenician civilization was the birthplace of alphabetic scripts, the 3,000-year-old ancestors of our modern writing system. One of the reasons writing systems were developed was because, as the reach of societies expanded, so did the need for communication. People needed a ledger system to keep track of the exchange of goods, and eventually, they started to exchange other ideas, too.
Fast-forward to Rome. The Roman Empire at its height covered about 3 million square miles and had almost 80,000 miles of roads. But even so, using an oxcart on one of those roads, it would take two days to travel from Rome to the port city of Ostia. That’s almost the same distance from Stanford to Half Moon Bay, which takes us about half an hour by car. (If you want to explore this further, the Stanford resource ORBIS provides a detailed, interactive map of the Ancient Roman world.)
Though life is significantly easier in the modern world, proximity still poses problems for us. They simply come in different forms. The two miles between East Campus and West Campus still feels like the distance between Earth and Mars when you want to comfort a friend late at night. We don’t have to worry about waiting weeks for a written letter to arrive; instead, we have to worry about a near instantaneous flow of information, via cell service. And sure, Half Moon Bay may be only 30 minutes away with a car, but it still takes a great deal of effort to take a weekend beach trip when there’s a practice midterm sitting just inches away on your desk.
The important thing is to recognize that distance does matter a great deal, even if we’d like to think that we’ve mitigated any impacts with 21st-century technology. We feel it in our meal plan accounts, and, more important, in our relationships with others. But if we’re more mindful of the fact that this is something that has been affecting humans for a long time, hopefully we can recognize when it’s holding us back.
And I’ll probably make that extra bike ride over to a dining hall from time to time.
Contact Melina Walling at mwalling ‘at’ stanford.edu.