Some D.C. folks reflect on this exercise of not using a car for a week. (It’s much easier in D.C. than out in the suburbs, of course.) This might sound a little like a hairshirt-environmentalist sort of thing. But I think it’s useful, both for driving home1 how much we’ve designed our places around the assumption of having a car, and for actually seeing places up close and directly, rather than through a windshield.
I did something like this, once. I walked a three-mile stretch of a typical car-oriented commercial strip along U.S. Route 50 in Fairfax, Virginia. It’s not pleasant—you feel exposed, standing between fast traffic on one side and vast parking lots on the other. It’s clear, in a striking, visceral way, how much the environment is built around the speed and scale of the automobile.
But it also felt like I was seeing more. There’s a level of abstraction when you’re in a car. Part of walkability is not just safety or convenience, but this more subtle question of the pace and the scale and the way you perceive things.
Deskilling the body, Aeon, Melanie Challenger, October 13, 2026
I have vague memories of what my professional life felt like before smartphones and video calls. I used to do my writing by hand. And I could concentrate for hours at a time, getting little upticks of arousal from lifting my head from the page, letting the hold on my pen loosen, and gazing at the life beyond my window, the light softening on my skin and eyes like snowfall on warm tarmac.
Nowadays, my productive bursts come from caffeine and sugary or salty snacks, even if I try to pick the healthier ones, and from checking my emails or picking up my phone to update my inbox. By the end of the day, the sheer volume of work I expect myself to do, now that digital tools make so much possible, has kept me nailed to my seat.
And more, and yes, all of this:
We have fallen into habits that are steadily deskilling the human body….we have come to rely on our phones, for example, and now, increasingly, on AI, to rapidly do work that would once have required something more physical – like looking around, or asking someone, or going to find and consult a book. Reliance on GPS may weaken both our spatial attention and the fluency of our wayfinding. In surrendering to a quick technological fix, we are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending. Other capacities are being retrained by machines and algorithms to work against us: for instance, smartphones and chatbots can train us to keep reaching for them even when we no longer enjoy using them, turning a conscious choice into an automatic habit and a colossal waste of time. The body that results is less able to assess its own condition, improvise and regulate itself. The crucial distinction is between technologies that strengthen our capacities and those that repeatedly substitute for the actions through which those capacities are formed.
And finally this, which is deep:
It is only when we imagine that our ability to act has nothing to do with the body that we end up taking seriously the idea that we can live contentedly as machines. Far from upskilling us, a technology that shuts us off from embodied learning risks diminishing the intelligence it seeks to enhance.
Read the whole thing.
The ghost of land scarcity is back, Roeland, October 18, 2026
It has now been well over half a century since we got cars, and the expansion of land that they enabled has has run its course. No new transport revolution has shown up to carry it forward. And meanwhile the area you can easily reach by car is slowly shrinking as roads congeal. Expansion still happens but those new areas no longer come with an ‘easy commute’.
This is a really fascinating point. This writer, who writes from New Zealand, left a comment on one of my own pieces to this effect, and I wrote a whole little follow-up about it. It’s kind of obvious, and we talk about it all the time in terms of “supercommuters” and exurbs. But the fundamental spatial constraint that explains these things is less commonly discussed or understood.
He writes:
Nobody in the entire history of Auckland city had ever needed to replace houses with larger buildings. Once your neighbourhood was built out it was unlikely to change. People did not say no to development in their backyards. They didn’t have to, because nobody had to ask. You could always build new houses somewhere else.
But now we can’t. Land is once again scarce. Every reasonable somewhere else also already has people living there.
There’s a subtle and really important point here: much of what we look back on as “traditional urbanism” was the greenfield development of its day. Incremental growth certainly happened. But cities also expanded horizontally according to traditionally urban designs (grids, mixed uses, smaller lots, etc.). They still “sprawled,” but not along modern suburban patterns. Today, however, “urbanism” and “new housing” are largely intertwined with densification.
And this:
For a long time, the Kiwi dream was getting your own house with a generous backyard, where you had space to live, and to raise kids. This wasn’t just pie in the sky dreaming. A majority of middle class people actually achieved this dream.
Now, young people are finding they cannot afford the same kind of home as the one they grew up in. What has happened?
Well, for a glorious 100 years or so we didn’t have to bother with stacking homes on top of each other. We had so much space. But now land is once again scarce. And the next generation has to settle for townhouses or apartments.
It isn’t yet obvious to the regular person that there simply isn’t any “somewhere else” left that does not involve changing established neighborhoods. That’s kind of a YIMBY point of view: no neighborhood should be frozen in time and exempt from change. But in a way it isn’t a point of view at all: it just naturally follows from the land constraints we face.
This is almost a skeleton key for understanding why urbanism and housing advocacy have become such lightning rods for controversy. Densification of existing residential-only communities really is a radical idea, based on the last century or so of residential development. Yet it is also a different way of achieving the same thing. If we believe that people are good, and that people deserve to be able to access economic opportunity, meet each other, raise families, etc., there really isn’t any other choice.
“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
This is interesting, on the most common English words over time:
Some of the changes make immediate sense: Telegraph dropped out; computer was added, along with website and blog. Tobacco was replaced by cigarette. Motherhood became mom, and dad was added too, though fatherhood was never on the list to begin with. The world changed and vocabulary surely followed.
But also: apple didn’t make the new list. Neither did fork, soap, umbrella or leaf, for example. It’s not that these things vanished from everyday life, but many hands-on words became less central to the core vocabulary. Dog stayed; goat and donkey didn’t. Bread stayed; breadmaking ingredients—flour and wheat—dropped. Cook is on the new list. Boil, bake, and fry are not.
Check it out.
Related Reading:
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