Arrival at a destination is often thought to be the prime purpose of travel these days. Taken in this way, the journey itself is not the point; rather, it is the serious business of transporting our bodies from one place to another. Getting to the end location as quickly as possible is the requirement and nowadays this is possible almost instantaneously. The modern method of travel seals us into tubes called aeroplanes as they charge through the sky at such speeds that we can hardly have any notion of the glorious planet we pass across. We want to get somewhere new and different as quickly as possible, and this is ironic as the very thing that enables us to get there quicker is also what makes all the "theres" so similar. Globalisation through airpower means stepping into the plane and swapping one city for another as though by some magic trick.

The same is true in the world of work, where we have our “quota” to make and our burden of work to carry, or else we are fired for not working fast enough. We put up with this because we have our eye on the prize, on the end game, on the fantasy of a board seat where we can relax at the top of the tree. However, when we get there at middle age, what we find is that this “thing” we have been waiting all our lives for has arrived, and… it’s not satisfying. It is like we place ourselves in a bubble where we can ignore all that goes on around us as though in some kind of sleep until we get that thing we imagine we want.