The Anywhere Fallacy
Unlimited options can quietly undermine what matters most
A few days ago, a reader called
left this comment on a post of mine:Anywhere is something that is only possible because a whole heap of us choose to be somewhere.
They left it on the post I’ve got pinned to the home page: Why you should stay in place. This piece is foundational. I wrote it in 2022, just after the second winter of the pandemic, as I was coming off a period in which I barely left my homestead in the mountains of central New Hampshire.
This was one of the best years of my life. I didn’t feel “stuck”—rather, I felt fulfilled in a way I rarely had in my adult life. I was climbing more than ever. Building things with my hands. Planting the garden and harvesting, preserving, and sharing with neighbors. Spending long nights around campfires with friends. Taking long walks with people I love.
It was also the year I first heard someone divide the world into “Somewheres” and “Anywheres.”1
I knew immediately that I was an Anywhere who had found peace and fulfillment in being a Somewhere. But it had to be forced on me to recognize it.
My whole life I had been over-indexing on freedom as a core value—assigning it too much importance when weighed against other values. When forced to stay in place, it turned out, I was able to do much more of all the things that brought me joy in life.
I’ve been writing about and advocating for those things ever since: finding meaning by investing in people, places, and communities.
Not that it still isn’t a struggle.
I struggle with it all the time. I still long to visit more places. Climb more crags. Kitesurf more seas. Connect with more people. I have a vagabonding, journeying heart that often feels restless. I can look at something directly in front of me and think to myself: I love this with all my heart, but also, wouldn’t it be interesting if I could go do something new?
A lot of people, given the money and freedom to do so, will follow that instinct.
They’ll move places. Sell homes. Quit jobs. Change partners.
This is usually celebrated. Follow your heart. Live your dreams. Pursue adventure. Be happy. You deserve it. The instinct to pursue novelty is strong.
But it’s a fallacy to think that more freedom will necessarily open your life to more meaning.
I’ve been mulling my choices over the last year (see: Too much freedom) and seeing myself drift to a place I don’t quite like—like a casual drinker slowly creeping toward just a bit more wine, just one more drink.
Just one more trip, I keep thinking.
No matter if it takes me away from things (or people) I thought I’d committed to. Everything will be fine. Just be happy. I can afford it. I deserve it.
I was thinking about all this when
left their comment:Anywhere is something that is only possible because a whole heap of us choose to be somewhere; it's not like the anywheres are spear fishing their own food every day, moving their flocks from pasture to pasture or building their own computers on the fly.
And, I was thinking about it when
published her excellent piece last week, The Freedom Trap: Why Escaping the System Won’t Set You Free. Among the many very good essays Lauren has written on digital nomadism, this has been my favorite. She writes:Freedom sells itself as an open road, an endless horizon. But sometimes, the more you chase it, the smaller your world becomes. The visa countdown. Another Airbnb host. The rising cost of never staying. It starts as endless possibilities, then tightens into a maze—one where the way out is never clear.
Escape is easy, Lauren writes. But what comes next? What’s the difference between having what Isaiah Berlin calls negative freedom—freedom from things—and positive freedom, i.e., the freedom to shape one’s life with intention, to do something meaningful?
Constant movement, Lauren writes, can be its own cage:
A nomad can technically go anywhere, but if they’re stuck in an endless loop of instability, their choices aren’t much freer than those of an office worker tied to a desk. The worker climbs a corporate ladder; the nomad runs on a treadmill.
Often, the motion itself becomes the escape. Moving keeps bigger questions at bay: What am I actually working toward? Where do I belong? Am I building something, or just passing through?
There’ a lot more, and I do recommend reading the whole thing. But the piece resonated deeply.
Who are the people who build something? Who are not just passing through? The Somewheres.
Whether it was the news of the day or Lauren’s pieces, for some reason I thought about all the local officials who were not the President or his team throwing grenades around to see what breaks. I thought of all the people who had run for or volunteered for local offices, taking thankless roles, agreeing to devote their time to trying to make their community just a little bit better.
I thought of the governors of various mountainous western states (because that’s where I’m from) shaking their heads at Washington D.C., wondering what any of it had to do with making the schools or trains work better, or the neighborhoods safer, or the jobs better.
I thought of the town clerk in New Hampshire where I have the homestead: I have no idea who she votes for every four years. All I know is her extreme competence and efficiency in getting our absentee ballots delivered, our car registrations renewed, our local elections running smoothly. All I know is her photographic memory for connecting the names and faces of everyone who lives here. All I know is her kindness in asking after family members. Everyone who lives here knows her name. She helps make this town work.
Obvously, she is a Somewhere.
She is the people WeepingWillow talked about who make it possible to even contemplate being an Anywhere.
Indeed, Anywheres are not building their laptops on the fly. Or planting seeds and growing the food, or harvesting and roasting the beans for the coffees, or building the planes and extracting the oil that becomes the jet fuel they use to travel the world.
Anywhere is something that is only possible because a whole heap of us choose to be somewhere.
Indeed. We all have to choose how we spend our time on this Earth. We can be trapped by too much freedom, as Lauren wrote. Or we can be set free by staying in place.
It’s not a binary thing, of course—always there is a balance to be found.
Yet time and again, I find myself struggling with where to set the balance. Too much in one direction, not enough in the other. All I can say for sure is that the world tends toward entropy: if you’re not careful, things can disintegrate. Just one more trip. You deserve it.
And then you wake up, and you wonder, why do I feel so disconnected? Where is the meaning in all of this?
The idea comes from a book by David Goodhart, but I heard about it on a podcast between Megan McCardle and Russ Roberts. They were talking about belonging, home, and national identity.
As McCardle described it:
I think the pandemic has illustrated that better than anything could, where all of the people who thought that they were--what one British writer called the 'Somewheres versus the Anywheres.' You know: the people who live in one place and stay there versus the people who are constantly mobile and can go anywhere. Well, the Anywheres found themselves trapped somewhere.
Thanks for the mention, I like your writing. I am a farmer so I am obviously very sedentary and don't venture far beyond the boundaries of my local government area, but I am not anti anywhere's.
I've found the best way to conceptualise it is the plant/animal split, and the philosophical rabbit hole that one can go down with it.
Plants are literally rooted to one place, and through that they become the base production of the whole food chain. Animals can obviously move around more freely, and therefore have more transformative power over a wider area, but they are of course dependent on plants. There does seem to be the an inverse relationship between movement and production.
Human societies are of course more similar to the moving animals originally, but it's only when they choose to root in one place and become like the plants (through agriculture) that cities take off and all the trapping of civilisation (for better and worse) come about.
Modern digital nomads are like the ultimate migratory animals, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that, it's more the understanding of great responsibility that comes with such freedom. And by actively taking on a more giving role (think the old missionaries, who despite what we may think now really believed they were doing Gods work, so no doubt found meaning) anywhere's may be better off mentally, rather than the usual parasitic role of the modern world.
Historically, there were always people like the gypsies and travelling ciruses that roamed across the world, but the key thing was they were a tribe that moved together, and in many ways they were (and still are) physically mobile but socially sedentary. They were also always selling things that weren't easily obtainable in sedentary places, so were welcomed and valued.
So perhaps it's the nature of he work, and the loner or family (rather than tribal) scale that is the issue with meaning, rather than the movement itself?
Loved this. You know the question so well—and wisely refuse to give us a simple answer.