Social Escape Velocity

"Escape velocity" is a term invented by my darling wife that means the necessary amount of distancing oneself from an environment in order to not return to that environment.  She originally came up with the term as an observation of her peers in high school leaving her small, rural home town.

In an environment people develop ties, family, work, friends, education, employment and the breaking or reducing of these ties, in that place, takes effort.  This effort is part of what I talked about in my post Psychic Activation Energy.  When you want to move to a different place you need to put extra effort into organizing where you will live, how to survive and how to get a social life.  it is almost always easier simply to stay where you are doing what you have been doing.

Please forgive the wobbly physics in this bit.  Now, think of the ties in an environment as gravity and the effort of moving as the fuel in a rocket.  A rocket blasting off into space needs enough fuel to achieve escape velocity, the speed necessary for the rocket to escape the gravity of Earth and fly off into space.  I believe escape velocity for Earth is seven miles per second and if at any time an object achieves that speed directly away from the Earth it will go into space.

For some people the ties at home are not that strong, the urge to leave is high, and the resources available for leaving are high.  These people have a lot of fuel and are able to get enough momentum in their leaving that they move to somewhere else, settle down there and don't feel the need to return.  Some people have strong ties to their home environment, aren't eager to leave, and/or don't have the resources to do so anyway.  These people don't have the necessary fuel to achieve escape velocity and leave.

Now, the number of people who blast off from Earth in this metaphor used to be pretty low but has increased with increased wealth, transportation, and variety of jobs.  If you grow up on a dairy farm you probably are more likely to leave the dairy farm at some point in your life.  However, even for those who blast off a good number don't achieve escape velocity and fall back to their original environment.

My wife and I have achieved escape velocity.  Neither of us live in, or wish to live in, the environments in which we grew up.  Our ties to those places are pretty small.  We may come to visit once in a while, but we have an alien spacecraft when we need to leave.  Both of our mothers did not achieve escape velocity, my mother when moving to the USA and my wife's mother when leaving for college (or after, I'm not an expert in her history).  My father has lived in the USA, would prefer to live in Pasadena, CA, but lives in the UK.  He has not achieved escape velocity, and for the best reason ever, he loves his wife.

I think the best example of the effects of social gravity that I know are the members of a group of men just out of high school who moved from Spokane, WA to Portland, OR.  I knew these gentlemen because over half of them joined the band Sam's Cross that I formed in Portland.  For people in Spokane, Portland is one of the two "big cities" that those from that good sized, but isolated, town that young people go to when wanting to move out and see the world.  Within a couple of years half of them were in Portland, flourishing in their art, employed.  they had achieved escape velocity.  The other half were back in Spokane and had impregnated some lucky woman.  They had returned to Earth, and with less available fuel than they had before.

It may seem that I am condemning those without the fuel to achieve escape velocity.  I'd be lying if I didn't say that I have more admiration for those who have gone to other places, experienced other things, met different people.  I think if you haven't really traveled (and I don't mean cruises, or the next state, or an all-inclusive resort in the Bahamas) you have a fundamental flaw in your understanding of the world, you simply aren't capable of understanding the world in a visceral way.  however, I have no problem whatsoever with people preferring one place to another, and if that place is their original home then that is fine.  However, I think of Justin, a talented musician with a great engine of energy who at twenty years of age gave up on the rest of the world to live a mile away from where he grew up, living with someone he knew in high school, and it makes me a little sad.