There are days where I think of leaving New Zealand. There is a loneliness to the country - you really feel how isolated you are from the rest of the world. I recently had a friend visit from Israel, who commented that she hadn’t felt this sort of isolation since visiting Nova Scotia in college. And I live in Christchurch, a city of 350,000.

You get the sense that you are just watching the the world play out on your screen, as opposed to actually participating in it. There isn’t much of a bitcoin scene, or an anything scene. And so few people travel because our closest neighbour, Australia, is an over 3hr flight.

People make fun of Americans for not traveling, but America is really like 30 countries in one, the regional cultures are so distinct. My parents are from small towns in Mississippi and Georgia, which are a different planet compared to New York, which is wildly different again to where I went to college in Ohio.

New Zealand is comparatively homogenous (with the possible exception of Auckland).

And NZ is huge - deceptively so! Even if your map includes NZ (which many don’t), it is lying to you about its size. Here is a map of NZ superimposed over Europe:

You could use the template of NZ and place it anywhere in Europe and you would capture at least 100 million inside it. Now consider that NZ has only 5 million people.

...Anyway, I say all of this, but then there are days like today, walking amongst ancient, extinct volcanoes I find myself humming the Jurassic theme without even realising it, when I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.