I’ve told this story before because it’s probably one of the most pivotal moments of my life.
At the time, my response was likely some variation of fuck off.
In 1998, I was failing miserably at a radio gig in Dallas. Long story short — I was about 23 years old and a complete idiot. I arrived in North Texas and proceeded to act like a complete Yankee. To an extent even worse than the stereotype Americans carry into their European travels.
Anyway, this guy I worked with in Dallas—Gordon Keith—was always trying to get through to me. One day sitting around the office, he—paraphrasing—said this to me:
One of these days you’re going to realize there’s more to life than radio. You’re going to somehow discover what the world has to offer and you’re going to devour it. You won’t be able to get enough.
It’s the last two sentences of that scolding that matter right now.
Those weren’t just words. There’s profound truth and substance in what Gordo said that has helped me connect the dots of my life.
I think Gordon saw the experience gap before I did.
I grew up in a place where we did things, but the range of what felt possible—and what actually happened—was always narrow and predictable. We took annual car drives to Florida from Upstate New York. We went to the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. But most of this was limited to scheduled vacation.
We had trips and memories and a family life that provided love, stability, routines, and good memories—but it was a childhood that kept my experiential world small.
The idea of waking up on a Saturday and taking a day trip to the Finger Lakes, or spending a weekend in the Adirondacks, or treating the region around us as something to explore, was never really on the menu. I have faint memories of a camping trip—maybe two—with my uncle and aunt.
I didn’t understand that not having these types of regular outings was unusual until much later in life—until I started seeing other people doing them without much thought or preparation.
A few years ago, when I visited the Finger Lakes for the first time, I asked my mother if we had ever gone when I was a kid. Her answer was basically: why would we have gone there?
For some people, the world is not something you casually go out and experience. It is something that exists elsewhere, for other people, under special circumstances.
This helps explain why I was so enamored with places like Toronto—we did go there a few times as a kid—and even Buffalo. When I saw city life happening, I always wondered—who are these people and why do they live here?
My wife’s version was even more extreme. She spent a significant part of her childhood off the grid in Puerto Rico, inside a strict environment where even television was forbidden. She learned things there that still shape her in useful ways. But she was also sheltered in the most literal sense of the word.
We both left at roughly the same age. I went to Miami for radio. She went to San Juan. Neither of us really looked back.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
When your early world is narrow, the first glimpse of a wider one can feel less like novelty than oxygen—just like Gordon said.
Two key points —
First, it didn’t happen overnight. I’d been away from home for several years when I received the scolding, and it didn’t even dawn on me then. I don’t think I fully realized what I’m talking about today until just a few years ago. It’s a process.
And, to be clear, in my upbringing shelter is not to be confused with deprivation. I’m saying I’ve come to discover that a life without a richness of experience—absent the idea that, yes, there is so much out there to see and explore—can create a particular kind of hunger once the shelter cracks.
When I look at my daughter or my wife’s daughter, I don’t see the same experience gap.
That might be one of the things I feel best about as a parent.
I didn’t do everything perfectly—nobody does. But I did try to give my daughter a wider experience set than the one I had. My wife did the same with her daughter. Between us, our daughters grew up seeing more cities, taking more flights, going to more restaurants, experiencing more neighborhoods, learning through more cultural exposure, and having more casual contact with the wider world than either of us had at the same age.
This isn’t to say they appreciate things less. It just means that the distance between what they knew and what’s possible isn’t as wide.
When you’re 22 and have already done so much—day trips, weekend trips, multiple visits to Europe, experiences with different people and different ways of living—the world can still be exciting, but there can be less urgency to see it all.
For people like my wife and me—and this is really another potential trademark of the Generation X experience—exposure arrived late enough that it came with urgency.
When you spend the first 18 years with a narrow frame, then the next 15–25 years figuring out what else exists while also working, parenting, surviving, building a life, etc., the desire can become more compressed and intense.
It’s not just “I want to see things.”
It’s more like: “I’m staring down the second half of my life and—suddenly—I realize just how much is possible and just how little time I have to do as much as possible.”
You leave at 18 because you suspect there is more. You spend the next decades figuring out what more actually means.
The hunger accumulates through practical and psychological trial and error, through seemingly unrelated successes and failures, through “scoldings” you receive and detours you take—planned or otherwise—along the way. At some point you realize that your early world—and even the worlds you created after leaving it—were not the only versions of life.
Eventually it comes together and you understand why you’ve always wanted more. You’re finally able to define the source of the hunger: the curiosity stops being casual and becomes urgent alongside the realization that you have much less runway than the 23-year-olds in your life.
This might help explain some of the difference between people who talk about big changes and the ones who actually make them. It’s not always courage—often, it’s accumulated urgency.
You finally understand what the world has to offer, how much of it you never knew existed, and how little time you have to experience as much of it as possible. Sitting still starts to feel like wasting what took you half a life to understand.
Gordo is still filling the airwaves in Dallas. Seems like a normal guy among the dozens of knuckleheads who live to hear themselves talk and who say dumb things just to be heard.