“Don’t you think,” one of George Minafer’s unnamed compatriots asks in The Magnificent Ambersons, “that being things is rather better than doing things?” Minafer and his crowd are not the most sympathetic characters, and I don’t think Booth Tarkington intended them to be (although Minafer could arguably be considered an exaggerated avatar of his creator in certain respects), but I think there’s something to this quote.

I thought about it on a recent drive to Fort Wayne, where the Hoosier Heartland Highway in all its four-lane divided highway splendor curves around several small towns. Americans, it seems, would rather get to places than go to places. By this, I mean the journey is something to make as short as possible, not a part of the experience.

I’m no highway engineer, but every time I’ve driven the Hoosier Heartland Highway, the traffic has been almost non-existent. There seems to be very little reason for the “upgrade”, other than to let people drive faster. And as a result, there are towns that people no longer drive through. This might be good for the driver, but it seems less good for the businesses in the towns, and perhaps for us as a society.

When I drive through small towns, I sometimes wonder how much longer they have. The population of Americus, through which Indiana 25 no longer passes, has fallen from 630 in 2012 when the Hoosier Heartland Highway opened to 57 in 2023. Some of this is part of a general trend, to be sure, but not all of it.

Are we really in such a hurry that we’re willing to give up unique places in exchange for the sameness of limited-access highways with the same fast food places at every exit? Probably. I’m guilty of it myself. But there’s a lot we’re missing out on that we might not get back when it’s gone. We could do with spending more time being and less time doing.

For the better part of the last decade (and perhaps longer), we’ve struggled with the fact that not everyone is living in the same reality. Political polarization is, in my view, less about reasoned differences in policy preferences and more about the fact that we’re not working from the same set of facts. Nothing I can say will convince someone who believes that a secret cabal is trafficking children in the basement of a pizza restaurant. Or more banally, that Joe Biden shut down the country at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We recently passed the 10th anniversary of “The Dress,” which some say is the start of all of this.

The day of The Dress, I was interviewing for a job. I wasn’t allowed to have my phone at the facility, so I was offline most of the day. When I got to the airport, I had a chance to catch up on work and also the Internet. I’ll admit that I was a lot more interested in the llamas running loose in Arizona than some photo of a white and gold (don’t @ me) dress.

“The Dress” was definitely a shared experience for those of us terminally online in 2015. Whether it’s the event that tore us apart or not is harder to say. It does seem to mark a turning point, but the same could be said for the deaths of David Bowie and Harambe in 2016.

Instead of a beginning, The Dress might be an end. I see it as the end of shared experiences. With so many entertainment options, we don’t have things like the final episode of “M*A*S*H” or “Seinfeld” to have a shared experience. And maybe that’s part of the reason we don’t have a shared reality.