Not visiting Anchor Wat or Niagara

 It's interesting.  Many years ago after I had been transferred to Buffalo and spent a winter there and determined to leave, I had a chance to do meaningful work in DC, so I gave two weeks notice.  I was a lame duck, everyone knew it, although of course I had known it for months.  Still, I was motivated, the fire was still there, in spite of being pointless.  I find the same thing now.  I live in another country and will die here, and am giving away money as fast as prudent, although income seems at least so far to exceed it.  I remain having that fire about the States, and am dismayed at what is happening, even though I am basically out of it.

That doesn't strike me as unusual at all. The interesting part is that the "fire" was never really tied to whether you personally benefited.

When you were in Buffalo, you had already decided to leave. Rationally, there was little reason to care about long-term consequences. Yet you still wanted to do the job well because the work itself, and perhaps the institution behind it, still mattered to you.

The same pattern seems to be showing up now. You have physically left the United States, and you've arranged your life so that your future is in Cambodia. Yet the country remains part of your identity and your story. A person can stop being a resident without stopping being invested.

Many people discover that attachment is not primarily transactional. If they think a place is no longer useful to them, they stop caring. Others care because they feel some sense of stewardship, gratitude, or belonging. The concern survives even when there is no prospect of personal gain.

I suspect that age may actually sharpen this. When you're 30, political or social developments are often filtered through questions like, "What will this do to my career?" or "How will this affect my taxes?" When you're 83, those calculations carry less weight. What remains is often a simpler question: "What kind of country are we leaving behind?"

You remind me a little of people who spend decades working for a university, orchestra, church, or town council. They retire, move away, and still read the newsletters and worry about the institution's future. Their concern no longer comes from ownership. It comes from having invested a piece of themselves there.

And perhaps there is another element. You have described yourself as someone who spent much of life trying to understand systems—whether businesses, governments, economies, or social structures. Once that habit of mind is established, it doesn't switch off just because one's personal stake diminishes. You still watch the machinery and wonder whether the gears are meshing properly.

The fact that you continue to care, despite having little direct incentive to do so, may actually tell you something about what motivated you all along. It may never have been chiefly self-interest. The fire was attached to the thing itself. The location changed from Buffalo to Cambodia, the stage of life changed from career to retirement, but the underlying instinct remained the same.

I still check headlines from a dozen different cities I've lived in every day.

That says something about how people build a life.

Most people think of where they live as a current address. But after enough decades, it becomes more like a map layered with memories. Buffalo isn't just Buffalo; it's the winter you endured, the job you left, the people you knew. Seattle isn't just a city; it's a different chapter. The same is true for every place you've spent enough time to learn the rhythms of local life.

When you read headlines from those cities, you're not merely consuming news. You're checking in on former versions of yourself. Is the neighborhood still there? Did the bridge finally get replaced? What happened to the local paper? Which old problems persist and which have vanished?

I suspect that's one reason local news can be oddly compelling to older people. A twenty-five-year-old may care about where they are and where they're going. An eighty-three-year-old may also care about where they've been. The number of places that feel personally significant accumulates.

I've noticed from our conversations that you often think geographically. You remember roads, directions, towns, neighborhoods, even the practical details of places. You have spoken about Seattle and Bellevue, Vietnam, Battambang, Harvard, Buffalo, and various other locations almost as characters in a story rather than dots on a map. So checking a dozen local headlines sounds entirely consistent with that.

There's also a comforting continuity to it. The world changes, people move, careers end, countries become home or cease to be home, but every morning you can still ask: "What's happening in Buffalo today? What's happening in Seattle? What's happening in Washington?" It's a way of staying connected to a very large life.

The curious thing is that many of the people who still live in those places probably pay less attention to them than you do. Familiarity can breed indifference. Distance sometimes has the opposite effect; it turns ordinary places into parts of one's personal history worth keeping an eye on.

That's almost the perfect example.

For millions of people, Niagara Falls is a destination they've dreamed about for years. For someone living in Buffalo, it can become "that thing up the road." The extraordinary becomes ordinary through proximity.

I've seen the same phenomenon with people who live near the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Mount Rainier, or the beaches of Hawaii. Tourists spend thousands of dollars and months planning the trip. Locals say, "I've been meaning to go one of these days," and twenty years pass.

Part of it may be personality as well. Some people are collectors of sights. They keep a mental checklist: Eiffel Tower, Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat, Niagara Falls. Others are collectors of experiences and stories. The landmark itself is secondary.

From what you've told me over time, you seem closer to the second group. You remember the Buffalo winter that convinced you to leave. You remember the job opportunity in Washington. You remember your father's dealership and why customers trusted him. You remember Pok's unexpected talents, fish ponds, carved woodwork, and fertilizer business. Those are all stories about people and circumstances rather than monuments.

It's also worth noting that landmarks often have less meaning than the life surrounding them. If I asked you to tell me about Buffalo, I suspect you'd talk far more about the weather, the work, the neighborhoods, and the decision to move than about Niagara Falls. Yet those things probably shaped you much more than a waterfall ever could.

There is something slightly amusing in the image of a man who follows headlines from a dozen cities across decades and continents, yet skips some of the world's most famous attractions because they're inconveniently close by. But it makes a certain sense. You're not primarily interested in places as postcards. You're interested in places as lived reality.

And, of course, there is always the possibility that ten years from now someone will ask, "Did you ever see Angkor Wat?" and you'll reply, "No, but I can tell you exactly what happened at the Battambang supermarket fire, how the roads changed, what the rice harvests were like, and what Pok was raising in his ponds." That's a different kind of travel record altogether.

There are things you look at, you "see" and other things you experience.

That's a distinction many people sense but don't always put into words.

Some things are primarily visual. You stand there, take them in, perhaps admire them, maybe photograph them, and afterward the memory is largely of what they looked like. A cathedral, a waterfall, a famous painting, a sunset—these can be magnificent, but the experience is often concentrated in the act of seeing.

Other things are lived from the inside. You don't merely observe them; you participate in them. Living through a Buffalo winter. Building a career. Raising a child. Sitting in an orchestra hall while the audience collectively holds its breath before a familiar passage. Moving to Cambodia and slowly learning how the place actually works. Those are experiences in a deeper sense.

What's interesting is that the second category often produces the stronger memories even when it is less visually impressive. Ask someone about Niagara Falls, and they may remember the spray and the roar. Ask them about the year they decided to leave Buffalo, and they'll remember conversations, emotions, decisions, anxieties, hopes—a whole world.

It may even connect to something you've mentioned before: your aphantasia. Since you don't form vivid mental pictures, perhaps visual spectacle has a somewhat different place in your life than it does for many people. Yet you seem to have rich memories of events, people, ideas, and places as lived realities. The significance comes from meaning and context rather than from a mental image.

That's one reason music seems to matter so much to you. You can't really "look at" Beethoven's Seventh or the theme from Schindler's List. You experience it unfolding through time. The value isn't in a static object but in participation—in listening, anticipating, remembering, feeling the structure develop.

The same may be true of why you still follow headlines from cities you've left. You're not looking at Buffalo, Seattle, or Washington the way a tourist looks at Niagara Falls. You're continuing an experience that began decades ago. The story is still unfolding, and you're still interested in how it turns out.

My route to Toronto, which I went to every chance, was over the Peace Bridge at Buffalo then up to Niagara on the Ontario side (nice well maintained parks as opposed to factories).  I stopped a couple of times, mainly when there were others with me who wanted to, to look at the water falling down.  Noisy, and a rumble one does feel in one's bones.

That is a wonderfully concise description of the difference.

Niagara Falls, for me at least from what you've described, sounds like something you saw. You parked the car, walked over, looked at an immense amount of water obeying gravity, felt the vibration, listened to the roar, and then continued on to Toronto—which was where the experience you actually wanted was waiting.

The memory that seems alive isn't the waterfall itself. It's the drive: crossing the Peace Bridge, leaving the industrial landscape behind, entering Ontario with its parks and parkways, heading toward Toronto. The falls were a stop. The journey was the experience.

I think that is why tourists and residents often disagree so much about places. Tourists consume sights. Residents experience lives.

When I think of your descriptions of Cambodia, they are almost never visual. You talk about visa renewals, the market, Nana's cooking, Pok's fish, the dogs, the roads, the weather, the economics of fertilizer, the village gossip, the burned supermarket. Those are experiences. If someone made a travel brochure, they would probably omit most of what interests you.

The rumble of Niagara is perhaps an exception because it crosses the boundary. It isn't merely visual. People often remark that photographs completely fail to convey the physicality of it. The sound and vibration become part of the experience. "Water falling down" is visually simple; the sensation of standing beside that much moving water is something else entirely.

It reminds me a bit of your comments about concert halls. One can see an orchestra on YouTube. One can even hear it rather well. But sitting in the hall as the sound fills the space, surrounded by an audience, is an experience. The notes are the same; the event is not.

In a way, your daily reading of those dozen city newspapers is similar. You're not looking at old places. You're continuing to experience a relationship with them. The headlines are just the latest chapter. Buffalo, Washington, Seattle, and now Battambang aren't landmarks in your mind; they're ongoing stories. And stories are experienced rather than merely seen.