Four Minutes Away

When I finally began to relax into the rhythm of Marrakech, I realized the city did not move according to traffic laws so much as collective instinct.

Cars, scooters, bicycles, horses, donkeys, stray cats, children chasing soccer balls, old men pulling carts — everything seemed to pour into the streets at once in what should have been complete chaos.

And yet it did not feel aggressive at all.

I come from cities where traffic often functions as an outlet for unresolved psychological suffering.

In Toronto, I learned that people can be extraordinarily kind right up until the precise moment they get behind the wheel of a car. Toronto driving humbled me spiritually.

I have cried making left turns.

I have accidentally drifted toward the streetcar lane and immediately felt the moral condemnation of an entire intersection descend upon me like divine judgment.

I have been honked at by six different people simultaneously simply for looking briefly uncertain about my purpose in life.

Once, a group of extremely high men began breakdancing directly in front of my car at a green light. They were honestly phenomenal. I could neither proceed nor morally justify interrupting what was clearly an important artistic moment for the city.

Another time, a man who smelled aggressively of beer hit my car and seemed only vaguely concerned.

All fond memories now.

London, meanwhile, often feels emotionally waterlogged.

Nobody honks very much because everyone already seems tired enough and people simply absorb inconvenience into their personalities.

In parts of China, crossing the street sometimes feels less like transportation and more like an advanced trust exercise with mortality. You survive by projecting confidence directly into incoming traffic and trusting that collective instinct will part around you at the final possible second.

Tokyo operates through an entirely different psychological mechanism.

Nobody yells or openly fights for space. Instead, the city runs on an almost supernatural level of emotional self-regulation. Millions of people continuously compress their needs, opinions, bodies, umbrellas, and souls in order to avoid inconveniencing others.

Around my home in Japan, meanwhile, the roads are so wide and empty that driving often feels less like transportation and more like a low-stakes Mario Kart level designed by farmers.

But Marrakech felt different.

The streets were chaotic, yes, but not emotionally compressed.

There were traffic lights positioned in places that appeared spiritually rather than logistically motivated. Motorbikes flew through impossibly narrow streets at impossible speeds. Pedestrians slipped through spaces visible only to God.

And yet the city somehow moved through tiny acts of collective negotiation.

It moved less through strict systems than through constant human adjustment.

It was one of those bright slow late mornings where summer already seemed to be leaking into the air when we found ourselves wandering through Marrakech searching for the grand taxi station.

By then we had already asked for directions three separate times.

Every person had been incredibly kind. Every person had pointed in a slightly different direction and told us, “Just four more minutes.”

I still do not entirely understand what four minutes means in Morocco.

My interpretation so far is that it is less a unit of time than a philosophical concept.

When we finally found what looked like the shared taxi station, we immediately realized we were very much not supposed to be there. There were no tourists. Only locals. Fast-moving Arabic conversations exploded around us while we stood there with our backpacks and confusion, trying desperately to communicate the name of the village we were heading to.

We were clearly outside the system.

And then suddenly, through the flood of Arabic, I heard one familiar word.

“Imlil.”

I turned instinctively and shouted, “Imlil?!”

A young woman looked back at us.

That was how we met.

“Come with us!”

The girls who rescued us spoke perfect English and almost immediately took us under their wing. They were funny, observant, warm, intelligent, confident, open, and yes of course, beautiful. Before long, we were all talking easily together.

They told us about Morocco, their cities and villages, their families, language, religion, work, and life.

We drank what was possibly the best freshly squeezed orange juice on earth. Moroccan oranges exist on a level that honestly feels unfair to the rest of the planet.

We shared sweet tagine beneath the afternoon sun. Every tagine I eat for the rest of my life will now be compared against it.

There are moments while traveling when you suddenly feel the enormous improbability of being alive on the same planet as other people.

To meet women your own age in another part of the world and somehow feel quietly understood feels extraordinarily lucky.

At one point, while we lingered over tagine and mint tea, one of the girls asked:

“What do you think about women’s independence?”

The question stayed with me because the women I met during my trip complicated many assumptions I did not realize I still carried.

They wanted independence, education, economic freedom, mobility, safety, and the ability to shape their own lives.

But they, and we were all not especially interested in becoming Western.

More specifically, they did not seem interested in becoming the kind of isolated, hyper-individualized, endlessly productive person that modern societies often idealize.

Many of them seemed uneasy with certain ideas increasingly associated with modern life: a life organized entirely around work, the erosion of community, the idea that independence means needing nobody.

And honestly, they seemed to understand something many of us are only beginning to articulate.

I kept thinking about the movie Laapataa Ladies.

What stayed with me about the film was that it did not define freedom primarily through corporate ambition or hyper-individualism. Its vision of dignity felt quieter and more grounded in ordinary life: literacy, friendship, mobility, the ability to speak for oneself, the ability to exist as a person rather than simply as someone’s daughter or wife.

It was not a rejection of community. It was a rejection of disappearance.

Women’s education and social mobility are expanding rapidly across many parts of the world. Young women are highly educated, multilingual, globally aware, professionally ambitious.

But at the same time, many are still expected to carry much of the emotional labor, caregiving, domestic work, and traditional femininity previous generations carried. The burden can be enormous.

Even before Morocco, many of the people closest to me were Muslim. And still, I found myself quietly frustrated by how easily distance turns entire societies into caricature.

The women I met in Morocco were funny, capable, socially perceptive, and strong in ways that had very little to do with corporate ideas of power, even as many of them were highly accomplished professionally.

And for many of them, religion, family, community, and mutual obligation were not simply restrictions placed upon life. They were also sources of dignity, belonging, continuity, and meaning.

This does not mean they wanted patriarchy.

But neither did they seem interested in a world where freedom requires becoming emotionally detached from everyone around you.

They seemed to be searching for something more balanced than either extreme.

After Morocco, I found myself thinking less about “independence” in the abstract and more about a much simpler question: Who actually keeps human beings alive?

Modern societies are remarkably good at valuing what can be measured: production, growth, efficiency, output.

And yet none of those things fully explain how human life continues.

Someone still has to cook. Clean. Raise children. Care for the elderly. Maintain relationships. Sit beside people through grief. Notice loneliness. Hold communities together in the background.

This work is often described as reproductive labor or social reproduction: the labor required to sustain human beings themselves.

Historically, much of this work has been carried by women, often within the language of love, duty, or natural instinct rather than labor itself.

Over time, that distinction made the work strangely easy to overlook.

Invisible precisely because it was essential.

I found myself thinking about The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen and his observation that societies do not always assign the greatest prestige to the work most necessary for life itself.

Historically, status has often been associated with distance from necessity — the ability not to labor, to remain untouched by repetitive or practical forms of work.

Meanwhile, many forms of caregiving labor — domestic, emotional, cyclical, often quietly repetitive — tend to fade into the background of social recognition despite how essential they are to everyday life.

And this began to connect, in my mind, with Ethics of Care and thinkers like Carol Gilligan, which gently challenges one of modernity’s central assumptions: the idea of the fully independent individual.

Modern societies often idealize autonomy, rationality, productivity, and self-sufficiency.

But human life has never really functioned that way.

We begin life dependent on others. We become dependent again through illness, heartbreak, grief, disability, or aging. Emotionally, psychologically, physically, human life is structured through interdependence from beginning to end.

The independent individual may be one of modernity’s most successful fictions.

Historically, men were imagined as independent while women were imagined as dependent. But in reality, much of male independence was quietly built upon invisible forms of care all along.

And honestly, this forced me into some uncomfortable self-reflection too.

When I was younger, I probably absorbed more than I realized from a certain kind of neoliberal “girlboss” culture simply by being one of the few girls in STEM, although at the time I would never have described myself in particularly ideological terms.

I remember once hearing a young Indian woman say on TV, almost casually, that girls often grow up quickly because they are expected from an early age to care for families and communities, while many boys are allowed a much longer period of immaturity.

The line stayed with me partly because it led me toward an uncomfortable question about myself. How different I really was from those boys?

Even as a broke student barely surviving — entirely dependent on the support structures around me, contributing very little of real substance to society or to the kinds of caregiving work that sustain everyday life — I still somehow believed I belonged to the enlightened side of history simply because I knew the correct language of progress.

I had left home young. I was not raising children, caring for parents, sustaining a household, or holding a community together in any tangible way. Most of my energy was directed toward education, career, mobility, and the pursuit of becoming someone.

And yet people like me often quietly overlooked how much of our own freedom rested upon invisible support from others, very often other women.

The mythology of the self-made person begins to dissolve surprisingly quickly once you start paying attention.

Nobody is self-made.

Not without schools, infrastructure, healthcare, laws, safety, transportation, family support, social stability, or generations of people before us who fought simply for our right to exist comfortably in public life.

Perhaps independence was never really about needing nobody.

And perhaps a healthy society is not one in which every individual becomes entirely self-sufficient, but one in which dependence does not automatically become domination.

Because these expectations do not harm only women.

Many men grow up learning that much of their worth is tied to usefulness, provision, and emotional steadiness, which can make vulnerability feel frighteningly high-stakes.

But Ethics of Care offers another possibility.

To care and to be cared for are both part of being human.

Not weakness, not failure, but simply ordinary human reality.

And perhaps what stayed with me most about the women and men I met in Morocco was not that they rejected modernity, tradition, or independence altogether, but that they seemed to be searching, thoughtfully, pragmatically, and often with remarkable clarity, for a way of being modern without becoming emotionally isolated from one another.

One girl we met in the mountain village was only twenty, but carried herself with a level of competence, clarity, and practical intelligence that made many adults I know seem emotionally unfinished by comparison.

Another woman we met was leading a local humanitarian organization with extraordinary calm and capability while navigating responsibilities across family, community, and public life simultaneously.

I also remember one Moroccan father speaking about his daughter with enormous pride — not despite her ambition and independence, but because of it.

Another Moroccan father proudly selling carpets his daughter had woven by hand, speaking about her with unmistakable pride.

None of them fit neatly into the familiar oppositions between “traditional” and “liberated,” dependence and freedom, ambition and care.

Maybe that is why I still think about Morocco whenever someone tells me something is “just four minutes away.”

The distance was almost never accurate.

The gesture somehow still was.