I suffer from a rare form of FOMO – Fear Of Moving Out

Albert Einstein never learnt to drive, allegedly because he found it too confusing, but more likely because he didn’t want to waste precious time commuting in a steel box so vastly slower than the speed of light.

Einstein would, no doubt, have been able to come up with a catchy yet imponderable equation to represent the conundrum facing the modern city-dwelling family. The closer they live to the gravitational centre known as the CBD, the more likely it is that they are pining for more space.

No matter where you reside in a city like Sydney, this extra space – bigger rooms, a patch of grass larger than a Kleenex, trees, a pool – is tantalisingly available, as long as you are willing to move further out.

The further you stray from the gravitational pull that is your place of work, however, the more time you will have to spend commuting and the less of it you’ll have to enjoy watching your children hugging your trees.

What it comes down to, then, is a very Einsteinian battle between time and space. The wormhole that has recently opened up, enabling many people to experience work and home in the same time and space (thanks to the lockdown) may, sadly, cease to bend our reality in the near future.

Acronyms can be confusing to people over the age of 40, which might explain why I long believed FOMO stood for Fear Of Moving Out.

Fear Of Moving Out is actually what a lot of inner-city parents are suffering from. My FOMO plays particular havoc with my sleep whenever my deeply real-estate-obsessed wife goes on one of her regular fantasy house-shopping sprees.

I have spent not just hours but days of my life perfecting a face that looks like it’s genuinely interested in the latest listing she has screen-shoved in my face.

I know exactly how fast to scroll through the photos so that it seems as though I’m actually taking them in, and to pause for slightly longer on the floor plan to make it look like I’m carefully assessing the relative benefits and vast scope for future renovations.

Occasionally I even make appreciative “Oohs”, or suggest that a particular yard looks big enough for that bandstand I’ve always wanted to build.

But inside, I am gripped with FOMO. Newport, a beautiful part of Sydney that I love to visit, does look fabulously affordable, comparatively speaking, and the houses there are the kind that my ideal children would grow up in, if I were my ideal self and, ideally, we’d won the Lottery.

My dearly beloved goes through regular Newport phases, and yet every time she does, it remains, stubbornly, 40 kilometres from the city.

People say the bus trip each day really isn’t that bad, and that the commute gives you the time to properly enjoy Tiger King, and I’m sure that’s true, but if you’ve lived within 10 kilometres, or even 20 kilometres, of the city for most of your Sydney years, the prospect can make you break out in an unpleasant sweat.

It helps to point out to my wife that she’s the one who would actually have to commute to the Dread Star of the CBD, and to gently suggest that this would essentially mean the children growing up without a mother, and thus helplessly in thrall to my influence.

Fortunately, this approach causes her own FOMO to creep up on her, and if it’s not severe enough I just pile everyone in the car and attempt to drive somewhere.

The lockdown light traffic had, I fear, been giving her an unrealistic view of what Sydney is like, but Anzac Bridge now regularly resembles a car park again, Newtown’s back streets are a badly clogged bowel and travelling by bus is still weird enough to put her off that idea pretty quickly.

Unless scientists can outdo Mr Einstein and actually bend space and time, in an affordable manner, I’m afraid that FOMO will keep us from moving to a satellite suburb.