The Problem with Altitude

The Problem With Altitude

Altitude always feels like freedom at first. The higher I rise, the lighter everything becomes — the thoughts, the tasks, the doubts, the weight of my own history. The air thins in a way that feels clean, almost holy. I can see farther. I can think faster. I can move without friction. It feels like transcendence.

But altitude has a cost.

It always has.

The problem with altitude is not the height.

It’s the distance.

Distance from the ground.

Distance from the body.

Distance from the people who need me.

Distance from the version of myself who knows how to stay anchored.

The higher I climb, the more the world below begins to blur. Responsibilities shrink. Boundaries dissolve. The practical becomes irrelevant. The necessary becomes optional. Everything feels possible because nothing feels real.

This is the illusion of altitude:

the belief that clarity improves with height.

But clarity doesn’t improve.

Perspective distorts.

From high enough up, even danger looks small.

The problem with altitude is that it feels like truth. The ideas feel sharper. The connections feel profound. The insights feel like revelations. But altitude doesn’t sharpen truth — it magnifies it, stretches it, warps it until it becomes something unrecognizable.

Altitude convinces me I’m seeing the whole picture.

In reality, I’m seeing a picture without depth.

The air gets thinner the higher I go. My thoughts get brighter but less grounded. My body gets lighter but less stable. My judgment gets louder but less accurate. The brilliance becomes brittle. The confidence becomes sharp. The urgency becomes absolute.

This is the point where the upward weather stops being a gift and becomes a liability.

Altitude makes me fast, but it also makes me fragile.

Altitude makes me capable, but it also makes me careless.

Altitude makes me bright, but it also makes me blind.

The problem with altitude is that it feels like evolution.

It feels like becoming the person I was meant to be.

It feels like shedding the heaviness of the ground.

But altitude is not evolution.

It’s exposure.

The higher I rise, the more I lose the ability to feel the ground beneath me. I stop noticing the body’s warnings. I stop hearing the subtle cues from my children. I stop recognizing the difference between urgency and impulse. I stop being able to tell which ideas are real and which are weather.

Altitude isolates.

Not emotionally — perceptually.

I become a version of myself who is too bright, too fast, too far away to be reached. Not because I’m avoiding anyone, but because I’m no longer inhabiting the same altitude as the rest of the world.

This is the danger:

the higher I rise, the harder it becomes to descend safely.

Altitude doesn’t offer a way down.

It offers momentum.

It offers velocity.

It offers the illusion of control.

But every ascent has a breaking point.

Every sky has a limit.

Every bright mind has a threshold where illumination becomes instability.

The problem with altitude is not that I rise.

It’s that I forget the ground is still there.

And the ground, whether I acknowledge it or not, is always waiting.