Distance is usually described as geography, time, or separation. This episode argues that it’s something else entirely.

Distance is a cognitive structure. A way people regulate exposure, delay responsibility, and stay operational in the presence of risk, complexity, and consequence. It doesn’t remove events from our lives; it reclassifies them.

This episode examines how distance functions across geography, time, morality, digital life, and institutions, and why its collapse feels destabilising rather than clarifying. It also asks what happens when awareness no longer requires response, and when proximity returns without preparation.

The end of the year is treated as a reset point - a moment where change becomes possible, responsibility is deferred, and progress is symbolically renewed.

This episode dismantles that assumption.

It examines how calendar boundaries are mistaken for structural interruptions, how New Year’s Eve absorbs accountability from the rest of the year, and how waiting is reframed as discipline rather than delay. It looks at why progress is mismeasured, why “starting again” feels relieving, and how continuity is quietly mistaken for failure.

After Episode 1 collapsed geographic distance, this episode collapses temporal permission.

Nothing resets at midnight.

What changes is whether anything actually moves.

This episode was recorded after the Bondi attack.

It examines what changes when violence enters a place that was ordinary, familiar, and trusted. For Australians, Bondi marks the moment where distance no longer holds - where violence is no longer absorbed through markets, policy, or news cycles, but enters everyday public life.

Written and read by Kyriakos Gold, this episode opens the series begins.

It offers no catharsis or resolution. It names what fractures when safety and distance can no longer be assumed.