Nature & Animals Quote by Doug Coupland

Coupland skewers a very modern superstition: that geography is self-help. The line starts with a faux-anthropological claim, then twists the knife with a comparison that’s both funny and faintly damning. Birds migrate, sure, but they don’t do it to become “a new bird.” Humans, by contrast, treat a new postal code like a personality transplant. It’s wit with an aftertaste of disappointment, the kind Coupland has built a career on: a cool, deadpan voice describing how consumer culture repackages old anxieties as lifestyle options.

The intent isn’t to sneer at travel; it’s to puncture the fantasy of escape-by-relocation. Underneath the joke sits a tougher truth: you can move your body faster than you can move your patterns. New city, new job, new friends, same nervous system. Coupland’s phrasing—“thinks they change who they are”—targets the belief itself, not the move, suggesting a gap between narrative and reality. We tell ourselves stories about reinvention because it’s easier than the slow work of confronting what actually follows us: habits, grief, shame, addiction, loneliness.

Context matters. Coupland emerged as a chronicler of late-20th-century North American drift, when mobility was sold as freedom and identity became a project. The quote reads like a rebuttal to the airport-bookstore religion of “fresh starts,” and also to the quiet privilege embedded in it: the idea that you can simply pick up and reset. Birds migrate because survival demands it. Humans migrate and call it self-discovery, then act surprised when the self shows up.