I also find travel mostly unfulfilling, but one difference from the article is that I like doing things while traveling that I would also do in my hometown. For instance, I will go to museums, and I have gone to museums at home before, including being a member at a particular one I visited monthly until I moved.
But overall, traveling is a fun activity with centuries of marketing around adventure that doesn't tend to change people in any manner. It is just very expensive fun, and I can have about as much fun doing things at home. I just can't take photos of it to prove how much disposable income I have.
While you’re not completely wrong, one of my main reasons for travel is exploring and understanding other cultures. That requires immersion, granted, and concerted effort to avoid the “TripAdvisor lists” unless you have no other ideas at present, but the opportunity for spontaneous interaction with someone wholly different from yourself is something that is harder to get at home.
That and the feeling of scale; every time I visit Iceland, I find it difficult to describe to others just what about it is so beautiful. The problem is that pictures can’t capture the feeling of scale, and feeling like a small speck on the planet when standing in front of a massive waterfall or inside or on a glacier, etc. That feeling is hard to capture.
I agree it is hard to capture that feeling. I've had it a few times, like being in Yosemite it felt majestic, I can't think of a better word for it right now.
But there is beauty in nature everywhere. It is harder to find in populated areas, but it is still there. In some ways, viewing something majestic, while nice and awe-inspiring, is like being smacked in the face with a baseball bat. Do I really need to be awestruck to remember that nature can be beautiful?
As far as cultures, I get it, but I find it uninteresting at this point. These people queue up different. Those people stop and chat different. These other people view time and lateness different. It is mostly surface level stuff you observe when traveling. Like you write, immersion is required to get a real understanding. IMO that's not travel any more, it's living somewhere else for several months and knowing the language. But I'll accept competing definitions of travel, I just don't think it's what people mean when reading an article like this one.
That is my problem with so-called wanderlusters and how traveling is sold this days as a type of "solution" or "therapy" - people just assume traveling is a decision everyone can make, but not what it actually is - a possibility a few can take.
It is easy to conflate too. Is it the travel destination, or just the simple break from working, different climate or the change of scenery. I think travel being good for “westerners” talks to how homogeneous towns and cities have become.
Maybe if the next town was interesting, getting on an airplane for 8 hours would be less needed.
I remember mentioning a decade ago that going to Antarctica is cheap, while living in Helsinki is expensive.
Then I took an academic job in what later became one of the least affordable areas in the US. Now I think that travel is cheap, fancy tech gadgets are cheap, and living in Helsinki would have been cheap. Doing things at home, on the other hand, is now a way to show off your wealth, because it assumes that you have a larger home than you would strictly need.
Well, the commoners will. The more virtuous and tolerant and rich among us will still get to fly their private jets and luxury yachts around to climate conferences. For the greater good.
This is a very enjoyable and well-written article, and it makes a good point - The nature of travel, and everything you do while you're travelling, is so ephemeral that it really does nothing for establishing or communicating your identity. The people you spend your time with, the sights you see, the food you eat... you are doing all of it because of novelty, not because you've made a deliberate choice. Doing something once on a trip is easy. Doing something as part of your regular routine at home... That's different, and that's who you really are.
That being said, the idea that people don't change when they travel is, I think, wrong. Someone changing fundamentally on a 2 week summer holiday? Unlikely. But I've had friends go off on long solo trips and they almost always come back having learned some pretty significant things about themselves.
A 2-week summer holiday used to have more impact than it does now. Prior to the internet, and back when long-distance calls were expensive, it did force some amount of change. Practical concerns made you disconnect from work, friends, etc, more than you do today.
tl;dr Woman went on holiday to the UAE (a Disneyland for the rich) and declared travel to not be a meaningful.... because too many people do it now and the experiences became a commodity.
I think it's an indirect commentary on how travel no longer confers status: the plebians ruined it.
I think there's more to it than that. I have definitely observed a group of people who consider themselves 'travellers', and there does seem to be this societal aura around travel as if it's an achievement. I think the author is just asking the question... Why?
I agree with the main point of the article. I just disliked some of the specific examples. "You would t spend the entire day walking where you live" - some times I do! "You don't go to museums where you live" - I didn't until I moved to a city with amazing museums, and now I do!
And even when I don't, part of the reason I want to do them while travelling is that I'm freed from my daily route and somewhere new. I've done 1h+ walks along pretty much every route from my house. I've done some 3h walks in a single direction to/from where I live and relied on transport to get me the other way so I was happy to walk further. I've done many of those walks many times, and they are enjoyable, but sometimes I want to walk somewhere new.
Last year, for example, I spent about 3h a day walking Nice. I covered most of the tram network on foot because I wanted to see areas well outside the typical tourist areas. I could've done the same length walks at home, but I'd have seen places I've already been many times.
And often even when you go to destinations where your home might well even have superior options sometimes, the point is partly that it's different and new and that in itself has a qualitative difference in how you experience it (try walking down a street you've never walked anymore and be present, and walk down the same street again every day for a week - the experience noticeably changes), but also often simply that it creates an adventure, even if a tiny one, exactly because it's not something you usually do on top of being somewhere you usually aren't.
That's true. I already know every bit of my city, I have visited almost all museums, walked almost every street. If I have the opportunity to do the same elsewhere, I will.
My parents are members of several museums and societies in their large city. Now normally the member benefits provide tickets and passes multiple times per year that present opportunities for locals to visit the museums "for free" because they are already paying members. (There are also free days for everyone.)
But my parents are part of that sizable minority of members who never go to these places on their own. So every time I visited home, there would be an appreciable pile of passes and vouchers on the mantelpiece, and Mom and Dad would encourage me to take a friend, or my sister, and have an outing with the free passes, so we could at least use them up.
So this is the case in my family. Now I can see where people who love visiting museums become members in their own towns, get free passes, and visit there often, right in their backyard. I can also see people becoming members because they love entertaining visitors and they can show those visitors a good time if they have a supply of free passes on-hand and ready for when someone new comes around.
A long article about essentially nothing. Maybe it's just my circles but I don't know anyone who thinks going on a vacation is some transformative experience, so I don't totally understand why this article needed to have been written.
This description fits almost every New Yorker article. Yet, the headline made you click. It does not matter if you read it, they do not expect you to read it, nor do they need you to - but there need to be some text following the headline.
It's hard to take The New Yorker seriously in any capacity. I find it's just long, pointless essays that don't communicate any new information or original thought, but are designed to make someone who already has the same opinion as the author feel good about themselves. Opinions which are never explicitly made clear.
It's class entertainment sold as news. It make a certain societal class feel higher class than they actually are.
This is rather unkind, but I think you are aware of this.
Opinion pieces, by definition, will be full of the author’s bias based on their experience up until the point when the article was written. We all go through the journey of life at our pace and guided by our own direction (but even that is debatable), and as such, dismissing some work with an ad hominim towards the author instead of the content of the piece is uncharitable.
What work is being presented here, it's just an opinion piece. Analyzing an opinion piece through the lens of previously expressed opinion pieces is anything but an ad hominem attack. It's the only possible way to understand an opinion piece.
> Analyzing an opinion piece through the lens of previously expressed opinion pieces is anything but an ad hominem attack.
The problem is that original poster did not provide any actual analysis or reason to support their assertion as this is not a famous or well-known enough person (at least within HN) to know automatically what their other opinions are on other matters. For this reason, I stand by my statement that this is just an attack on the author and not the ideas the author is communicating.
> It's the only possible way to understand an opinion piece.
No, the only way possible to understand an opinion piece is to read the text while keeping in mind what organization decided to publish it.
Let’s be honest here: this statement is just a ex post facto justification for the ad hominem. Perhaps a you’ve heard it’s cousin, the classic “no offense but, <something offensive>,” or even, “I’m not racist, but <something racist>.”
This is not true of anything. There are always multiple perspectives and ways of understanding things. We short-change ourselves and others when we think otherwise.
Or as Frank McCourt once said, when asked "Why do we have to read this?" by one of his students: “You will read it for the same reason your parents waste their money on your piano lessons. So you won't be a boring little shite the rest of your life.”
It's very hard to learn how people in other cultures live without going there and experiencing it. Also, your low-stakes fumbles and challenges will make you a little more resilient, and so much more interesting.
Yeah but do you really learn anything. Listen to “common people” by Pulp and that is the gist of what I think of how most people travel myself included.
Rich westerners galavanting around poorer countries visiting a rice paddy or temple and doing a cooking lesson with the locals etc. You can be interesting and resilient through other means too. You could be a nurse for example! Or a cop. Or do a survival course down the road from where you live.
Except people rarely ever do get a real insight into other people's lives and culture from just travelling, do they? You're not sharing your life with the locals, you're not friends, you're just walking around the city centre looking at sights and eating in restaurants. You're not going to work, commuting, having coffee with friends, going to house parties, etc
You can make friends. Sometimes it's easier, and sometimes it's harder, and there's a lot you can learn about yourself and the country you're visiting from that.
I can't see why so many people look down on traveling. I do not tell people unless asked (it is not part of my identity) but I traveled my fair share and it changed me a lot. The food I eat (the better half of my diet), the way I drive, my values for a fulfilled life, my willingnes to accept risks in life, appreciation and compassion for regions and many things more. Traveling is what you make out of it. If they walk it like dinsneyland polishing their instagram, travelling isn't the issue, it is people. But then, isn't it allways?
It's treated in a very similar way to many other status-linked luxuries which used to be the preserve of the upper classes and then spread to the masses through commodification.
Theres probably a name for it. If there isnt there should be. Burberryfication?
A lot of people who do travel I don't think actually enjoy it much but feel compelled to engage in status games.
Meanwhile the upper classes and aspiring upper classes understand that it doesn't give them status any more. This becomes "a lack of meaning" because it's well understood among the upper classes that directly gatekeeping status is vulgar.
I think you're getting at why I struggle to share in people's excitement when they say they 'love to travel', is that to some extent, it feels like an obligation at a certain income level, and when I say I didn't really travel this year, people are surprised. Obviously I'm biased to my own experience, but I feel like I ended up having more to say about the experiences in state parks near me than some folks did about their island trips where they just sat on a beach and drank all day (which is totally fine to enjoy if that's your thing!). It just felt to me like throwing the yeah just got back from the Bahamas again was meant to carry more weight in conversation that what people actually did there or why they went, and that's diluted the meaning of 'travel' to me since I've become an adult.
But we are not rational machines. There is a difference in emotion and depth to buying a cookbook, or randomly stumbling upon a dish you (maybe unexpectedly) like and take the ideas of it home with you. One (of many) example of mine is british breakfast tea.
Since you mention China specifically: I was in Beijing once. On my first day there I walked into a random restaurant and was given a vacuum-sealed package full of stuff I couldn't recognize. There were multiple spoons, a teapot (I think), a small plate... far from the chopsticks I was expecting. I eventually had to accept that I had no idea how to eat "Chinese style" and resigned myself to being "that guy" who eats straight out of the serving spoon.
I gained a new appreciation that day for what "different culture" truly means, and has made me more tolerant to those who break social rules without malice. I knew all of that before, but that moment really helped me grok the concept.
To put it in algorithmic terms (this is HN after all): one could be stuck in a local maximum and not known it, and making a small jump in a completely random direction might be exactly what's needed to get out of there.
I don't need to have a "need". Want alone is enough. We did not "need" to do shit since we were wandering around gathering food some bazillion years ago.
> Do you really need to travel to China to get an appreciation for Chinese food? That’s kinda the point the author makes.
"when I was in Abu Dhabi, I went on a guided tour of a falcon hospital. I took a photo with a falcon on my arm. I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals. But the falcon hospital was one of the answers to the question, “What does one do in Abu Dhabi?” So I went."
This is a terrible example because that’s one cuisine where the western experience and the China experience are significantly different. I’m talking even authentic restaurants not Panda Express.
Yes, because once you get there, you learn that "Chinese Food" outside of China is generally a collection of different cuisines sanitised for the local palette. There's no such thing as real Chinese food; China is enormous and full of a wide range of cultures and cuisines. While we're on the subject, there isn't one Chinese language either...
Could we do same argument with other food. Like why try any authentic burger when you have McDonald's available anywhere. Or specific pizza as you can get frozen one from a store...
I’ve never been to China but I know Panda Express is not Chinese food. You can get very authentic Chinese food in any reasonable sized city in the US. You can appreciate all cultures without having to travel there.
My best friend is Indian. Many of my friends are. We talked a lot about India. I read a lot about India. I watched a bunch of Indian movies. I ate my fair share of Indian food.
And then I went there. Nothing could have prepared me for it. Seeing it for yourself is a whole different beast. It puts the whole thing in context.
Reducing a whole culture to a meal in a local approximation of its cuisine? Come on.
Hell, after living in Canada for two decades and consuming American culture ad nauseum, going there for a few days is always a mind trip. The magic happens in the details, not in the broad strokes. I wouldn't pretend to understand America because I ate at a fried chicken place.
Yes? I traveled to China and had some amazing food I haven’t found here since, Same for pretty much anywhere I’ve traveled. This is due to not having to force things to fit the American palate and survive as a restaurant.
>For example, a decade ago, when I was in Abu Dhabi, I went on a guided tour of a falcon hospital. I took a photo with a falcon on my arm. I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals. But the falcon hospital was one of the answers to the question, “What does one do in Abu Dhabi?” So I went. I suspect that everything about the falcon hospital, from its layout to its mission statement, is and will continue to be shaped by the visits of people like me—we unchanged changers, we tourists.
So she fell into a tourist trap. She wouldnt be the first.
I clicked into the article with a general mindset of planning to agree with the author. And while I generally did, the article felt a bit esoteric and like another commenter mentioned, the examples weren't great for me. I think my big issue when people tell me they love to travel is that it frequently ends up being almost a checklist, where the person has a whole list of "what's next" already lined up, like it's just something to do because they're bored. Almost like they are dissatisfied with their day to day life and the travel is the antidote. The author touches this briefly, but I've found so much joy in treating my own city like a tourist, and I'm still finding interesting places to go or explore years later, especially by running or biking.
I've also had the fortune of traveling abroad 3 times in my life, and I do think because those were such unique events, it has changed me to some extent. One example would be seeing the train infrastructure across Europe and then Japan, and realizing how much I enjoyed that experience and how easy it was to traverse the cities themselves. I did also see the Mona Lisa, but quickly went back to just walking the streets of Paris at night, and enjoyed that experience much more!
I've been a tourist in my city for years, and I'm nowhere close to having seen everything. I haven't even some of the basics!
It's funny that I go out of my way to see art galleries abroad, but haven't seen most of the local ones. That's to say nothing of the recurring events, the rich history, and the millions of people I haven't met yet.
The author buries the crux in the middle: travel is fun. It’s rarely if ever, meaningful or transformative. You can do it because it’s fun. You might even learn a thing or two and be awed by the people and sights, but that’s it. I’m yet to meet a well traveled person whom I truly admire for anything, quite the contrary. The vast majority of chronic travelers I’ve met are just collecting fridge magnets and checking things off some lists. In the end it’s likely not even worth having this discussion with them any more than trying to discuss the moral obligation or fulfillment of childbearing.
I don’t like to travel. I often say that I only want to travel when I have a purpose (study something, visit someone, etc). It does shock some people when I say I don’t like to travel, even when I complement that I don’t dislike either. The accepted answer is that everyone “love” to travel. But I didn’t feel represented in this article. I didn’t feel connected with any of the arguments. I think the author carefully worded each example to being the worst interpretation of it to make a point without considering or conceding what is good about “loving to travel”.
Take this part:
> ” If you think that this doesn’t apply to you—that your own travels are magical and profound, with effects that deepen your values, expand your horizons, render you a true citizen of the globe, and so on—note that this phenomenon can’t be assessed first-personally. Pessoa, Chesterton, Percy, and Emerson were all aware that travellers tell themselves they’ve changed, but you can’t rely on introspection to detect a delusion. So cast your mind, instead, to any friends who are soon to set off on summer adventures. In what condition do you expect to find them when they return? They may speak of their travel as though it were transformative, a “once in a lifetime” experience, but will you be able to notice a difference in their behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass? Will there be any difference at all?”
He puts the positive outcomes of traveling as utopian perspectives, while defining that you can’t disagree, and proposing a test that is obviously designed to fail. “Can you notice a profound transformation in your friends after asking them how the trip went?”. That’s silly.
I noticed profound transformation from traveling in myself and in friends before, but that’s during conversation about other stuff than the trip and that happen along the years, not right after the trip. People talking about their careers, their partners, their family, their expectations, their doubts, and then mentioning something that happened years ago in a touristy trip.
I read this whole text as someone making an effort to prove that they are right at being presumptuous about people who say “I love to travel”.
I appreciated the perspective in the article just having taken my first overseas vacation with my kids a week ago. There are overstated benefits and pros and cons and costs to the thing. How much of post-travel glorification is reflexive self defense of sunk cost psychology?
But the article was a bit more of a thoughtful rant than a capturing the essence of the travel and its trade offs.
Two thoughts it doesn’t capture:
Travel in almost all cases broadens your perspective of what life is (or was) like for others, or could be like for you. The broadening of perspective you get from, say, books, is similar in a way but just… different.
The type and degree of broadening you get can be different depending on duration, how and why you travel (vacation, visiting friends, volunteer work serving others, business) and what you do (touristy, backcountry, live with locals, museum focus, food focus, nightlife focus, outdoor focus, bucketlist focus) etc. Are all those of equal value? Are none of those of any value and they are all just vanity on the way to death?
Second, there is also an aspect of “adventure” to travel. The traveler goes into the unknown in hopes of something and returns. Is adventure good or pointless? Is it true “the journey is the reward” (Steve Jobs quote) or is it all about outcomes as the article author implies?
Anyway it was a good rant but something better could be written on the subject.
You are not alone, friend. I also don't like to travel. I am lazy to pack up, lazy to sit while I reach the destination, lazy to see things, lazy to pack again, etc. And all to see "new stuff", which is not something I'm interested in.
I dislike travel. I wouldn't mind traveling alone though. But travel with family is more expense and hassle than its worth imo. The packing, whining, sharing hotel rooms, arguing about what to do, when to do it, where and what to eat, etc. Spend tons of money and kids dont even appreciate it and would rather just stay at the hotel pool, or stay in the room all day, etc.
You might genuinely not be a travel person, but sometimes people just hate the specific kind of travelling they've experienced.
For instance, many Americans try to cram all of Europe into their two weeks there. They end up seeing a major capital with centuries of history in 6 hours. Perhaps they'd have a better time strolling around Poznan for two weeks.
I think that travel is a lot more pleasant if you reject the completionist approach and just try to have a good time while expanding your horizons.
> Pessoa, Emerson, and Chesterton believed that travel, far from putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it.
And that's bad because hunanity is awesome?
I've travelled a little but never was I interested in people or culture. I liked experiencing natural beauty and land marks. Imagination has nothing on reality.
For example, my favorite part of going to vegas is leaving it during the day to check out nevada,the canyon, utah and east california.
Every single time I went exploring national parks or remote places, I am shocked and in awe more than before.
America is pretty, perhaps these people could use a trip down the pacific highway or a day at yosemite.
If they really did travel then kant,emerson and socrates are fools who in their intellectual pursuit found empty ego boosting thoughts and useless admiration from peope.
And for the record, I love touristy places just fine. I travel for me not to brag about it or for virtue signaling and I hardly think I am a rarity.
As a seasoned traveler, both with and without purpose, I feel the author is erecting a straw man tourist that fits no real person. "No, I don't mean those who travel with purpose, nor those who actually appreciate the place, nor those who follow through with a life-changing experience, nor those whose year will now be more bearable thanks to the memories made during the trip, nor those who think they got something out of it. I mean the other ones".
I get the urge to dunk on those who are "doing it wrong" (hello Instagrammers blocking the way), but I'd need to have a long conversation with someone before labeling them "unworthy of traveling". And some of my fondest memories are of people and places I wouldn't have met at home - hard to enjoy a sunset next to a gorgeous cathedral on a cliff when your city is 100 years old and flat.
Nothing really matters due to the amount of coal being burned in places like China. Your vein efforts to reduce your personal footprint in North America are largely pointless.
Edit: Lots of coal defenders in here. It is absolutely ridiculous to be burning coal in 2023. But hey, perhaps the US could focus on reducing its own coal usage. Go nuclear! My point is that your trip around the world is a drop in the bucket.
Right, non-negligible. And if those mass-consumers of electricity switch to clean energy it would be great. But a lot of dirty energy is used for heating homes in colder regions on an individual basis.
This is like saying “Nothing really matters due to the millions of people in our countries that also vote making our vote worthless so don’t bother voting”. If we all thought like this the world would be a worse off place.
I think in the US at least, travel has an even deeper aspect of ritualized behavior or religiosity in the positive sense of those concepts. A pilgrimage for people who don't believe in anything.
Even someone who takes a 20 hour flight to take photos for Instagram is having a unique life experience. They are going to have experiences worth telling stories about. Certainly more than the person who doesn't leave the house.
You haven't given the number of how much CO2 people use to live, only what the sustainable number is, so there isn't enough information to make any conclusion.
Sounds like that number just takes the CO2 that the us produces and divides by population. It would be agreeable if the wealth that came from that CO2 production did also was similarly distributed, but since it's not, that's not really how much your every day joe produces to live. It's what is produced to put another billion dollars onto a company's books.
I quite enjoy traveling and fly about 50,000 miles per year. I take offense to your sentiment. I have as much right to travel as anyone else. We need to live and let live.
You think that VR goggles aren’t destroying the planet as well with their manufacturing? Its also pretty bad.
I say this as someone who owns and enjoys my Quest 2 VR headset, in part to watch 3D videos of nature scenes and walks in various places. I just also know it isn’t without an environmental cost of its own.
Thankfully I am already old so I won't live in this world you propagate. The last thing I ever want is to live life dreaming of being somewhere rather than being able to go somewhere.
Yeah, I don't think Ive read anything as dismissive and cynical as this piece.
I found myself trying to see their viewpoint, trying to be critical of my own experiences as a traveler and I kept failing to do so. What a horrible narrative they're embracing.
Travel/tourism is what I like to call "rudeness in aggregate". What I mean with that is that single individual people are doing nothing egregiously wrong as such, but above a certain number all combined create a strong negative ("rude") effect.
The most obvious example of this in context of travel are these huge cruise ships. No one is really doing anything wrong with that, as such, but craptons of tourists descending on your comparatively little city or town can become quite disruptive (as I've experienced first-hand as a resident).
There's quite a few problems like this, from small to large. Humans don't seem very good at taking "collective responsibility" for these sort of things, "because I'm doing nothing wrong", which is true, but also not.
It’s weird to see downvotes on this comment. I think it is without question that me traveling to, say, Yellowstone is just fine but not if too many people do so each year. The damage done would ruin the place.
At a higher level I think the issue is overpopulation combined with ease of travel. We cause too much damage.
Question: how do you see downvotes (or any votes) on a comment? I use news.ycombinator.com but all I see is when the downvotes are large enough to gray out the comment. I often see people talking about upvotes and downvotes as though they can see a number. I’m just wondering if I may be “doing it wrong”.
I saw it stand at 0 (i.e. 1 downvote) shortly after I posted it; I don't know if it went lower than that, but probably not. A single person downvoting something shortly after it was posted can make something appear "as if it's downvoted", but more often than not it's just a single person. I wouldn't put too much stock in it.
You might think of it as a tragedy of the commons.
Certainly, there are many who rely on the "rudeness" of the travelers for their livelihood. New Orleans comes to mind, when I say that people who live there may not appreciate the tourists, but know that many of the things they do appreciate (dining, arts, etc) would not be there, but for the tourist. Luckily, the peak influx can be avoided while enjoying the fruits the rest of the time.
As a kid working in a fast food joint, whenever someone would notice a bus of any sort pull into the parking lot, the cry of "bus!" sent everyone into oh-shit mode. I imagine a cruise ship pulling into a small tourist town dock is similar but much larger.
Ordinarily I disagree with this kind of thinking, but I live in Edinburgh, for some reason I hate that the old town now feels like a theme park, though I'm not sure why. Especially given that during lock down I walked around it a lot and missed all the tourists. Makes no sense.
It's about the number of people. Less than 5% is fun and allows you to meet all sorts of people from various places, at 5-15% it's already a bit more mixed, and at >15% it becomes disruptive to every-day activities and the place no longer feels "yours".
I'm just making these numbers up because I don't have a good way to estimate them, could also be ">50%" instead of ">15%". But that's what it comes down to.
I think COVID really highlighted the contrast; first it was a slow increase that you don't really notice directly, then suddenly none, and then suddenly a huge spike again. e.g. Edinburgh roughly doubled the number of tourists from 2012 to 2019[1] which, in spite of being a fairly large change, you probably don't really notice when spread out over a 7 year period.
Thats interesting about the visits to Edinburgh castle, probably very accurate. Feels accurate too. Around 2009 or so Edinburgh was pretty "dead" I remember work mates complaining about it, so much one of them moved to Glasgow. Now we have the opposite problem.
>single individual people are doing nothing egregiously wrong
Because you included the word "egregiously" I suppose technically you are right, but only on a technicality. A small "wrong" at the individual level becomes "egregiously" wrong at the population level.
- one person eating food in the streets in Japan isn't egregious, every tourist doing it is.
- one person being loud in a church in Italy isn't egregious, all of them is.
- one person touching some old Australian rock art isn't, every tourist doing it is.
When you consider your actions as a tourist, you have to consider a million people doing the same. Anything else is being a bad tourist.
For example "eating in the street is rude" is one of those things that's just a foreign concept to many people outside Japan. I just so happen to know about this from a YouTube video I once watched, but if it wasn't for that I could see myself doing it. Hell, even with that I could see myself just forgetting because it's such an alien concept to me that this is considered rude.
I was more saying when a tourist considers their actions. Not if. Of course not everyone knows every social idiosyncratic curiosity of countries they visit.
But "I'm only a tourist, it's ok" leads to the egregious "tourists are bad" concept.
I like the article as it kind of reflects my thinking about traveling.
I used to joke about people who argued in favor of traveling that nature's laws are the same everywhere. So there’s no need to go somewhere else and experience something different.
Nowadays, I see very much the harm from tourism. For example, places in Italy and Portugal are becoming inhabitable for locals.
Venice has become increasingly unpleasant to actually live in compared to the mainland for basic infrastructural and engineering reasons, and tourists have exacerbated those but the problems would still be there without them.
That is it, I think. Or the saying, "not afraid of dying, afraid of not having lived."
I'm pretty sure as an old man I will not be wishing I spent more time in life browsing the web, ha ha. (Honestly though, probably regret having not spent more time with the people I love — we can of course have travelled together though!)
I want to leave my life with as little interference as possible from any moralizing types telling me how to do it. So my basic answer for "well wishers" - fuck off and leave me alone. You do what you want with your life (and I respect it) and let me do whatever I want with mine.
And I fulfill said obligations by abiding laws (even though I find many unjust) and by paying taxes. I also try not to interfere with other people and not "trespass" into their space. But I have zero duty to follow demands of prudes, lunatics, "strong hand" wishers etc.
It takes a while to really get to the point: "Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue". I think framing that everyone treats travel as this enlightening, broadening experience ("we") is wrong.
I'm not one of those people. I'm a filthy tourist that goes to museums and art galleries and goes home after two weeks happy to be back and I'm okay with that. I also know people that put months or years of their life on hold so they could travel aimlessly with a backpack and they seemed like they had a great time, and would probably argue they feel enlightened and broadened for doing so. So I don't really know who this article is against. There probably are some vapid people who fit whoever this is targeting. Don't know why this is written like it's uncovering some ugly truth about "us" and "we", whoever that is meant to be.
I travel for perspective, so I am not sure if I fit into your description of "imbuing it with vast significance," but I'm interested in exploring that. I have a pretty strong policy of regular self-review where I need to make effort to experience people and places outside of my day-to-day or comfort zone. In the US, it is very, very easy to become hyperlocally insulated and use yourself and your immediate surroundings as a standard by which the known universs is measured. I find that travel, and the mild culture shock or fresh experience that comes with it keeps all that in check in a pretty healthy way.
I do have trouble applying any high virtue to that, though. It's much more selfish than that. Keeping my persective honed and dynamic allows me to function better as a human being, forming better relationships to get what I need, apply different ways of doing things to make my day easier, etc. In a way, sure, I guess that is broadening myself a bit, but I can't see any fault in that.
Virtuousness is assigned to activities and pursuits that, in that context, to the non-virtuous may seem inconsequential, or worse than the "real thing", or a waste of time. Virtuousness is assigned, say, to reading, "she's a great reader," or cooking at home, "she makes such homely meals," while living one's life or going to a restaurant or bar instead of grocery shopping and peeling potatoes and cooking for hours is seen as plebeian.
"She likes to drink diet coke" does not carry the same weight as "she likes to drink tea," where the former suggests an impoverished mind and the latter a certain philosophical attitude toward life. Or "she likes to walk everywhere" compared to "she likes to drive everywhere," where walking is "imbued with a vast significance, an aura of virtue," whether in the city, mountains, or woods (but especially in the mountains or woods). "She keeps a diary" sounds profound, but shallower when the diary is digital than when the paper smells of lavender and evokes flowering hills as far as the eye can see.
I like to travel to certain places and at certain times, which makes me a "conditional traveler", and very often I travel alone, which often allows me to get to know the local people and to lose myself, for a few days or weeks, in another world, perhaps in another life. Other people like other ways of traveling, which I may find more or less appealing to myself, but it's the same feeling I get from clothes worn by others: I may not like them on me, but I don't have to wear them.
> The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.
This article couldn't be more insufferable if it tried.
The author has a point in regards to short trips (~2 weeks). However, I think if you travel and stay longer, the impact on your identity is far different.
I've been traveling longer-term for two and half years, staying at each place for at least a month when possible. I'm amazed at how much experience I can pack in a week, time that used to spent commuting.
I'm able to observe a lot of different people going about their lives, people I would've not encountered otherwise. I'm exposed to many ways of doing things and am also able to see great pieces of art and natural wonders on the weekend. These experiences have markedly shifted my general perspective. It just takes being away for longer than a week or two.
Again, previously this time would've just gone towards commuting or watching mediocre stuff on Netflix (which we still do occasionally but not as often).
In contrast, the things I and many of my friends used to do for entertainment when living in the Bay Area were more similar to the examples the author of the article mentioned-novelty for novelty sake and no impact on you as a person.
Ugh harsh piece. Yeah you can argue fundamentally there's no deeper meaning to traveling then to entertain the traveler. That it is selfish and to the detriment of others. Certainly not completely untrue, but what a inhumane spin on the topic. This is nihilistic way of thinking.
I get the sentiments of the article, but I generally disagree with the author's perspective. I think my experience (although may not be necessarily unique) I tend to find that traveling to different places has reinforced connection to my own culture, be it through cultural links based on geography and history or through a more recent context where migrants from my cultural background have had to move to the country due to economic circumstances and I've had the privilege of encountering these individuals.
Overall, I tend to find that travel provides a lot of perspective and context. One notable figure which helped me come to this realization was Anthony Bourdain. He used food as a baseline connection and when we as humans share a meal with people, we tend to be more open. He would then progress into talking about more sensitive topics which provided a deeper insight about a place.
The takeaway that I have gotten from most of my travels has been that we are all really the same people. We need a place to sleep, something to eat, some fun and the feeling of safety. Understanding this has allowed me to make deeper connections with people that I've encountered and I'm thankful that experience.
I had my fair share of trips around Europe and to the UK/US the last two years. I come from a lower class family and we never travelled when I was growing up. I had to wait to get a job to afford it.
I think it gave a better appreciation for my hometown and country. It taught me that wherever I go there I am and I cannot fix my problems just by leaving (it’s not therapy). It allowed me to make friends. It taught me that this planet is freaking huge and wherever you go there is so much diversity of cultures, languages, and people. It’s exhilarating-if you’re into it.
Could I have achieved the same without shelling thousands of euros? Could I have just read about other people’s experiences? Could I have just admired pictures of national parks, museums and cathedrals instead of visiting them by myself? Sure, but it would not have been the same. You live and learn.
I don’t think travelling makes you better than people who don’t, nor does it necessarily makes you better than your past self.
You gotta have the right expectations. I had the most fun when I was genuinely interested in visiting a place and I didn’t care about a checklist. I was the most miserable when I travelled to escape issues at home or because I was plain bored.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadBut overall, traveling is a fun activity with centuries of marketing around adventure that doesn't tend to change people in any manner. It is just very expensive fun, and I can have about as much fun doing things at home. I just can't take photos of it to prove how much disposable income I have.
That and the feeling of scale; every time I visit Iceland, I find it difficult to describe to others just what about it is so beautiful. The problem is that pictures can’t capture the feeling of scale, and feeling like a small speck on the planet when standing in front of a massive waterfall or inside or on a glacier, etc. That feeling is hard to capture.
Holy shit is that thing HUGE.
But there is beauty in nature everywhere. It is harder to find in populated areas, but it is still there. In some ways, viewing something majestic, while nice and awe-inspiring, is like being smacked in the face with a baseball bat. Do I really need to be awestruck to remember that nature can be beautiful?
As far as cultures, I get it, but I find it uninteresting at this point. These people queue up different. Those people stop and chat different. These other people view time and lateness different. It is mostly surface level stuff you observe when traveling. Like you write, immersion is required to get a real understanding. IMO that's not travel any more, it's living somewhere else for several months and knowing the language. But I'll accept competing definitions of travel, I just don't think it's what people mean when reading an article like this one.
And it's not that it actually does wonders.
Maybe if the next town was interesting, getting on an airplane for 8 hours would be less needed.
Then I took an academic job in what later became one of the least affordable areas in the US. Now I think that travel is cheap, fancy tech gadgets are cheap, and living in Helsinki would have been cheap. Doing things at home, on the other hand, is now a way to show off your wealth, because it assumes that you have a larger home than you would strictly need.
That being said, the idea that people don't change when they travel is, I think, wrong. Someone changing fundamentally on a 2 week summer holiday? Unlikely. But I've had friends go off on long solo trips and they almost always come back having learned some pretty significant things about themselves.
I think it's an indirect commentary on how travel no longer confers status: the plebians ruined it.
Last year, for example, I spent about 3h a day walking Nice. I covered most of the tram network on foot because I wanted to see areas well outside the typical tourist areas. I could've done the same length walks at home, but I'd have seen places I've already been many times.
And often even when you go to destinations where your home might well even have superior options sometimes, the point is partly that it's different and new and that in itself has a qualitative difference in how you experience it (try walking down a street you've never walked anymore and be present, and walk down the same street again every day for a week - the experience noticeably changes), but also often simply that it creates an adventure, even if a tiny one, exactly because it's not something you usually do on top of being somewhere you usually aren't.
But my parents are part of that sizable minority of members who never go to these places on their own. So every time I visited home, there would be an appreciable pile of passes and vouchers on the mantelpiece, and Mom and Dad would encourage me to take a friend, or my sister, and have an outing with the free passes, so we could at least use them up.
So this is the case in my family. Now I can see where people who love visiting museums become members in their own towns, get free passes, and visit there often, right in their backyard. I can also see people becoming members because they love entertaining visitors and they can show those visitors a good time if they have a supply of free passes on-hand and ready for when someone new comes around.
This description fits almost every New Yorker article. Yet, the headline made you click. It does not matter if you read it, they do not expect you to read it, nor do they need you to - but there need to be some text following the headline.
It's class entertainment sold as news. It make a certain societal class feel higher class than they actually are.
Opinion pieces, by definition, will be full of the author’s bias based on their experience up until the point when the article was written. We all go through the journey of life at our pace and guided by our own direction (but even that is debatable), and as such, dismissing some work with an ad hominim towards the author instead of the content of the piece is uncharitable.
The problem is that original poster did not provide any actual analysis or reason to support their assertion as this is not a famous or well-known enough person (at least within HN) to know automatically what their other opinions are on other matters. For this reason, I stand by my statement that this is just an attack on the author and not the ideas the author is communicating.
> It's the only possible way to understand an opinion piece.
No, the only way possible to understand an opinion piece is to read the text while keeping in mind what organization decided to publish it.
Let’s be honest here: this statement is just a ex post facto justification for the ad hominem. Perhaps a you’ve heard it’s cousin, the classic “no offense but, <something offensive>,” or even, “I’m not racist, but <something racist>.”
This is not true of anything. There are always multiple perspectives and ways of understanding things. We short-change ourselves and others when we think otherwise.
It's very hard to learn how people in other cultures live without going there and experiencing it. Also, your low-stakes fumbles and challenges will make you a little more resilient, and so much more interesting.
Rich westerners galavanting around poorer countries visiting a rice paddy or temple and doing a cooking lesson with the locals etc. You can be interesting and resilient through other means too. You could be a nurse for example! Or a cop. Or do a survival course down the road from where you live.
Theres probably a name for it. If there isnt there should be. Burberryfication?
A lot of people who do travel I don't think actually enjoy it much but feel compelled to engage in status games.
Meanwhile the upper classes and aspiring upper classes understand that it doesn't give them status any more. This becomes "a lack of meaning" because it's well understood among the upper classes that directly gatekeeping status is vulgar.
I gained a new appreciation that day for what "different culture" truly means, and has made me more tolerant to those who break social rules without malice. I knew all of that before, but that moment really helped me grok the concept.
To put it in algorithmic terms (this is HN after all): one could be stuck in a local maximum and not known it, and making a small jump in a completely random direction might be exactly what's needed to get out of there.
So the answer is almost always: certainly. Especially if we talk about Sichuan food - very hard to find the authentic stuff imho.
"when I was in Abu Dhabi, I went on a guided tour of a falcon hospital. I took a photo with a falcon on my arm. I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals. But the falcon hospital was one of the answers to the question, “What does one do in Abu Dhabi?” So I went."
I think the author has bigger issues than travel.
But I didn’t love Vietnamese food until visiting Vietnam. Having been there, I now seek it out here.
Even though I had it on quite a few occasions as a kid.
This is _precisely_ why people need to travel: not to learn 5,000 years (good luck) but to appreciate that there's a helluva lot more than to a place.
And then I went there. Nothing could have prepared me for it. Seeing it for yourself is a whole different beast. It puts the whole thing in context.
Reducing a whole culture to a meal in a local approximation of its cuisine? Come on.
Hell, after living in Canada for two decades and consuming American culture ad nauseum, going there for a few days is always a mind trip. The magic happens in the details, not in the broad strokes. I wouldn't pretend to understand America because I ate at a fried chicken place.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I too realized just how pointless signs and driving laws were on my travels.
So she fell into a tourist trap. She wouldnt be the first.
I've also had the fortune of traveling abroad 3 times in my life, and I do think because those were such unique events, it has changed me to some extent. One example would be seeing the train infrastructure across Europe and then Japan, and realizing how much I enjoyed that experience and how easy it was to traverse the cities themselves. I did also see the Mona Lisa, but quickly went back to just walking the streets of Paris at night, and enjoyed that experience much more!
It's funny that I go out of my way to see art galleries abroad, but haven't seen most of the local ones. That's to say nothing of the recurring events, the rich history, and the millions of people I haven't met yet.
Take this part:
> ” If you think that this doesn’t apply to you—that your own travels are magical and profound, with effects that deepen your values, expand your horizons, render you a true citizen of the globe, and so on—note that this phenomenon can’t be assessed first-personally. Pessoa, Chesterton, Percy, and Emerson were all aware that travellers tell themselves they’ve changed, but you can’t rely on introspection to detect a delusion. So cast your mind, instead, to any friends who are soon to set off on summer adventures. In what condition do you expect to find them when they return? They may speak of their travel as though it were transformative, a “once in a lifetime” experience, but will you be able to notice a difference in their behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass? Will there be any difference at all?”
He puts the positive outcomes of traveling as utopian perspectives, while defining that you can’t disagree, and proposing a test that is obviously designed to fail. “Can you notice a profound transformation in your friends after asking them how the trip went?”. That’s silly.
I noticed profound transformation from traveling in myself and in friends before, but that’s during conversation about other stuff than the trip and that happen along the years, not right after the trip. People talking about their careers, their partners, their family, their expectations, their doubts, and then mentioning something that happened years ago in a touristy trip.
I read this whole text as someone making an effort to prove that they are right at being presumptuous about people who say “I love to travel”.
But the article was a bit more of a thoughtful rant than a capturing the essence of the travel and its trade offs.
Two thoughts it doesn’t capture:
Travel in almost all cases broadens your perspective of what life is (or was) like for others, or could be like for you. The broadening of perspective you get from, say, books, is similar in a way but just… different.
The type and degree of broadening you get can be different depending on duration, how and why you travel (vacation, visiting friends, volunteer work serving others, business) and what you do (touristy, backcountry, live with locals, museum focus, food focus, nightlife focus, outdoor focus, bucketlist focus) etc. Are all those of equal value? Are none of those of any value and they are all just vanity on the way to death?
Second, there is also an aspect of “adventure” to travel. The traveler goes into the unknown in hopes of something and returns. Is adventure good or pointless? Is it true “the journey is the reward” (Steve Jobs quote) or is it all about outcomes as the article author implies?
Anyway it was a good rant but something better could be written on the subject.
For instance, many Americans try to cram all of Europe into their two weeks there. They end up seeing a major capital with centuries of history in 6 hours. Perhaps they'd have a better time strolling around Poznan for two weeks.
I think that travel is a lot more pleasant if you reject the completionist approach and just try to have a good time while expanding your horizons.
And that's bad because hunanity is awesome?
I've travelled a little but never was I interested in people or culture. I liked experiencing natural beauty and land marks. Imagination has nothing on reality.
For example, my favorite part of going to vegas is leaving it during the day to check out nevada,the canyon, utah and east california.
Every single time I went exploring national parks or remote places, I am shocked and in awe more than before.
America is pretty, perhaps these people could use a trip down the pacific highway or a day at yosemite.
If they really did travel then kant,emerson and socrates are fools who in their intellectual pursuit found empty ego boosting thoughts and useless admiration from peope.
And for the record, I love touristy places just fine. I travel for me not to brag about it or for virtue signaling and I hardly think I am a rarity.
I get the urge to dunk on those who are "doing it wrong" (hello Instagrammers blocking the way), but I'd need to have a long conversation with someone before labeling them "unworthy of traveling". And some of my fondest memories are of people and places I wouldn't have met at home - hard to enjoy a sunset next to a gorgeous cathedral on a cliff when your city is 100 years old and flat.
Edit: Lots of coal defenders in here. It is absolutely ridiculous to be burning coal in 2023. But hey, perhaps the US could focus on reducing its own coal usage. Go nuclear! My point is that your trip around the world is a drop in the bucket.
Even someone who takes a 20 hour flight to take photos for Instagram is having a unique life experience. They are going to have experiences worth telling stories about. Certainly more than the person who doesn't leave the house.
A 20 hour flight produces ~3 tonnes of CO2. This is ON TOP of the CO2 used up for living.
But yes, I agree, the vast majority of CO2 is produced by corporations who don’t pay for the externalities they create.
I’m sorry I offended you. Do you have a better term for someone using several hundred percent more than their allotment of a resource?
Just get a pair of those Apple VR goggles.
Is it the same? No. Is the difference worth destroying the planet? Hell no.
I say this as someone who owns and enjoys my Quest 2 VR headset, in part to watch 3D videos of nature scenes and walks in various places. I just also know it isn’t without an environmental cost of its own.
I found myself trying to see their viewpoint, trying to be critical of my own experiences as a traveler and I kept failing to do so. What a horrible narrative they're embracing.
About par for the course for the New Yorker, in my experience
The most obvious example of this in context of travel are these huge cruise ships. No one is really doing anything wrong with that, as such, but craptons of tourists descending on your comparatively little city or town can become quite disruptive (as I've experienced first-hand as a resident).
There's quite a few problems like this, from small to large. Humans don't seem very good at taking "collective responsibility" for these sort of things, "because I'm doing nothing wrong", which is true, but also not.
At a higher level I think the issue is overpopulation combined with ease of travel. We cause too much damage.
I saw it stand at 0 (i.e. 1 downvote) shortly after I posted it; I don't know if it went lower than that, but probably not. A single person downvoting something shortly after it was posted can make something appear "as if it's downvoted", but more often than not it's just a single person. I wouldn't put too much stock in it.
Certainly, there are many who rely on the "rudeness" of the travelers for their livelihood. New Orleans comes to mind, when I say that people who live there may not appreciate the tourists, but know that many of the things they do appreciate (dining, arts, etc) would not be there, but for the tourist. Luckily, the peak influx can be avoided while enjoying the fruits the rest of the time.
I'm just making these numbers up because I don't have a good way to estimate them, could also be ">50%" instead of ">15%". But that's what it comes down to.
I think COVID really highlighted the contrast; first it was a slow increase that you don't really notice directly, then suddenly none, and then suddenly a huge spike again. e.g. Edinburgh roughly doubled the number of tourists from 2012 to 2019[1] which, in spite of being a fairly large change, you probably don't really notice when spread out over a 7 year period.
[1]: visits to Edinburgh castle is probably a reasonable proxy: https://www.statista.com/statistics/586822/edinburgh-castle-...
Because you included the word "egregiously" I suppose technically you are right, but only on a technicality. A small "wrong" at the individual level becomes "egregiously" wrong at the population level.
- one person eating food in the streets in Japan isn't egregious, every tourist doing it is.
- one person being loud in a church in Italy isn't egregious, all of them is.
- one person touching some old Australian rock art isn't, every tourist doing it is.
When you consider your actions as a tourist, you have to consider a million people doing the same. Anything else is being a bad tourist.
For example "eating in the street is rude" is one of those things that's just a foreign concept to many people outside Japan. I just so happen to know about this from a YouTube video I once watched, but if it wasn't for that I could see myself doing it. Hell, even with that I could see myself just forgetting because it's such an alien concept to me that this is considered rude.
But "I'm only a tourist, it's ok" leads to the egregious "tourists are bad" concept.
I used to joke about people who argued in favor of traveling that nature's laws are the same everywhere. So there’s no need to go somewhere else and experience something different.
Nowadays, I see very much the harm from tourism. For example, places in Italy and Portugal are becoming inhabitable for locals.
So tourists make the place for to live in for the locals?
I'm pretty sure as an old man I will not be wishing I spent more time in life browsing the web, ha ha. (Honestly though, probably regret having not spent more time with the people I love — we can of course have travelled together though!)
You generate externalities. You rely on society. You are part of society, you thus have obligations to that society.
Uncalled for
>"you thus have obligations to that society"
And I fulfill said obligations by abiding laws (even though I find many unjust) and by paying taxes. I also try not to interfere with other people and not "trespass" into their space. But I have zero duty to follow demands of prudes, lunatics, "strong hand" wishers etc.
I'm not one of those people. I'm a filthy tourist that goes to museums and art galleries and goes home after two weeks happy to be back and I'm okay with that. I also know people that put months or years of their life on hold so they could travel aimlessly with a backpack and they seemed like they had a great time, and would probably argue they feel enlightened and broadened for doing so. So I don't really know who this article is against. There probably are some vapid people who fit whoever this is targeting. Don't know why this is written like it's uncovering some ugly truth about "us" and "we", whoever that is meant to be.
I do have trouble applying any high virtue to that, though. It's much more selfish than that. Keeping my persective honed and dynamic allows me to function better as a human being, forming better relationships to get what I need, apply different ways of doing things to make my day easier, etc. In a way, sure, I guess that is broadening myself a bit, but I can't see any fault in that.
"She likes to drink diet coke" does not carry the same weight as "she likes to drink tea," where the former suggests an impoverished mind and the latter a certain philosophical attitude toward life. Or "she likes to walk everywhere" compared to "she likes to drive everywhere," where walking is "imbued with a vast significance, an aura of virtue," whether in the city, mountains, or woods (but especially in the mountains or woods). "She keeps a diary" sounds profound, but shallower when the diary is digital than when the paper smells of lavender and evokes flowering hills as far as the eye can see.
I like to travel to certain places and at certain times, which makes me a "conditional traveler", and very often I travel alone, which often allows me to get to know the local people and to lose myself, for a few days or weeks, in another world, perhaps in another life. Other people like other ways of traveling, which I may find more or less appealing to myself, but it's the same feeling I get from clothes worn by others: I may not like them on me, but I don't have to wear them.
This article couldn't be more insufferable if it tried.
I've been traveling longer-term for two and half years, staying at each place for at least a month when possible. I'm amazed at how much experience I can pack in a week, time that used to spent commuting.
I'm able to observe a lot of different people going about their lives, people I would've not encountered otherwise. I'm exposed to many ways of doing things and am also able to see great pieces of art and natural wonders on the weekend. These experiences have markedly shifted my general perspective. It just takes being away for longer than a week or two.
Again, previously this time would've just gone towards commuting or watching mediocre stuff on Netflix (which we still do occasionally but not as often).
In contrast, the things I and many of my friends used to do for entertainment when living in the Bay Area were more similar to the examples the author of the article mentioned-novelty for novelty sake and no impact on you as a person.
Overall, I tend to find that travel provides a lot of perspective and context. One notable figure which helped me come to this realization was Anthony Bourdain. He used food as a baseline connection and when we as humans share a meal with people, we tend to be more open. He would then progress into talking about more sensitive topics which provided a deeper insight about a place.
The takeaway that I have gotten from most of my travels has been that we are all really the same people. We need a place to sleep, something to eat, some fun and the feeling of safety. Understanding this has allowed me to make deeper connections with people that I've encountered and I'm thankful that experience.
I think it gave a better appreciation for my hometown and country. It taught me that wherever I go there I am and I cannot fix my problems just by leaving (it’s not therapy). It allowed me to make friends. It taught me that this planet is freaking huge and wherever you go there is so much diversity of cultures, languages, and people. It’s exhilarating-if you’re into it.
Could I have achieved the same without shelling thousands of euros? Could I have just read about other people’s experiences? Could I have just admired pictures of national parks, museums and cathedrals instead of visiting them by myself? Sure, but it would not have been the same. You live and learn.
I don’t think travelling makes you better than people who don’t, nor does it necessarily makes you better than your past self.
You gotta have the right expectations. I had the most fun when I was genuinely interested in visiting a place and I didn’t care about a checklist. I was the most miserable when I travelled to escape issues at home or because I was plain bored.