The Case Against Travel

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 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.

> 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.

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.