The Case Against Travel

I expected this to focus on the climate aspect but it didn't.

> In the many great cities I have actually lived and worked in, I would never consider spending whole days walking.

I do. I walk a LOT in Barcelona. And I've lived here for 6 years. It's a great way to discover really exceptional things and I discovered the area I live right now in this way.

In fact it's much nicer to just walk around and explore than to do all the usual tourist crap things.

> That is, before quickly moving on: apparently, many people spend just fifteen seconds looking at the “Mona Lisa.” It’s locomotion all the way down.

This is because you can't look at it quietly. It's tiny, behind a 10cm thick pane of glass you can't approach closer than 1 metre, and there's a whole queue of impatient visitors behind you. It's ridiculous.

I think the author doesn't really get it. For me travel is important, it teaches me about other cultures. Understanding is important int his connected world. One time I spent an hour talking to an old lady beggar in Bucharest, who told me a surprisingly accurate vision of what is wrong with the world. She was not a druggy but a retired school teacher whose generation has been done a really raw deal by the current government.

I also found the city I love to live in, which really improved my life. I've lived in 4 countries so far in my life and I love it. I don't think I'll ever want to return to my native Netherlands because it's changed so much and become too right-wing and materialistic. When I visit there now I'm anxious to go back because I don't fit there anymore.

If I never would have traveled, why would I ever have considered moving? I'd have been stuck there. I would never have known what I like about different places, what I don't like, what's really "me". Travel has profoundly changed (and arguably improved) me as a person.

So no, while I agree mass-tourism can be a terrible thing (here in Barcelona a typical example is the hen party groups that just come here to get wasted in a different and cheaper place), not all travel and not even all recreational travel is bad.

Dismissive and cynical writing in The New Yorker.. never!

I guess the principal reason in this topic context for this to provoke thought about the benefit of travel is that it is a song written by George Harrison after he had convinced the band to travel to India and study Transcendental Meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and a song that demonstrates an overt Indian classical influence.

It is literally a song unlikely to have been written without the act of travel.

As travel becomes more common I find experiences are becoming too homogeneous. Everyone travels to the same places to see the same things and most people recount having experiences that are vastly similar to other people who also visited those places, right down to seeing the same landmarks and eating the same foods.

When you have a specific reason to travel to a place, that doesn’t involve tourism, you often end up having richer more genuine experiences. The location no longer becomes the focus of your trip, it just becomes a curiosity you happen to observe while you go about your business. You become a legitimate contributor to the surroundings rather than just a visitor taking pictures.

Destroy the world while it still exists.