Traveling Without Leaving
Don't be curious, never leave the place you live, and definitely don't have any adventures!
Is it just me or do you also feel manipulative vibes emanating from this New Yorker headline?
Oh boy.
First of all, I simply adore the illustration of the traveller in the bubble which serves as both metaphor (ie. even when you travel, you are always in your own mind, your own world… you can’t fully appreciate the new place because you bring ‘yourself’ with you, etc) and literal graphic reinforcement of perceived safety in actual “bubbles,” of the type that entrepreneurial manufacturers created for the super-paranoid during Our Times of Covid.
The essay’s subtitle is also suitably deterring:
It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best.
(Hmmm, says I, feeling the misanthropic writer’s commissioned pain).
The author uses intellectual and academic arguments (here’s one: Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is?) and quotes famous philosophers and poets to check our suitcase privileges and incite us to stay at home.
Who is she (oops I mean: Who are they) trying to convince with this?
We are reminded that we all despise tourists, even though we never see ourselves as such. (Um, I wonder if hoteliers and hotel staff who lost their jobs due to lack of tourism during the pandemic feel this way?).
We are told:
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. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning?
Methinks thou doth protest too much, lady. I mean, is it possible to travel without any intrinsic search for meaning? I know many who do, myself included depending on the destination…
Her opening paragraph mocks people who say “I love to travel,” and OK, on a certain level I agree; that statement is overused and is on a par with saying “I love eating food.”
But the whole article reeks of classism and antipathy, which is very much a thing in certain circles these days, especially in those circles of people who love to tell others what to do, whilst they/themselves do precisely the converse.
Advice for thee, but not for me… disguised as philosophical assessment.
The parody instagram account Thank You Brave Journalist’s take of this elitist propaganda feels accurate:
Just stay home, it’s really not that hard. Traveling is neocolonialism, climate molestation and journophobia.
(Ha, I love that account!)
The morose conclusion (emphasis mine, what are these idiots trying to prepare us for?):
One is forced to conclude that maybe it isn’t so easy to do nothing—and this suggests a solution to the puzzle. Imagine how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel. If you aren’t planning a major life change, the prospect looms, terrifyingly, as “More and more of this, and then I die.” Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation. And it does so in the cleverest possible way: by giving you a foretaste of it. You don’t like to think about the fact that someday you will do nothing and be nobody. You will only allow yourself to preview this experience when you can disguise it in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it.
Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel.
Yikes, to that last sentence! (I wonder if they’re warning us against taking flights now that so many pilots have been vaxxed?)
OK, I might be going hard there with the conjecture, but once you find out who owns mainstream media (just two companies, and the board members are pretty much the same for both), and what their agendas are, you become cynical about such screeds. You can find them in all the publications now, telling you how to reduce your Size 13 carbon footprint, how to eat ze delicious bugs, and all the many beautiful ways you can limit your life so as to enjoy doing so much more with much, much less.
Yeah, so here’s my translation of this particular piece of nonsense lecturing, of the type that the controlled media frequently try to impose upon the unassuming plebs:
You are a boring person seeking happiness and thrills but you will not be changed by any in-real-life interesting experience, not in the slightest. Let’s face it, life (ahem, for a non-rich person) mostly sucks without money, so you might as well stay at home where you will eventually die. Here have some VR goggles until you do…
Love, Your Controllers
Basically, don't be curious, never leave where you live, don't try anything novel (no different cuisines, no new dance moves, etc), don’t listen to — or try to speak — other languages, don’t make new friends in other places, and please, please, please, rule out having anything that might remotely feel like an actual adventure. Better to just put these VR goggles on, select your favourite “experience,” press play and you can travel cheaply, safely and in the comfort of your own home.
I don’t buy it, do you?
My wife told me about this article, and I had feeling inside of me that I could not quite express. Now you've gone and expressed it perfectly. Thank you!
This is another veiled anti-human piece. After all, what could we possibly benefit from learning about someone who lives in another culture by different rules that also somehow work for them? Hmmm. I might actually find that the cultural box this author is trying to build for me is not the only choice out there. In fact, bu travel we learn that we humans have choices!
This is dangerous to the globalists. Also one of the reasons that they are trying to destroy individual local cultures under one world government.
It's all about TPTB wanting us to stay in our 15 minute cities and eat bugs.