‘At home he feels like a tourist
At home he feels like a tourist,
He fills his head with culture...’
Gang of Four, At Home He’s A Tourist.
Truth be told, I’ve never really been the sort for travelling. In the same way that youth is wasted on the young, it has always struck me that travel is an opportunity that footloose post-adolescents mainly squander in a haze of duty-free alcohol, stepped-on narcotics and perspective-destroying hormones.
This may well be unfounded slander against the twenty-somethings whose ranks I am no longer a part of, but this is my show and I’ll say what I want.
Anyway. We are told that travel broadens the mind, that travel brings new frames of reference and with that gratitude. We are told that we deserve holidays. We are told a lot of thing, primarily as a means of extricating our wallets from our pockets and our hard-earned cash from our bank accounts.
Travel- doesn’t matter where, doesn’t matter why- is both a fundamental right and an unquestionable good, a sine qua non of the good life, something that is both pleasurable yet also intrinsically improving.
Well, gentle reader, I’m not quite sure I buy this.
Unpopular Opinion
One of the staples of low-resolution, polarising social media accounts is the (actually not especially controversial) unpopular opinion post.
In-group signalling disguised as risk-taking and truth-telling with the outside chance of generating virality via hate-shares and feuding in the comments. What’s not to love? This is a very effective strategy if the goal is to merely make pointless metrics tick upwards. Which seems to be a fairly popular pastime for some reason.
Now, as you have already gathered the unpopular opinion that I hold is that travel is overrated. But there are of course a ton of nuances and many caveats to this position. And, as with everything else, it is not something that I feel compelled to proselytise or (God help me) ‘build my brand’ around.
Ideas are things to be played with, not weapons to bludgeon an adversary to death with.
The concept behind these essays, then, is that I tell you something that I think (or more often merely intuit or feel or observe) and then I leave you to make your own judgement. Afterwards we can converse about such things like freethinking adults.
Simple.
I have zero interest in popularity via controversy. I have zero interest in low hanging fruit and low vibration engagement tactics. I believe audiences should be cultivated and pruned like bonsai trees not overwatered and artificially modified like some kind of monstrous monocrop.
But back to the idea of travel.
I think travel is overrated because it has become commodified. It has become simultaneously fetishised, infantilises and drained of enchantment, which is quite a feat when you stop and think about it.
The whole process from start to finish feels as if it has been systematically drained of magic. First you have the airport and the hard-chaired waiting lounge and the mediocre sandwiches and the tat shops and the possibility of undignified frisking and scrutiny. Then you have the flight itself and the lack of legroom and the mediocre food (again) and the slovenly dress of fellow passengers and the spirit crushing in-flight family film and all the rest of it.
I am aware that highlighting all of this is part of the well-worn path of hack comics but it bares repeating nonetheless. The standard flight to the standard holiday is a conveyor belt of absurdity, stress, chaos and disappointment.
(David Foster Wallace has led me to believe that cruises are even worse but that is beyond the remit of today’s discussion.)
And this is just the actual A to B aspect of travel. The nature of the activities that constitute the foreign experience itself seem even more at odds with what I would call a good time. It’s all harried, whistle stop, military precision ticking off of items on an itinerary while carrying altogether far too much baggage, both literal and figurative.
In the same way that my countrymen have the awful habit of bringing their lager-fuelled, sunburned, walnut bladdered football hooligan mentality with them to various ancient Eastern European capitals, so do Westerners generally have a way of never failing to pack their time-bound, over-caffeinated, checklist-fuelled worker bee mindset with them when they travel to slower and more enlightened countries on holiday.
We look at the monuments, but we fail to take in the lessons of the civilisations that were able to erect them. We see the centuries old eateries and the millennia old places of worship but we fail to ask what it took to build such things and what we can learn from those that did.
Instead we reduce said cities to our own consumerist level. Instead of becoming cosmopolitan in the truest sense, we become (unwitting) foot soldiers of deadening homogenisation.
The Shrunken Map and The Tourist Mindset
Of course, the sketch I have drawn above is very much BC (Before Covid-19). Things have changed.
Moaning about the implicit ingratitude that accompanies that bucketlist-clutching ultra-hectic mode of tourism carries just as much ingratitude. It seems mean to kick a paradigm while it’s down.
And I’m sure many of my more outgoing readers deeply miss the jetset days and mourn the passing of the opportunity they once presented.
To think: mere months ago you could pay for a flight and be on a whole different continent in the time it takes to watch four bad movies back to back or to sleep off the effects of a diazepam and a fistful of whiskey miniatures.
No masks, no tests, no restrictions, no bans. No muss, no fuss.
How much we take for granted.
So for the time being at least our world is smaller. Which conversely means our locality has grown larger- in both importance and in terms of possibility.
And this is the point that I want to hammer home today, the conclusion that I wanted to reach. Tourism- in its original debonair, worldly, urbane sense is a mindset and not a commodity.
As with all worthwhile things it is not so much something you buy, or even something you do, but it is something that you are.
To be a tourist in this sense, or more precisely a flaneur- observant, amused, unhurried, paradoxically detached and engaged at once- is a mode of being that we can cultivate without the necessity of passport checks and luggage carousels. It simply involves looking up from screens and walking slowly without music and attempting to view our locality as it actually is, without the mind-polluting mediation of the news telling us what to think and feel about things that are outside of our personal sphere of influence.
To act in such a simple and local manner is to become a participant in the place that you actually live. It is to live at human scale. It is to know something- your own environment and thus your own life- at depth.
And this perspective, gleaned from a thousand walks in all weathers and all seasons, means that when the borders do re-open you will be able to truly learn from and appreciate and value and enhance the far-flung places that you travel to.
Because your day to day life during these trying times will have taught you how.
And it won’t have been for nought.
Hey Thomas,
This is all very well said. Just a century ago, a travel abroad meant you'd have to stay longer (couldn't travel to Istanbul just for an extended week end), know some locals or at least people who knew some locals, and be ready to subject yourself to a stenuous and often challenging trip. The concept of leisure and "wanderlust" (the plague of the modern world) did not exist, so you'd usually had some king of a "purpose" to go there; discover the local culture as an artist - when every country in the world wasn't yet McDonald'ed - find local products like books or technical devices that could not be found where you lived, etc. Nowadays, in the age of mass-tourism, there is just no purpose in traveling except the very fact of traveling itself. Tourism isn't a discovery anymore, it's a bucket list. You must cram as much "items" as possible in the shortest amount a time; rush to the next bullet point; take the mandatory picture; move on.
When you think of it, the big boom of mass-tourism came almost at the same time as the rise of social medias. How many "travel-addicts" would just stay home if they couldn't broadcast it as a demonstration of value on their instagram? But I have a feeling it is getting more and more outdated; since everyone can pony up a few hundreds of $ once a year and go the the same places to take the same pictures, the value of travel has taken a dive: no one will look at you with their eyes staring wide when you show off your Machu Picchu pics on your iphone by the office Nespresso machine. You can feel there is a growing boredom. Almost as if travel was sold to us as the ultimate form of freedom, and the Easy-jet, low-cost airlines-made Eden didn't prove to be as effective as we'd thought.
French author Montherlant once wrote "On n'emporte que soi dans les voyages", which roughly translates to "You only travel with yourself on a trip": tourism as escapism does not work. You will not feel more fulfilled. You will not feel more "connected" to others; quite possibly the opposite. You might experience a slight boost in social validation, but that will only last until the next IG pic. Only human bonding and a sense of purpose in a community you value can bring you happiness. Tourism as localism, as you elegantly said.
There is is only one thing I have missed this year and that's travel. For me, every time I travel it's a huge adventure. I live in a French farmhouse which pre-dates the revolution. Many of the stones used to build it come from the medieval monastery in the next village. I am smacked in the face with the history of my immediate surroundings every day, and I love that, and will spend the rest of my life exploring them. But I am a true believer that travel broadens the mind (if done properly). To experience different cultures, different climates etc etc. (Which might explain the move from the UK to the depths of rural France 13 years ago 😉)
The beauty of this pandemic is that it has proved that an awful lot of us don't have to stay in one place. We are seriously considering sodding off after Christmas for a month or so. A small apartment in Florence, or Rome. Or a gîte in Provence. Even with restrictions the possibilities are huge. All we need is good WiFi for work and an open mind to experience day to day life as it is lived by the locals. Not a holiday. An adventure. It makes my heart race even to think of it.