How We Bastardized the Meaning of Travel
Travel used to be about the road travelled. Now, it’s about the destination.
The captain of the Lake Como Ferry announces through the loudspeaker to the 100+ cruising tourists that the next house on the left is George Clooney’s mansion.
All the tourists sitting on the right side of the boat instantly swarm towards the left, squashing the ones who had taken a more fortunate seat. Half of the people don’t even look at Clooney’s mansion. They look away from it and into their phones, to take a selfie with the mansion behind them. The other half struggle to take photos pushing and shoving one another for a better spot.
An instant later, they will post the photo on instagram with the caption: Checking out George Clooney’s mansion.
A week later, they will tell their friends back home: I saw George Clooney’s house with my own eyes!
Neither of those is true. They weren’t checking out or seeing any house. They were fumbling with their phones and their settings for the best angle to get the much-desired photo. A great experience, they will call it.
Travel used to be about the road travelled. Now, it’s about the destination.
Planning a holiday nowadays contains mostly a mimetic desire.
As we ingest, online, a constant stream of the lives of the rich and the royal, we see where they are holidaying, and we take that as inspiration for our next escapade.
Every season, some destinations are suddenly trending, like the rising tides of a tsunami. The past spring, it was Japan. This summer, it’s either Greece or cool-weather destinations like Scandinavia. So without much pondering, we ‘choose’ to go to the same hot spots.
If we’ve been to the Maldives just like the Beckhams, or if we ate at the same pizzeria Julia Roberts did in Naples, then we feel a little closer to them, not just geographically but in our perceived personal value. This is performative richness. We act like the rich and royal, so we feel a little more like them.
We have subconsciously (or consciously) started making decisions about our holiday locations based on how instagrammable they are. We go to places to be seen there, by friends and followers on our social channels, not necessarily to discover a foreign culture.
Travel has become aiming to make it to a trending destination and taking the best selfie in the hot spot. We feel entitled to get to the same places as the rich and royal, and to photograph ourselves as proof that ‘we made it’ there.
And just like the tide of a tsunami also recedes, wiping out homes and people, once these trendy places stop being popular, mass tourism wipes out the well-being of local communities. Just ask the residents of Venice or Barcelona.
Travel used to be about travailler
The origin of the word ‘travel’ is the French word travailler, which means to work. Because travelling used to entail going on (often difficult) journeys.
For most of history, when one embarked on travels, that meant they got ready for the physical work of transiting vast amounts of land, ready to face unexpected threats along the way. People used to go on journeys to learn, to clear their minds, to forge their character through possible challenges.
To travel (v.) = late 13th century, travailen, “take pains, suffer pains”, from Old French travailler “to toil, labor”.
Pilgrimages, arguably the first forms of travel, were taken for religious reasons, but also allowed the pilgrims to escape their daily lives and engage in spiritual reflection along the way. Believe it or not, there was a time when only the brave would embark on a journey. Only the brave would travel.
Travel now equals having an experience
Until recently, travel was never about comfort and unnecessary luxuries. Today, travel often equals leisure and cocktails by the pool. Probably the most overused word related to travel has been for many years ‘experiences’. People want experiences, not just a trip, they said. But travel propaganda forgets that an experience is not necessarily only a positive experience.
Travel always included experiences. It used to be about the courage of the journey and about reaching those foreign places, discovering them, learning new customs. Travellers had plenty of experiences along the way — bad experiences are also part of the ‘experience’ category. I’d argue that bad experiences (provided they are not tragic), teach us more along the way than pleasant ones.
Now the ‘experience’ has been reduced to posing in front of those famous sites, in front of ancient ruins or pizzerias we know nothing about. An obsession with the proof that ‘I’ve been there’, obsession which maybe informs us of our generalized lack of an otherwise meaningful life. An obsession with documenting our existence in certain hot spots, the ultimate proof that we, too, are here, we live a good life, we are worthy.
When globally 85% of people are not happy at their jobs — which probably also means they are not proud of their profession — they search for meaning elsewhere. And the 21st-century hub for borrowing meaning is social media and the celebrities’ lives, including their travel destinations.
When we don’t want to put in the hard work for a job well done, which would increase our self-respect; when we don’t want the hardships of a travel journey, just the modern luxuries, then meaning starts to trickle away from our lives. When we just want the final euphoria, we neglect that the actual hard work to get there is what makes us euphoric.
It’s the climbing of the mountain during our holiday, not the instagrammable photo on top of it.
Q: where did you go on holiday this summer?
Last summer, I went back to Italy for a bit of tourism and a bit of visiting-my-family-after-4-years. I saw the instagrammers doing their things and, as much as I would have loved a photo on the Spanish Steps, I also thought 1) I would be comparing myself to 'The Other Photos' and 2) I don't have socials where people care about it. All the photos I ended up taking make me happy when I spot them in my camera folder because they are snippets of my holiday, not because they got millions of likes.
So many different observations that I agree with! When we went to Rome we sat at the Trevi fountain ⛲️ watching all the people pushing and shoving or jumping barriers to get that perfect picture. But very few actually sat and looked at that fountain (to be fair I think we watched the people more than the fountain itself in the end 😂). The same in the Vatican, we’d stop and admire the walls, finding interesting images in the paintings whereas most walked through taking photos and barely observing. We even witnessed an ‘influencer’ pose her way around and bossing her possible mum to take photos… I couldn’t help but think what a waste of an experience, she’d experience nothing but vanity!