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Kimberly Steele's avatar

It looks like you’ve already touched a nerve with compulsive travelers. Of course they don’t want to face the idea that they’re boring people. They see themselves as the literal jet set. Yet I feel exactly as you do. Most travelers become the most obnoxious, low class form of vermin: tourists. At the moment, there are violent protests in Mexico City over gentrification. Normal people cannot afford to live in Mexico City because Airbnb has driven up the prices of housing. The entire economy has started to revolve around the tourist class. I don’t agree with them breaking store windows, but I do understand the sentiment behind it. Compulsive travel is what you do when you are empty on the inside. You fetishize the exotic because you yourself are nothing special and do not believe you can do anything to remedy it besides spend more money.

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Leaf Rhetoric's avatar

Reminds me of lines from David Watson's "Civilization is a Jetliner"

https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/314-fall-1983/civilization-is-like-a-jetliner/

"...because it transports people who have never experienced their humanity where they were, to places where they shouldn’t go. In fact it mainly transports businessmen in suits with briefcases filled with charts, contracts, more mischief—businessmen who are identical everywhere and hence have no reason at all to be ferried about."

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