The Modern Cult of Travel

"Oh, it's just..."

Everyone appears to be traveling nowadays. If one is to catch up with old friends, attend a party, or just go to the store, there’s a high chance one will overhear someone mention their recent ‘travels’, or perhaps even lightly pressuring someone else into ‘traveling’ themselves.

However, when such travelers are pressed as to just what it is they took, learned, or gained from their exotic expeditions, I have yet to find a single traveling soul who doesn’t draw a blank whilst simultaneously appearing offended at the suggestion that they should have retained something. When asked what, exactly, it is that’s just so special about traveling, these travelers tend to reply with such retorts as ‘Oh, but, well, it’s just so amazing!’ or, ‘Oh but the culture, the other cultures!’, or the cultish classic ‘You really just have to do it to get it, you really must!’ And, if pushed a tiny bit further as to what they’re actually on about, they tend to shut down and get slightly hostile at the line of questioning.

I understand the point of travel; it’s not difficult to grasp in principle. I traveled a lot when I was younger (mostly throughout Europe, the Mediterranean, and the UK), I get the premise, the idea that when one travels to places other than their immediate town, county, or country, they—again, in principle—are going to be exposed to cultures, worldviews, and ways of life that differ from their own. And, from this supposed difference, they are going to internalise a sort of deeper appreciation of things, develop a broader understanding of the world and other people. This is, as I have said, an idea that exists only in abstraction, in principle. In truth, the abstract term ‘travel’ has become synonymous with the latest, bleeding-edge middle-class status signal, and a form of escape taken from fiction to fact. Let me expand on these.

First and foremost is the obvious point that travel is, by and large, a middle-class fetish, limited to an extremely safe group of people who tell themselves they’re better people for undertaking such things. This limitation, however, doesn’t say much, considering nearly everyone has the aesthetic possibility of becoming middle-class via credit cards.

Travel, then, is the latest in a long line of consumer goods (though admittedly a tad more abstract) that signal someone both ‘gets it’ and has ‘made it’ as per the modern definition of both. It is the example par excellence of normality since travel—and all the normal, good, moderns know this—comes after everything else. You obtain your degree, your job, your house, your dog, and your equally vacuous partner, and then you travel. Ergo, travel is synonymous with having made it. The ability to travel—and the continual hollering of such a reality—is a packaged signal, ‘I am safe! I am normal! Please like me!’

Secondly, travel is a form of escape. Now, there’s nothing wrong with escape, as long as some sort of lesson is learned as to why one feels the need to escape in the first place. The problem here is that travel is an escape that, like the weekend or an office party, is built into the very system it seeks to escape as a cynical pressure release. ‘Holiday soon!’ cries out the worn-out office worker from behind veiled tears. This escape, however, was once primarily found in the realms of fiction; that is, people would escape via books, stories, or myth. Forms of escape that, whilst allowing a momentary exit from the banal status quo, would equally allow for a deepening appreciation of being on one’s return. In this move from fiction to fac,t travel becomes another commodity, another thing amidst a million others that is to be consumed, discarded, and swiftly forgotten. It is not uncommon nowadays for people to book their next holiday whilst on holiday. Nothing like thinking about your next escape whilst…escaping.

It’s a cliche that’s been done to death, but as with so many cliches, it holds a sour truth - You are wherever you go. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. Wherever you go, there you are. - And this gets us to the root of this modern cult of travel. In placing all of our hopes and dreams within the world of things, we have to transform everything undertaken into a thing as a means to understand it. The reason such travelers return from their travels with nothing interesting to say isn’t because the destinations they visited are vacuous and shallow; it’s because they are vacuous and shallow. If you place a person who has no means to feel into any situation, what will be retained will be a barrage of facts and images that are entirely disconnected.

And yet, what else is it that’s being brought along on these journeys that is itself anathema to the intended point? The modern self. Nothing open is being taken on this trip, nothing vulnerable. The armored modern self, complete with its sole value of consumption, its sole emotion of fake-empathy, and its sole question of ‘Will this make me seem not normal?’, attends to any and all destinations as a hegemonic zoologist who unconsciously defends Western materialism at every turn. The destinations are not taken on their own merit but oft described as ‘weird’ or ‘odd’ or even ‘mad’. The focus is on shop opening times, food (I’ll get to this), the airport, the airport process, the flight, the hospitality, the hotel, the cost, the exchange rate, or the price of condoms, but never anything that might actually change anything, because of course, as so many, they don’t want to change. Travel is the second-best example (the first being therapy) of a hobby undertaken that is both enjoyable and allows you to do everything you want to do, whilst also a status signal that one is cultured and, let’s be honest, better than other people.

All these people who go traveling, they somehow manage to return not only unchanged, but also emphasised. Somehow—lo and behold!—these continual excursions to exotic destinations far and wide, the intention of which (as they so often state) is to broaden one’s mind, only manage to bolster the exact same politics, lifestyle, thoughts, opinions, and ideas they left with! ‘Oh, but you just have to go!’

What, pray tell, is it that nearly all these modern Phileas Foggs do bring back with them? Food stories! Every single time, I find myself standing before some privileged, middle-class, bloviating bore who has just returned from their trip, their little getaway, their defense of their supposed elitism has its foundations built atop a seeming mountain of yummies. ‘Oh, but the food was SO good!’ And the fact of the matter is, even from where I’m standing, I can tell you that the food wasn’t that good, you just happened to pay more attention to it because you’d internalised the idea that the food should be good whilst on holiday. And this is it, is it? The result of your entire cultural capital expenditure is to return from your trip, spin a vague yarn about ‘Oh the culture’, and display a curtain call by stating—with wide eyes!—that the chicken gyro you had was really, really good.

Why, then, is this strange fetishistic cult of travel happening? Boredom. People are bored. And, people who are bored are themselves boring. As one accepts their lot of boredom—and being boring—they need increasingly ‘different’ and extreme entertainments to keep them appeased. It begins with near incessant trips to restaurants and cafes, then city breaks and adult play zones (escape rooms and all that other infantile shite), then small holidays, then more distant holidays, and then eventually the dream of wanting to live in a fan and just…travel all the time. A fluxing, absent-minded, ignorant moron, the existence of whom is entirely reliant on ever-greater sensual shocks to the system to ensure they’re alive. The end destination of all this travel will be scuba diving into a volcano whilst eating deep-fried loaded chorizo bites and scrolling reels, all just to feel something.

To paraphrase Wendell Berry, it takes a lifetime to know a field. It doesn’t matter how far you go, how seemingly different or exotic the destination is, how many strange excursions you book; if you have the inability to feel, then nothing is going to come of it. If you can’t appreciate the flower that’s just blossomed outside your window, you aren’t going to appreciate the botanical gardens halfway around the world.

Wherever you go, there you are, and it turns out, most people are so nothing at all, that they can’t even really be said to be anywhere.