We Need To Talk About Travel

I'd like to challenge this common intuition that 'travel broadens the mind' and the almost religious regard we hold for travelling as an intrinsically virtuous undertaking. 

 These decorated my hostel wall, last time I was away travelling:

And for some reason, my brain spewed out the question 'why?' and followed it promptly with 'and why not?' by which I mean specifically why are these the kinds of quotes and messages one sees in a backpacker hostel, and never in accommodation targeted at say, business travelers. By the time you are in a hostel in Guatemala city, at least circa 2019 and the issues the country currently faces, do you really need inspiration to pack your bags and go off on an adventure? Versus someone sent to Budapest on business to inspect a factory holding, one of 19 trips might need a reminder to seize the opportunity to get to know the world, to explore, to discover oneself.

It struck me as propaganda, a rationalization there to reinforce the beliefs of people that have already bought in. A 4 star business hotel, I guess, wants it's occupants to stay in, raid the minibar, call room service etc. not go out looking for dumplings from a street vendor. Curious to me, is this message is targeted at the young, almost as if it is spruiking an education, a degree, an expensive one, which makes me suspect what is actually being sold is the debt in exchange for a dubious degree. 

That travel is regarded as somehow universally and somewhat holistically educational seems curiously unchallenged to me. It's one of those quite ubiquitous cases that presents me with a lot of data with which to test the claim, and yet it just about goes unchallenged, perhaps because, as I suspect will prove the case with me, to question it is to tread on a taboo and reveal myself to be quite a horrible person.

I believe of all places, I was inspired to the following thought experiment by crappy BBC show 'Art Attack' though I'm never going to find the episode. But it was to think of your life from a bird's eye view perspective and sort of heat map your movements:

This is a not-to-scale approximation of my life between 1998-2001. Where day in day out, I either stayed at home in my room. Ran around the lake, walked to school, where I would walk around the campus in a fairly routine way, even at recess. I would spend a lot of my leisure time going up and down the street, and I would have other running paths and tracks.

I don't know why Art Attack recommended this exercise to children, if indeed it did, (I could have gotten it from some other program) because it made me realize how small my life was. I run around some circuits, go up and down a shopping/residential strip and wander around a school campus. Day in day out, for years. I could draw heat maps of other routines I've fallen into at other stages of life, but I tend to fall into the same patterns everywhere. Most of my movement is a commute, running trails, and eating establishments in my local hoods.

By contrast consider this that I just grabbed from a google image search of 'travel map where I've been':

This person compared to my high-schooler self, seems to have lived a much larger life, seen a lot more, done a lot more. And if you think the twist is 'this person is one and the same' it isn't.

I suspect it's something like this comparison though, that we all understand. Most of our lives seem too small to be of any interest to anyone, we work for employers whose names are only known really within the industry, or we are a very small cog in the great machine of a globally recognized brand. The globe-trotter, the global citizen though, their life is defined by global brands - Paris, London, Tokyo, New York. They've gone to places everyone knows, eaten at restaurants you've heard of, and come back with stories of... eating things that are 'so good' and catching various forms of transport, and if you're lucky, some kind of scam, crime or illness that evidently was not too serious.

And history has produced some great globe-trotters. Ghenghis Kahn, and in the other direction, Marco Pollo. Mark Twain made his name with 'Innocents Abroad' about Americans on the Grand Tour, and paid off his debts by travelling the world on an onerous speaking tour. The Beatles... ah... of course, the explorers, Magellan, Columbus, Cook. The speculatively richest person to have ever lived was Mansa Musa I of the Mali Empire and he was famous for bringing so much gold on his pilgrimage to Mecca that he inadvertently ruined the economies of nations he was trying to be generous to.

A bunch of the broadest people, in terms of wisdom and contribution to culture, historically, did not travel much at all, or did so under duress, or in military service. Buddha, Jesus, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Einstein, Freud, Marx, Spinoza, Shakespeare. Historical figures like Des Cartes or Da Vinci might wind up travelling and dying far from home, but they tended to be wise before they departed.

What tends to make people wise, as near as I can observe is a combination of a) aging, and b) introspection. With some of the most profound commentators on the human condition basically being shut-ins and homebodies. And what do the wise say about Travel?

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is. ~ Marcel Proust

Who I suspect was the first exposure to this idea, that there is plenty to learn from at home.

You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.

You must lay aside the burdens of the mind; until you do this, no place will satisfy you.

The mind cannot find strength in its leisure unless it stops looking around and wandering around.  To keep your mind within bounds, you must first stop your body from running away.

Your rushing around will bring you no benefit, since you are traveling in company with your emotions, and your troubles follow along.  . . .  A sick person does not need a place; he needs medical treatment. If someone has a broken leg or dislocated a joint, he doesn’t get on a carriage or a ship; he calls a doctor to set the fracture or relocate the limb.~ Seneca the Younger.

Seneca admonishes against what I feel is my own conclusion - travel employed as a non-solution, an avoidance of what really ails people.

What is the usual practice, then?  People behave like a traveler, who, returning to his own country, comes across a good inn on the road, and because the inn pleases him, remains there. Have you forgotten your intention, man?  You were not traveling to this place, but only through it.  ‘But this is a fine inn.’  And how many other fine inns are there, and how many pleasant meadows?  But only to be passed through on the way. Your business is the other thing; to return to your country, to relieve the anxieties of your family, to perform the duties of a citizen, to marry, to have children, and to hold public office. For you have not, I think, come into the world to pick out the most charming places, but to live and act in the place where you were born, and of which you have been appointed a citizen. 

 . . . you regard it as a misfortune to die without seeing such sights. But when there is no need to travel at all, and where you are already, and Zeus is present in his works—will you not desire to contemplate these things and understand them?  Will you never perceive either who you are, or for what you have been born, or the purpose for which this vision has been given to you? ~ Epictetus.

In the latter quote, Epictetus preflects Proust. In the former, he points out how little service people render by travelling, essentially reviewers of hotels and perhaps meals in the present day context, and directs the focus on finding purpose closer to home.

I could go digging for more, but because of personal preferences it's hard for me to step beyond the Stoics. Alain De Botton has a book, and conveniently a BBC feature on this very subject:

As I've lived my own life, I've become increasingly skeptical that travel does anything of the sort, anything close to, broadening people. At best I would concede it doesn't necessarily narrow the minds of people who travel, but as to the claim of broadening, the map doesn't match the ground. Which is to say, when I recall the most globe-trotting people I know, the word that bubbles to the surface of my conscious to describe the insights they offer is 'underwhelming'.

In my experience, most often those truly bitten by wanderlust are characterized by being stupefied by the very notion of the question "why travel?" Making an impression on me that they've actually never thought about it at all. Like someone showing me the rock they bought for $500 that prevents them from being mauled by a tiger, 'of course it works!' they say 'I've never been attacked by a tiger!' missing that an absence of tiger attacks is not proof positive of the rocks magical power, especially given I have no such rock and have also never had any trouble from no fucking tigers.

Now with a climate change study coming out seemingly weekly to remind us that we are on the brink of destroying human civilization if we don't act, it feels like a worthwhile endeavor to challenge the mythical benefits of travel.

Because that's where it differs from the more complex issue of the value of University degrees (at least for domestic students, education as an export folds the two together.) True you may study a very expensive and quite useless degree, and go on to throw good debt after bad by going on to post grad studies that leave you with the same two career paths - work in a bookstore or become a teacher; and bookstores are in much shorter supply. But Tertiary studies eat up time and keep people on the bread line for 3 to 5 years, put people in debt that restricts future cash flow so if anything, lowers a person's carbon footprint. Not so with tourism's contribution to the supply of airline services.

What makes travel hard to question, is the social contract that I suspect for many is in play. Esteem needs as psychological/emotional needs that need meeting and which to some extent, travel meets. Travel as apologetics in our society, for our existence.

I also have a limit in my ability to sympathise with globe-trotters. I have never 'reacted' to a friend posting on facebook that they've just 'bought' a property, which were I to share my actual reaction to people buying Australian real property, is in itself I feel a kind of kindness on my part. Travel photos I have liked, because I do know what it means to people. But not photos of bowls of ramen and In-and-Out Burgers. 

I have to, of course put the brakes on myself, because I'm aware one can suck the moisture out of just about anything. Take my beloved king of sports - basketball, easily described as 'ten or less people running up and down a stretch of flat surface trying to put a rubber ball through one basket more times than the other team can put the same rubber ball through the other basket.' There's a level of observation at which some of the most profound and amazing things can be reduced to banal and worthy of ridicule. Travel is certainly one of these things you can reduce to 'I exchanged money for goods and services' where the standing on the observation of the Eiffel Tower on a summer's night can be described as 'waiting in a queue to take an elevator ride' and running in the New York Marathon can be described as 'running around some streets for hours.'

I don't wish to do this, what my experience testifies to though is how many people return from travel with the remarkable ability to turn a visit to the Blue Mosque as 'I took my shoes off to go in an old building.' I don't suck the emotion out of the experience, most travelers I know simply cannot articulate what they got out of the experience.

I'm sure, I'm sure if the average level of articulation was higher people would be able to describe what it feels like to wake up in a yurt and step outside onto the Mongolian steppes, being a stranger in a strange land confronted with a profound truth of the limits of your own ego and your place in the universe, to momentarily break the chain of ancestry that defines our culture and lifestyle and link onto an entirely different one of the nomadic peoples of Mongolia whom once dominated more of the known world than any other people ever had before. 

Or the euphoric sensation of peeling off wet clothes and tumbling into a dry bed in the middle of a rainy night in the middle of the Czechoslovakian countryside after spending a day getting lost on a tour bike with a Michelin map, to feel the world's roads open up to you in kaleidoscopic possibility and truly understand what it is to have a roof above your head, suddenly holding up the sky like Atlas, the mercy you are at when you relinquish control of your climate to the stratosphere and ponder how many pockets of hospitality are out there in the dark waiting to receive you, given that you simply happened upon this one.

Or the instantaneous renewal that comes from opening one's eyes after diving into the turquoise pools of Peru watching the fish that live oblivious to your worldly struggles beneath the surface scatter from your submerged form. To turn over and pear upwards at the disturbed surface as it tries to calm itself, distorting the sky and you suddenly feel you do not occupy one world, but one of many interconnected ones.

The thing is, I can describe these things, and imagine them somewhat vividly having never done any of those three things. I may not be much of a writer and thus not up to scratch, but I suspect to some extent it would prove true that someone could go through a truly bizarre and unique experience, sit down with someone imaginative that hasn't, and find to their chagrin and consternation, that they can't describe the experience they've had, but someone else can describe their experience that they haven't had.

I have some experience of this myself, I drew a piece based on intoxication for my exhibition entitled 'feel' that connected sufficiently with someone enough to sell, and I somewhat disappointingly had several people ask me about my experiences with psychedelics, of which I have none yet by their testimony I had accurately captured in my picture, which amazed the people that inquired.

The point of this, is not just that life is cruel, but that what most people get out of travel is a private, not public good. Private consumption can be justified, but I would see an end to rationalizing travel in particular as some public good that makes people, into 'better' people.

I remember sitting in a car on a two day work trip with a company sales rep, it was to show my face to the customers I served via phone from head office, and get a picture of the actual business model. The sales rep taking me around was in his late forties and at some point on the long road trip he mouthed what I feel is a popular conjecture. 'It should be mandatory for all kids to spend a year travelling, seeing the world, it would get rid of all these dopey racist c*#ts' or something to that effect.

...Maybe. My lived experience leads me to suspect that confirmation bias is at play, that the kinds of people who do travel in Australian society at least, are the least likely (in their youth, who knows once they are employing the services of financial advisers and chartered accountants) that vote left-wing liberal progressive. And they don't travel to see the world, but confirm their belief of what the world is. So maybe if it was mandatory for everyone to travel, and the government financed the blue-collar kids to go travel for a year visiting at least one country in each continent, we would see a massive swing away from racism and towards progressivism.

Something that flies in the face of this expectation though, is again, confirmation bias. The Australian citizen that earlier this year murdered a bunch of people in two New Zealand mosques, had traveled, not just from Australia to New Zealand, but around Europe: 

Captivated with sites of battles between Christian European nations and the Ottoman Empire, he went on another series of visits to the Balkans in 2016–2018, with Croatia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Turkey and Bosnia-Herzegovina confirming his presence there in these years. ~from Wikipedia's 'Christchurch Mosque Shootings' page.

Terrorist attacks in general are not carried out by parochial home-town working class young men. They are often educated and affluent, and dual-citizens. Often literally educated and employed in the societies they wind up attacking. Then there's my grandparents generation, many young men of which were shipped off overseas during WWII, and despite being helped along the Kakoda Trail by the "Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels" have not left a great impression on me as to being open-minded, tolerant, peace loving, multiculturalism enthusiasts. More like loyal servants of the Crown that marched off to war when called.

Then there's me.

I was just in Guatemala last week, a country poorer, more corrupt and less safe than Mexico at least by testimony if not my experience. I mean it was poorer because goods and services were cheaper for me, but I never experienced any actual danger to my persons or belongings, nor any corruption.

But I was on alert the three days I spent there. My mind dedicated attention to where my valuables were at all times, the physical proximity of strangers, the time of day and angle of the sun. I was more suspicious and more physiologically aroused than I am in Guadalajara. To some extent, the danger, or sense of it, was what I was consuming. I wanted briefly to feel awake to life, it's fragility and thus preciousness.

This is a valuable experience... in theory. In practice though I got to the airport on Sunday morning to catch a flight back to Mexico and the guy at the checkout desk wouldn't let me board the plane unless I had a booked flight out of Mexico, something that has never been required of me before. Under duress I bought the cheapest flight I could find to meet the criteria and be let past this gatekeeper. I now found my thoughts preoccupied by getting back a couple of hundred dollars on a transaction I was forced to make (Mexican immigration granted me another 180 days in the country before they bothered to even ask me the purpose of my trip, which was the only question I got asked, and I got the distinct impression that I was asked because they remembered there was a box they were supposed to tick, not because they cared or that it matters to them, which is wonderful). 

It was a matter of minutes between sitting in the back seat of a cab and literally thinking 'okay I can't use a seat belt to strangle the driver, but I think I could strangle him with my hands if need be.' thinking through what to do if the taxi driver attempted to abduct me rather than deliver me to the airport. How much would I pay an abductor in Guatemala to save my own life? Or even the fingers on my hands, or not have my face lacerated? Probably Thousands of dollaridoos. 

Now though with that bridge uncrossed; now I was caught up in feeling ripped off by Aeromexico's check in policy, that I am still unsure whether the fault was his pedantic nature or my ignorance of the airline policy.

Only sitting in the terminal lounge did I cool off enough to become salient at how quickly I had forgotten any 'perspective' I may have gained from surviving intact my time in 'dangerous' Guatemala. By analogy, if I had been wrongfully jailed for murdering my wife, and after 12 years in prison was finally exonerated by new evidence, and released from prison, and at a press event held in a hotel bar room, I ordered a lemonade and something fucked up with the dispenser such that I got a glass of carbonated water, no sweetener. I would be profoundly disappointed in myself if I reacted to this as the greatest injustice to have befallen me.

I don't believe my mind to be unique in this regard, if there is anything possibly rare, it's that I noticed my irrationality at all. So again, to degrade my own case, I personally do think I can get a lot out of the stimulation of travel. 

But I reflect, I write blog posts, of which I only know one person that maybe still also writes blog posts. I know a bunch of artists, but very few of them produce substantive pieces, and very few of them on the subject of travel. To be honest, as most people I suspect, will suspect, most artists produce work that is entirely vacuous, accompanied generally by impenetrable word salads that are submitted as artistic statements. 

What of less reflective people? What of the people who do the kind of travel the bourgeoisie love to hate on? Those who go to an exotic country to stay entirely within a 5 star resort, sipping cocktails, getting pedicures and riding jet skis. 

To me this type of travel better demonstrates the social contract I believe may be in effect. 'I work hard, I play hard.' It is not true of me that I work hard. I'm a big fan of the 'Lewis family motto' (of Author Michael Lewis fame) 'Do as little as possible, and that with great reluctance for better to endure a slight reprimand than an arduous task.' but I can again imagine a great value to a holiday that consists entirely of lying on a banana lounge on a Vietnamese private beach.

What I imagine is the feeling of abandoning a sinking ship, clinging to a life jacket and swimming all through the night. Arms and legs aching, mouth choking back up the salt water that splashes into it, you lose consciousness under the blistering sun and awake washed ashore onto terra firma. After a long struggle you just want to lie on the beach, completely burned out until you recover enough to face an actual struggle for existence again.

But again, such holidays are never presented as such to me. As people having achieved some career milestone that took so much out of them that they had to retreat some place far away and highly ergonomic to recover. Nor does it generally follow that people having recovered, recharged, rejuvenated make any real changes to their lifestyle upon return to avoid reaching such a point of exhaustion again. Most people I know just go back to work, often having never really left their lives behind, as evidenced by all the photos I see posted to social media as the holiday is happening.

No, what is presented to me is something that stimulates an altogether different impression: this is what I get, this is what I get in exchange for working a career I find so dull I never talk about it publicly or socially. What I get is to visit a material paradise for 2~4 weeks a year, before I return once more to a life I do not find worth sharing.

This selective publicity of course, has a name, called 'image-crafting.' And like many issues of our time, it gets talked about for a while and then we stop talking about it even though none of the issue is actually addressed, the behavior doesn't stop. We just find new issues like pile-ons and doxing etc. to discuss without action.

Image crafting is probably at the crux, if not the very manifestation of the mythical benefits of travel, and taking what I am sure is a very lovely and comfortable international holiday to a 5-star resort you could not afford in your domestic market, is functionally to me no different from completing a climb of Kilimanjaro if communicated by the same means to the same effect.

As an artist who publishes my work on social media platform, I do spare some attention for a bit of market research in the form of noticing what people like. I tell myself I do this mainly to try and inoculate myself from a Skinner-box type feedback effect, where I find my own practice hijacked by chasing what the public like. (Many an artist I've followed on Instagram has fallen into the trap of producing nothing but fan art, because they get addicted to the easy likes this brings) Probably, it's also a condescending exercise in judging those around me, so that I may enjoy feeling superior. 

What I have broadly concluded though, is that people like what is easy to like. Every artist faces a challenge on a platform like instagram for example of putting hours and hours of effort into a piece they share to receive 17 likes and the occasional spam comment 'wow I really like your stuff, please check out my page!' or something. Then they will notice a friend of theirs that works in accounting took a photo of the hamburger they ordered for lunch today and it has 62 likes.

I've had friends advise me to have a baby, because they have a license to print 'likes' on social media. Which I don't really begrudge babies, I understand the import babies have in people's lives. Just so, I don't begrudge that any work of mine should ever get more attention than somebodies grandma dying or pet dying. 

My broad theory is though, that people like things that they can easily do themselves. Basically, the achievements most valued are expressing non-controversial opinions like that racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination are bad. It requires nothing of people to express solidarity with sympathetic people, it often doesn't actually require them helping those sympathetic people in any meaningful way or even ceasing behaviors they are engaged in that may hurt the very people they sympathize with.

Purchasing a house, taking a holiday and eating hamburgers are all very egalitarian achievements. They involve the spending of money. This is also somewhat true of announcements of graduation. 

Author Chuck Palahniuck tells an anecdote from a reading in New York, where he cited that Truman Capote claimed 'Americans don't like natural beauty because it isn't egalitarian enough, they like fake beauty; hence we have Sarah Jessica Parker...' which he says produced boos and hisses and jeers from the audience in their condemnation of his cheap shot at the hometown heroine. The nearest Capote quote I could find by the way was: "She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty"

Thus I feel the Travel broadens the mind myth propagates because we want desperately to believe it is true. That something as simple as booking a plane ticket and a place to stay online, and exchanging some dollars into some other currency can make us better people and respected members of our community, it would be so nice if it were true...

My jury may be out on the personal benefits and growth promoted by travel. But the deliberation is going in a clear direction as the circumstantial evidence piles up. What most people appear to get out of travel is a personal indulgence, an experience akin and probably amplified to reflect the costs both material and mental involved, of the pleasure received from eating a fatty salty meal.

It occurs to me, that my attitude not towards Travel per se, but to the myth of Travel's medicinal properties, is very similar to the epiphany I had towards the end of highschool. Back when I was trudging around the campus in a predictable way. 

The epiphany was thus: I'd never seen a teacher take a dumb student and make them smart. To some that might seem obvious, but for some reason I held a naive belief at the time, that education made you smarter. It doesn't and the key distinction is between knowledge and intelligence. My school could cram a bunch of data into any kids mind that would improve their performance on a given test. But that was the limit of the performance enhancement. After the test results came back, their minds had about as much utility as before. True of me to this day.

Travel then, has been sold, probably as middle-class propaganda, as Lumosity which if you are already forgetting what Lumosity is/was, it's probably because you used Lumosity thinking it would improve your memory somehow.

Lumosity might be the best example to end on, because I titled this we need to talk about Travel, and currently we don't. Lumosity was a product that sold itself as some kind of nuerosciencey brain boosting gaming app. Flashing up on youtube, and we never really discussed these ads as they made their outrageous claims. I didn't talk about Lumosity, and something was painfully obvious to me about the ads. The hired spokespeople came across as really stupid.



I feel we are equally silent on how many people come back from their travels, and couldn't pass a multiple choice test on their travels. Nor when we think of our oldest friends and families, how many have made an impression altering change as a result of the travels they have undertaken. Our characters, and our vices and virtues, seem quite robust in the face of exposure to new places, new cultures, new ways of being.

In the meantime we are killing the planet as part of the deal we signed with nobody, that we get to travel to exotic countries in exchange for working jobs we feel we really need the break from.