Many have argued that travel doesn’t equal tourism, especially today. Travel has a purpose and intention for self-discovery, whereas tourism focuses on the mere consumption of leisure. Are both distinguishable anymore?

In his book The Songlines, English travel writer Bruce Chatwin argues that language started as song, which to peoples capable of tapping into the remote past, like aboriginal Australians, language sang the creation of the world.

When we go about in the world, if we keep our senses and sensibility open, we could tap into the distant past via the people who sang and dreamed about it all before us.

But what Chatwin proposes, if beautiful, doesn’t sound that realistic today. When visiting places, most of us don’t look for a distant Dreamtime, or the enchantment of things but rather check social media posts and dots in our smartphone map app. Bruce Chatwin seemed to know how to travel, doing so with the intensity fellow travel authors, like French writer Sylvain Tesson or American novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux, to whom tourists don’t know where they’ve been (whereas travelers don’t know where they’re going).

Our last trip through Northern Europe and the Mediterranean was an opportunity for me to reflect on the meaning of travel, now that it’s easier than ever and our society can’t get enough of it.

A trip takes us (not the other way around)

Roughly three-quarters of Americans have visited at least one foreign country, and 26% have been to five or more. And, though 23% have not traveled internationally, most want to do so once the opportunity arises, according to Pew Research. However, travel shouldn’t be about ticking off every sight or attraction but about training a personal perspective of things. Trusting the travel literature I packed with me, as well as my own thoughts: our destination is never a place, and even less a non-place. If sightseeing might sometimes feel unnatural and meaningless, there’s a reason for it.

During and in between travels, I’ve been lately going to bed with John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. It’s hard not to agree with him when he mentions that—if we are doing it right— “we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” Like a successful marriage, he asserts early on, the certain way to be wrong on a journey is to think you control it.

This attitude eased the way for me to read it slowly every night, almost as though it were a compendium of psalms, to the point of being able to read some of it before going to bed after some demanding travel days during the last weeks when I could barely keep my eyes open. It turned out to be a way to keep my travel intentions on track: instead of aiming at going from one point to another, I found it helpful to have authors I trust remind me that when on the road, attitude is everything. Like the character Platon Karataev from Tolstoy’s War and Peace, an old peasant soldier who decides to share all the food he has (a salt-sprinkled potato) with the protagonist Pierre Bezukhov when they fall captive to French troops, the simplest of things can carry the highest meaning and joy, if offered and welcomed with the right attitude.

Losing track of the way of the world

Another enlightened traveler that I have kept close on my trips, the Swiss journalist Nicolas Bouvier, author of a pioneering travelogue across Eurasia with the illustrator Thierry Vernet on a Fiat Topolino in 1953, puts it this way:

“Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.”

Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World, 1963

When Steinbeck was getting ready to leave Sag Harbor aboard his converted truck Rocinante, he explains the curiosity of neighbors passing by to say farewell. In their eyes, he sees “a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here.” For “nearly every American hungers to move,” he asserts. As if, before starting, every trip were to hold a promise, an opportunity to grow, know, evolve.

Also, from the vantage point of its beginning, a trip can feel like a longing promise when waking up early and observing the horizon like a Western character by Cormac McCarthy rubbing his eyes in the morning chill: the stakes are high, the hope too precious, the journey too idealized to live up the hype:

“I pulled Rocinante into a small picnic area maintained by the state of Connecticut and got out my book of maps. And suddenly the United States became huge beyond belief and impossible ever to cross. I wondered how in hell I’d got myself mixed up in a project that couldn’t be carried out. It was like starting to write a novel.”

Travels with Charley; In Search of America, John Steinbeck, 1962

No matter how hard we try to keep our senses open: a trip is never an opportunity to see all that matters somewhere, but at best, a personal pass at things that are hardly self-evident. When strolling across vast areas, the contingencies are so significant that the main scarcities we have to deal with, from time to attention to knowledge and cross-references, can make anyone crave the experiences, landscapes, establishments, and foods that feel frictionless and familiar. Popular guides and influencer posts will narrow the possibilities of a given trip even more, as we end up emulating borrowed experiences, getting there by letting our map app do the work for us.

The eyes of the beholder

When packing activities and covering big areas, we confront the risk of being taken by a feeling of placelessness and saturation:

“I crossed into New Mexico, rushed past Gallup in the night, and camped on the Continental Divide—and much more spectacular it is here than in the north. The night was very cold and dry, and the stars were cut glass. I drove into a little canyon out of the wind and parked by a mound of broken bottles—whisky and gin bottles, thousands of them. I don’t know why they were there.

“And I sat in the seat and faced what I had concealed from myself. I was driving myself, pounding out the miles because I was no longer hearing or seeing. I had passed my limit of taking in or, like a man who goes on stuffing in food after he is filled, I felt helpless to assimilate what I was fed in through my eyes. Each hill looked like the one just passed. I have felt this way in the Prado in Madrid after looking at a hundred paintings—the stuffed and helpless inability to see more.”

Travels with Charley; In Search of America, John Steinbeck, 1962

When traveling with teenagers, one realizes how successfully modernity has created interchangeable environments or non-places, physical or digital, where one feels comfortable. There’s a reason commercial areas, airports, rest stops, or vending machines offer similar comfort foods. Their engineered variability is a mere iteration of tastes proven popular in standardized formats, using standardized ingredients.

French anthropologist Marc Augé theorized about the rise of comfortable placelessness in a 1992 book, Non-Places: Introduction to Anthropology in Supermodernity. The phenomenon is already self-evident for Steinbeck in his 1962 travelogue:

“It is more than possible that in the cities we have passed through, traffic-harried, there are good and distinguished restaurants with menus of delight. But in the eating places along the roads the food has been clean, tasteless, colorless, and of complete sameness. It is almost as though the customers had no interest in what they ate as long as it had no character to embarrass them.”

Travels with Charley; In Search of America, John Steinbeck, 1962

The sameness chased by tourism

When traveling, few people feel comfortable being a tourist, especially as locals from popular destinations voice their concerns regarding massification and excess of tourist-oriented cultural and commercial offers or the effect of short-term rentals on housing prices. As I write this, in Southern California, Laguna Beach residents are discouraging beachgoers from coming to town on peak summer days due to the effects of what they call “destructive tourism.” As if it were a massified music festival, crowds will gather at the beach even when the amount of people makes it virtually impossible to enjoy the experience. Being and ticking off the activity replaces the experience, just like the mountaineers who have to wait in line to summit Everest as they take their mandatory selfie.

Since Covid, the residents of Laguna Beach have noticed a radical increase in visitors to places like Victoria Beach; not even multiplied resources can keep up with the excess of noise, trash, traffic, and people. Some days, it’s just too much for everyone involved, creating a collision between two modern phenomena: the “tragedy of the commons” (when individuals, acting on legitimate self-interest, deplete a shared resource) and the boom of “comfort experiences,” the equivalent of comfort food when on vacation. Many places are experiencing the same phenomenon.

Comfort experiences feel familiar and relatable, and are often portrayed on social media as soothing and aspirational travel experiences, and, like comfort food, they create a pre-packaged, recognizable product. When all experiences are gamified and commodified, we end up thinking that there’s nothing to discover and no mystery is left in the world; and, with a lack of mystery, we risk interiorizing that there’s no possibility for enchantment in a quantified world where interactions are transactional and where people compete with each other to improve constantly.

In his book The Agony of Eros, German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that we need to reinvent our sense of awe for the world and everyday things so we can escape what he calls “the inferno of the same.” We are so self-centered and focused on our quantified constant improvement that we forgot the need of others to be able to exist as a social body: diversity brings the possibility of discovery of other realities that escape a world dominated by “sameness.”

Inferno of the same

We now think the world is at our fingertips, having the illusion that we can reach it all by performing a search or querying an AI chatbot, and having an oracle in our pocket has erased the boundaries between the self and the world. Now, the world (or, at least, the image of the world that we can reach digitally and via cheap travel) is ours, erasing the need and possibility of “others.” Just like newborn babies who haven’t yet developed the ability to distinguish between themselves and the outside world (including their mother), our world has erased the previous boundaries between “self” and “other.”

“The time where there was such thing as the Other is over. The Other as a secret, the Other as a temptation, the Other as eros, the Other as desire, the Other as hell and the Other as pain disappear. The negativity of the Other now gives way to the positivity of the Same. The proliferation of the Same constitutes the pathological changes that afflict the social body. It is made sick not by denial and prohibition, but by over-communication and over-consumption; not by suppression and negation, but by permissiveness and affirmation. The pathological sign of our times is not repression but depression. Destructive pressure comes not from the Other but from within.”

(…)

“The terror of the Same affects all areas of life today. One travels everywhere, yet does not experience anything. One catches sight of everything, yet reaches no insight. One accumulates information and data, yet does not attain knowledge. One lusts after adventures and stimulation, but always remains the same. One accumulates online ‘friends’ and ‘followers,’ yet never encounters another person. Social media constitutes an absolute zero grade of the social.”

The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today, Byung-Chul Han, 2016

Musings of an anthropologist

Moreover, our interconnected world is designed so we quickly find and congregate with like-minded individuals to create the all-too-familiar echo chambers.

French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famously opens his 1955 memoir Tristes Tropiques, highlighting his reserves regarding travelers:

“Travel and travelers are two things I loathe-and yet here I am, all set to tell the story of my expeditions. But at least I’ve taken a long while to make up my mind to it: fifteen years have passed since I left Brazil for the last time and often, during those years, I’ve planned to write this book, but I’ve always been held back by a sort of shame and disgust. So much would have to be said that has no possible interest: insipid details, incidents of no significance.”

Opening lines of Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1955

Perhaps he had a point, especially as old travel became a commodity in developed countries after World War II, and experiences turned out to be interchangeable, for the actual experience was to adapt the world to the traveler so he doesn’t need to give up his comfort.

Rethinking travel?

We have reached a tipping point and tourism is now perceived as a potentially harmful force in places that have benefitted from it. Many areas that attract tourists have detached from the local reality where they are embedded to the point of vanishing: they are the archetype of non-place, a point to be avoided at all costs. Marc Augé saw it coming over three decades ago:

“And while we use the word ‘space’ to describe the frequentation of places which specifically defines the journey, we should still remember that there are spaces in which the individual feels himself to be a spectator without paying much attention to the specta­cle. As if the position of spectator were the essence of the spectacle, as if basically the spectator in the position of a spectator were his own spectacle. A lot of tourism leaflets suggest this deflection, this reversal of the gaze, by offering the would-be traveler advance images of curious or contemplative faces, solitary or in groups, gazing across infinite oceans, scanning ranges of snow­ capped mountains or wondrous urban skylines: his own image in a word, his anticipated image, which speaks only about him but carries another name (Tahiti, Alpe d’Huez, New York). The traveler’s space may thus be the archetype of non-place.”

Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, Marc Augé, 1992

Is it finally time to rethink the way we travel? Can tourism be a positive force when massification and little contextual knowledge end up eroding any destination?