The Futility of Travel

Travel is exalted as one of the highest forms of self discovery. At its simple core, moving yourself from one environment to another is transformative - literally and of course poetically. You relocate your physical self to another place and in the process, experience some kind of mental clarity and emotional shift in perspective. You eat new foods, meet new - sometimes foreign - people, exist in another climate, landscape, city, environ, navigate customs and cultures and language to earn some kind of coveted life experience you would otherwise be deprived of having. 

Yet, in spite of these aspirational outcomes, travel is futile. It is futile because at its core, it is selfish. Of course, there can be altruistic intent involved, but for most and in most contexts travel is an exercise in self-gratification that serves the ego. You transpose yourself to do something for yourself; to tell yourself and others you have been somewhere; you did that thing. You travel to consume and take. 

Think about the last trip. Maybe you went across the country. Maybe you went across the globe. You booked a flight or drove a car. You reserved a hotel or apartment and deliberated over the location, price, and ratings. Was the host a ‘superhost’? You probably researched the destination and what to do - restaurants, nightlife, neighborhoods, getting around, ‘best insert anything’ and for what..? For your own amusement, a photo, an anecdote, a memory. 

The point is that throughout this journey you are focused on your needs to meet your expectations. We are all the protagonists in our story. How could it be any other way? It is our condition. Our lives, in many ways, are true vacuums of narcissism because every single life experience is a plot element in our personal theatre production. Everything happens to us as the main character, and we need to be aware of this truth. But for most of our ordinary, daily lives we kind of dial down this reality. When travelling, however, this truth is much louder and more apparent to everyone. 

When you travel almost everything is transactional. You are interacting in order to obtain something you need to further your journey. At home, there are plenty of daily transactions too, but these are muted by the many familiar interactions and relationships - co-workers, family, friends, the dude you see at the gym every Sunday. There is routine and familiarity to our transactions because everything else is consistently boring. 

In most travel, there is none of that. With the exception of actually residing somewhere for more than a few weeks and creating a routine, everything is wildly fresh and exciting, but also incredibly superficial. You go to that market once or twice, that hotel or short term rental one time; same with that restaurant and beach and photo next to that scenic overlook and provocative street art. You are a ghost and a shadow on the street of some place in time.

In spite of this, there is magic and introspection in travel for those open to it. You take but you also leave something of yourself everywhere you go. Some places capture you in profound ways and you connect to the foreign and beautiful and chaotic and unsympathetic churn. You detach and assimilate into the human organism - every bit of the good and ugly and the wasteful and the magnificently uplifting and soul destroying manifestation of being alive in the world. 

There is a sadness in memory because it is a kind of death. Life exists in an ephemeral now that we can never have back. The past lingers in a semi-transparent haze into which we periodically gaze to attempt to recapture some part of ourselves we forgot. Maybe travel exists at the intersection of the present and past - truly fleeting, pointlessly selfish, yet one of the most honest ways to capture and hold ourselves, however briefly, in a moment in time.