Well, this is a return to the familiar dour form! I think it's all a little harsh. Although I recognise some of the arguments against travel, I think every case is overstated.
Travel is memorable, and a holiday in Sri Lanka is probably more memorable than one in Dorset. I think it's worth giving your children memories. Kids probably don't spend enough social time with their parents now with the distractions of social media. Granted, flying across the world is an expensive way to get them off their phones.
I think some of the complaints about travel are purely status-driven. If you can't travel more than other people, brow beat them into travelling less, so your status is restored. Does anyone travel in order to "feel"? I get strong straw man vibes here, coupled with "It's just not my scene, man." (One for the oldies. Ah, YouTube https://youtu.be/v9FsEi2us88?si=LJuKtXrbA__w3hCj )
"The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started."
I don't think this is true. It wasn't true for me. It might drop you back, but in a slightly different place. Just one day visiting East Berlin dispelled any illusions I ever had of supporting Communism.
"I’ve heard of men leaving committed relationships and the prospect of raising a family because they wanted to go travelling and ‘discover themselves’, well into their thirties when I suspect there isn’t that much more to discover." Come on, this is nothing to do with travel; this is a pretext. People need constant new experiences. Perhaps a good marriage is essentially a new experience every day, and a bad one is the same one repeated. (There's probably an aphorism there, if I had the time, and inclination, to polish it.) And it worked for Paul Gauguin. (Shame I no longer have a reason to visit Edinburgh, because I would like to see his paintings there again.)
Agnes Callard has no interest in falcons, but this is somewhat Green Eggs and Ham-ish—you don't know until you've tried. At risk of being even more of a pain that I usually am, there is a mindful way of doing this, and it sounds like she wasn't. There's a small chance that you do this, then go home and relive "Kes" apart from the bird being killed. You probably won't, but you'll know something about yourself you didn't before. Personal growth, man.
Nice nuanced piece. Travel doesn't usually change our lives; but maybe the problem is the exaggerated claims that people make for it. One can learn from a holiday in the same modest way that one can learn from other small life experiences.
My answer to Callard's piece would be that the very counter-example she gives actually suggests why travel is valuable, in that modest way. She wasn't interested in falcons, but because it was "the thing to do in Abu Dhabi", she went anyway. In other words, she did something she doesn't usually do, and wouldn't normally have thought to do, because she was somewhere else. Maybe she was left underwhelmed; but she might have discovered a newfound, hitherto unsuspected fascination with birds of prey.
Fifteen years ago, I went to Vienna for a conference. I had a spare evening and I thought, "What does one do on a spare evening in Vienna?" - so I went to the opera. I was so delighted by the experience that when I got home I started going regularly. OK, that wasn't particularly a "life-changing experience". But I found a new hobby, a new passion - one I might not have discovered had I not travelled abroad.
Callard compares taking a holiday with emigrating, starting a job, or establishing a relationship. But those are unfair comparisons, because she's comparing something temporary with something lasting. Did I learn more, change more, in sixteen days in Slovenia last month than I have in sixteen years working in my present job? Of course not. Did I learn more, change more in sixteen days in Slovenia that I have in the last sixteen days back at home? I think so.
Many years ago a couple of things put me off travel. The first was when I was cycling along the coast of Ireland. I stopped at a place that I knew must be of interest because several tourist buses had pulled up in the car park. I stopped, locked up my bike and went closer to hear what the guide was saying to his charges, a group of elderly Japanese or Chinese tourists, mainly ladies. He was pointing towards the sea and particularly to a bay, saying that this is where Tristan and Isolde had done...something. I didn't hear what. I was too busy looking at the Japanese ladies quietly talking to each other, either unable to understand the guide or not interested. And why should they be? They had probably never heard of Tristan and Isolde and while I did know the names, that was all I knew. This made me wonder why I too visited cathedrals and churches and the houses that famous people had lived in, despite not really being very interested in them. I was much more like Philip Larkin's cyclist in his poem Church-going, who stops simply because he's bored.
The second thing happened 5 years later when I was living in San Sebastian in the Basque region of Spain. It was a beautiful tourist destination but on rainy days, of which there were many, there was very little to do in that town. Then I would see families with morose teenagers wandering the streets in their raingear, arguing about what to do next and generally getting on each others nerves. Another cup of coffee? Another Pintxo? Walk back along the grey seafront to the hotel? Since then I have pretty much stopped going on holiday. Instead I visit friends dotted around places where I have previously lived.
I genuinely wish I was more interested in the world and I love it when my Japanese students reel off all the places they want to visit when they have enough money to do so. It reminds me of the young protagonists in Joseph Conrad stories for whom the mere mention of the term 'the East' conjures up the magic and romance of far-off places. Nowadays, in my own mind, all that is conjured up is the feeling travel sickness on coaches, killing time waiting for the rain to stop and asking myself why I never learn that brochures OF COURSE don't include photos of ring roads and industrial estates.
When the people of the Eastern Bloc countries were first able to travel outside the Bloc in the early 1990's I often met groups of young East Germans and such taking advantage of the new ability to travel abroad. They were so enthusiastic that it made me feel a bit dead inside. Why didn't I travel more? I concluded it was because, unlike them, I had always been able to, thus lessening the thrill. I'm sure that, had I been in their place, I too would have spent endless nights dreaming of distant places I wanted to visit, if only I could.
I have a friend who is quite happy to go on holiday alone. She goes to all the tourist places and is perfectly happy. But when I see people sightseeing alone, especially women, I feel sad.
I wonder if travel losing its coolness (at least on X) is also due to it becoming somewhat boomer-coded. I recently had a chat with an older couple, who were extremely nice, but after their third story about the Maldives, or Dubai, or wherever, I admit I started to glaze over a bit. They were also frustrated about their kids not having kids, and despite them being in work not able to afford a decent flat, but then launched into an account of their third jaunt to the Caribbean that year, so it all began to get a bit Nicolas 30 ans. Probably unfair - I don't know what else they spent their money on - but I can understand zoomers souring on travel a bit if all the olds are splurging the inheritance on safaris.
One shouldn't need one's parents to kick off and leave an inheritance to afford a house of one's own. Any decent full time job should pay enough (and yes, often that's not true)
Thank you for making a pro-family argument for travel! I’ve really taken all the anti-travel arguments to heart, so it is nice to hear an argument that is not awash in shallow self-actualization language.
I’m the only one of my not quite 30 year old friends with a house, marriage, and child in New England, and my friends ask me how can I afford it. I tell them the same way they’ve afforded trips abroad every year since college. That’s not to minimize housing costs be crazy, kids being expensive etc., but it feels like my whole cohort of American white collar professionals don’t realize when they say they prefer experiences to things it really is a choice!
Even if I’ll remain the least well-travelled of my friends, I’m socking away a few hundred bucks a month into a vacation fund, so my children don’t have to be.
"I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals."
You sound like a real bore, Agnes Callard.
"The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return."
You don't know that, unless you were absolutely ossified before you left home. Even if you just go to Columbia, SC, you could meet someone or have an experience that broadens you in ways you hadn't expected.
"A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love."
It can be, if you're not a total stick already. Honestly, I though I was a drag, but Agnes Callard takes the cake. Like, totally meh.
As someone who definitely felt the romantic need to travel when I was younger to ‘arm myself with experience’ this hit home.
It had two lasting effects, a greater appreciation of my own land and wasting valuable years when I could’ve been stating my career like my peers.
Alain De Botton is good on the important role of Romanticism in inspiring this sort of travel in young people that I imagine most non westerners find very hard to understand.
It's interesting what you say about travel becoming "female-coded". No doubt the smartphone has played a substantial role. But isn't it also of a piece with the way in which cultural activities in general seem to have become of less interest to (heterosexual) men, at least within the Anglosphere?
I often reflect that a typical audience these days at the opera, or the theatre, or the cinema, consists of elderly straight couples, middle-aged gay couples, and little groups of female friends. It didn't used to be that way, and I still see plenty of young men taking their girlfriends to the opera in France or Germany.
I wonder, then, are more European guys travelling these days than British or American men?
With my Poirot hat (or possibly moustache) on, I deduce that Mr West is dictating and using a speech-to-text app: something I do myself most of the time when texting, being such a slow typist on my phone, but in the end it actually takes almost as long as typing, as one has to check very carefully to correct mistakes. This one obviously sneaked past him!
Someone once wrote something I liked about holidays, namely that they are the modern version of a religious pilgrimage. They are time away from your everyday life; getting to your destination is arduous; you see the ‘sites’ in the hope of an uplifting metaphysical experience, but don’t necessarily have one; you actually enjoy the eating and drinking and freedom from everyday strictures more than anything else; you collect a few relics to take home; and when you return home you feel superior to people who have not circumnavigated Svalbard in a pedalo or whatever.
An advantage of living in the US: There's lots and lots of America to see without crossing any international borders. I'm currently on a two week road trip in the upper Midwest-- later today I'll be crossing into Canada to visit an old favorite place up on Lake Superior. In the years I lived in Michigan (I moved away when I was 32) Canada was just next door and felt almost like home but with signs in metric and odd looking money. Now I really do feel like I'm going somewhere foreign, which I suppose I can partly blame of Donald Trump' stupid animus for that country, but also some on the post 9-11 passport requirement.
Well, this is a return to the familiar dour form! I think it's all a little harsh. Although I recognise some of the arguments against travel, I think every case is overstated.
Travel is memorable, and a holiday in Sri Lanka is probably more memorable than one in Dorset. I think it's worth giving your children memories. Kids probably don't spend enough social time with their parents now with the distractions of social media. Granted, flying across the world is an expensive way to get them off their phones.
I think some of the complaints about travel are purely status-driven. If you can't travel more than other people, brow beat them into travelling less, so your status is restored. Does anyone travel in order to "feel"? I get strong straw man vibes here, coupled with "It's just not my scene, man." (One for the oldies. Ah, YouTube https://youtu.be/v9FsEi2us88?si=LJuKtXrbA__w3hCj )
"The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started."
I don't think this is true. It wasn't true for me. It might drop you back, but in a slightly different place. Just one day visiting East Berlin dispelled any illusions I ever had of supporting Communism.
"I’ve heard of men leaving committed relationships and the prospect of raising a family because they wanted to go travelling and ‘discover themselves’, well into their thirties when I suspect there isn’t that much more to discover." Come on, this is nothing to do with travel; this is a pretext. People need constant new experiences. Perhaps a good marriage is essentially a new experience every day, and a bad one is the same one repeated. (There's probably an aphorism there, if I had the time, and inclination, to polish it.) And it worked for Paul Gauguin. (Shame I no longer have a reason to visit Edinburgh, because I would like to see his paintings there again.)
Agnes Callard has no interest in falcons, but this is somewhat Green Eggs and Ham-ish—you don't know until you've tried. At risk of being even more of a pain that I usually am, there is a mindful way of doing this, and it sounds like she wasn't. There's a small chance that you do this, then go home and relive "Kes" apart from the bird being killed. You probably won't, but you'll know something about yourself you didn't before. Personal growth, man.
Nice nuanced piece. Travel doesn't usually change our lives; but maybe the problem is the exaggerated claims that people make for it. One can learn from a holiday in the same modest way that one can learn from other small life experiences.
My answer to Callard's piece would be that the very counter-example she gives actually suggests why travel is valuable, in that modest way. She wasn't interested in falcons, but because it was "the thing to do in Abu Dhabi", she went anyway. In other words, she did something she doesn't usually do, and wouldn't normally have thought to do, because she was somewhere else. Maybe she was left underwhelmed; but she might have discovered a newfound, hitherto unsuspected fascination with birds of prey.
Fifteen years ago, I went to Vienna for a conference. I had a spare evening and I thought, "What does one do on a spare evening in Vienna?" - so I went to the opera. I was so delighted by the experience that when I got home I started going regularly. OK, that wasn't particularly a "life-changing experience". But I found a new hobby, a new passion - one I might not have discovered had I not travelled abroad.
Callard compares taking a holiday with emigrating, starting a job, or establishing a relationship. But those are unfair comparisons, because she's comparing something temporary with something lasting. Did I learn more, change more, in sixteen days in Slovenia last month than I have in sixteen years working in my present job? Of course not. Did I learn more, change more in sixteen days in Slovenia that I have in the last sixteen days back at home? I think so.
Many years ago a couple of things put me off travel. The first was when I was cycling along the coast of Ireland. I stopped at a place that I knew must be of interest because several tourist buses had pulled up in the car park. I stopped, locked up my bike and went closer to hear what the guide was saying to his charges, a group of elderly Japanese or Chinese tourists, mainly ladies. He was pointing towards the sea and particularly to a bay, saying that this is where Tristan and Isolde had done...something. I didn't hear what. I was too busy looking at the Japanese ladies quietly talking to each other, either unable to understand the guide or not interested. And why should they be? They had probably never heard of Tristan and Isolde and while I did know the names, that was all I knew. This made me wonder why I too visited cathedrals and churches and the houses that famous people had lived in, despite not really being very interested in them. I was much more like Philip Larkin's cyclist in his poem Church-going, who stops simply because he's bored.
The second thing happened 5 years later when I was living in San Sebastian in the Basque region of Spain. It was a beautiful tourist destination but on rainy days, of which there were many, there was very little to do in that town. Then I would see families with morose teenagers wandering the streets in their raingear, arguing about what to do next and generally getting on each others nerves. Another cup of coffee? Another Pintxo? Walk back along the grey seafront to the hotel? Since then I have pretty much stopped going on holiday. Instead I visit friends dotted around places where I have previously lived.
I genuinely wish I was more interested in the world and I love it when my Japanese students reel off all the places they want to visit when they have enough money to do so. It reminds me of the young protagonists in Joseph Conrad stories for whom the mere mention of the term 'the East' conjures up the magic and romance of far-off places. Nowadays, in my own mind, all that is conjured up is the feeling travel sickness on coaches, killing time waiting for the rain to stop and asking myself why I never learn that brochures OF COURSE don't include photos of ring roads and industrial estates.
When the people of the Eastern Bloc countries were first able to travel outside the Bloc in the early 1990's I often met groups of young East Germans and such taking advantage of the new ability to travel abroad. They were so enthusiastic that it made me feel a bit dead inside. Why didn't I travel more? I concluded it was because, unlike them, I had always been able to, thus lessening the thrill. I'm sure that, had I been in their place, I too would have spent endless nights dreaming of distant places I wanted to visit, if only I could.
I have a friend who is quite happy to go on holiday alone. She goes to all the tourist places and is perfectly happy. But when I see people sightseeing alone, especially women, I feel sad.
I wonder if travel losing its coolness (at least on X) is also due to it becoming somewhat boomer-coded. I recently had a chat with an older couple, who were extremely nice, but after their third story about the Maldives, or Dubai, or wherever, I admit I started to glaze over a bit. They were also frustrated about their kids not having kids, and despite them being in work not able to afford a decent flat, but then launched into an account of their third jaunt to the Caribbean that year, so it all began to get a bit Nicolas 30 ans. Probably unfair - I don't know what else they spent their money on - but I can understand zoomers souring on travel a bit if all the olds are splurging the inheritance on safaris.
One shouldn't need one's parents to kick off and leave an inheritance to afford a house of one's own. Any decent full time job should pay enough (and yes, often that's not true)
Thank you for making a pro-family argument for travel! I’ve really taken all the anti-travel arguments to heart, so it is nice to hear an argument that is not awash in shallow self-actualization language.
I’m the only one of my not quite 30 year old friends with a house, marriage, and child in New England, and my friends ask me how can I afford it. I tell them the same way they’ve afforded trips abroad every year since college. That’s not to minimize housing costs be crazy, kids being expensive etc., but it feels like my whole cohort of American white collar professionals don’t realize when they say they prefer experiences to things it really is a choice!
Even if I’ll remain the least well-travelled of my friends, I’m socking away a few hundred bucks a month into a vacation fund, so my children don’t have to be.
"I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals."
You sound like a real bore, Agnes Callard.
"The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return."
You don't know that, unless you were absolutely ossified before you left home. Even if you just go to Columbia, SC, you could meet someone or have an experience that broadens you in ways you hadn't expected.
"A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love."
It can be, if you're not a total stick already. Honestly, I though I was a drag, but Agnes Callard takes the cake. Like, totally meh.
Respite Ed…
As someone who definitely felt the romantic need to travel when I was younger to ‘arm myself with experience’ this hit home.
It had two lasting effects, a greater appreciation of my own land and wasting valuable years when I could’ve been stating my career like my peers.
Alain De Botton is good on the important role of Romanticism in inspiring this sort of travel in young people that I imagine most non westerners find very hard to understand.
It's interesting what you say about travel becoming "female-coded". No doubt the smartphone has played a substantial role. But isn't it also of a piece with the way in which cultural activities in general seem to have become of less interest to (heterosexual) men, at least within the Anglosphere?
I often reflect that a typical audience these days at the opera, or the theatre, or the cinema, consists of elderly straight couples, middle-aged gay couples, and little groups of female friends. It didn't used to be that way, and I still see plenty of young men taking their girlfriends to the opera in France or Germany.
I wonder, then, are more European guys travelling these days than British or American men?
I think you are onto something there. Men and boys have largely left the public sphere and meet in computer games and otherwise online.
"The eldest just wanted a rest bite from the sun." While I like the idea of a rest bite, I think you mean respite.
With my Poirot hat (or possibly moustache) on, I deduce that Mr West is dictating and using a speech-to-text app: something I do myself most of the time when texting, being such a slow typist on my phone, but in the end it actually takes almost as long as typing, as one has to check very carefully to correct mistakes. This one obviously sneaked past him!
Ha no just ‘holiday brain’. I’ve never used one of those
Someone once wrote something I liked about holidays, namely that they are the modern version of a religious pilgrimage. They are time away from your everyday life; getting to your destination is arduous; you see the ‘sites’ in the hope of an uplifting metaphysical experience, but don’t necessarily have one; you actually enjoy the eating and drinking and freedom from everyday strictures more than anything else; you collect a few relics to take home; and when you return home you feel superior to people who have not circumnavigated Svalbard in a pedalo or whatever.
An advantage of living in the US: There's lots and lots of America to see without crossing any international borders. I'm currently on a two week road trip in the upper Midwest-- later today I'll be crossing into Canada to visit an old favorite place up on Lake Superior. In the years I lived in Michigan (I moved away when I was 32) Canada was just next door and felt almost like home but with signs in metric and odd looking money. Now I really do feel like I'm going somewhere foreign, which I suppose I can partly blame of Donald Trump' stupid animus for that country, but also some on the post 9-11 passport requirement.