Why do we travel?
To tell the truth, I think most of us travel blindly.
Vaibhavi Addala–The Tech
I mentioned in a previous article that reading Jack Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveler made it clear that there are many ways people go about traveling. So when I had some free time on my hands this summer, I tried to reevaluate my own.
As someone who has always planned their trips obsessively, watching Kerouac from afar as he wandered through the world (or even experienced, as one might cloyingly say), I started to feel keenly how tiring my own way of traveling could be. As Kerouac took long walks through Paris and Tangier, veering off here and there to cry in a church or eat a three course meal for 95 cents, I grew tired of endlessly reading about what to do and where to go online, taking faceless peoples’ recommendations as dogma and planning my time down to the minute to fulfill them.
I had that clichéd realization that I was spending more time figuring out what to see than actually seeing things. I would grow anxious if something took longer than expected, afraid that we might fall behind schedule, unable to see the next thing. While this approach meant I always got to experience a lot in a small amount of time, it also meant there were many moments when I was tired and unhappy; sometimes, I never even ended up seeing anything that made me grow in a real way, so I wasn’t better for it at all. I was the same old person, except I now had a few more photos in my camera roll, and maybe a story or two to tell people who weren’t really interested.
A turning point was the beginning of my time in Germany. I had a long weekend and thought I’d make a day trip to the Black Forest — the otherworldly natural jewel of the Baden-Württemberg region — partly because that was what you were supposed to do, and partly because I was scared of not making the most of my time there. So I scheduled my train to Freiburg, the famous city in the region, and planned exactly what I wanted to do there. But my first train was delayed, and I missed my connection.
Despairing that I’d have to wait another hour for the next train, I caught a different train to another city called Baden-Baden, and was rather surprised at myself for doing something so “spontaneous.” In reality, however, Freiburg and Baden-Baden are both in the Black Forest; I did nothing revolutionary nor wild — at the end of the day, I simply took a different train. But as I walked around the idyllic town, free of tourists, I felt strangely happy. I struck up a conversation with an elderly couple (in German!) on a train that took passengers to the top of the Merkur Mountain. Once we got to the top, they called me inside the little mountaintop restaurant and insisted on treating me to coffee and a slice of Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, a specialty of the Black Forest region. We ended up staying in the restaurant for over an hour, just talking. After we finally said our goodbyes, I hiked around the top of the mountain and took in the splendid views of the uninterrupted Black Forest around me. And I felt a confusing kind of rushing happiness that I had rarely experienced before when traveling, yet I couldn’t really pinpoint where it came from.
Some weeks later, I started reading Lonesome Traveler. After cursing my way through the first bowls of word soup and getting used to going along with Kerouac instead of fighting him, I realized that I saw in his visceral writing the same mysterious joy I’d experienced earlier in Baden-Baden. Trying to figure out the source of that joy, I started to realize that maybe it was the fact that I had made this crazy beautiful connection with wonderful people, that I had a real human interaction that I wouldn’t have had if my first train had pulled in on time. It was because I felt like I was actively dictating my itinerary in situ, exactly at that moment, and not being bossed around by an arbitrary list. In other words, I had experienced the beauty (darn! some clichés are true!) of surprises and spontaneity, that little bit of free will you take back when you fold up your list, stuff it in your back pocket, and just start walking.
Yet this simple truth hides very well in plain sight, because the incessant need to constantly see and do is powerful. Part of this need certainly comes from within. There is a significant part of me — maybe it’s the engineer lurking within — that wants to optimize and maximize, to get the greatest output for my input. But when the need to see is so deeply embedded in us, when what should be common sense feels revolutionary, then it has to come at least in part extrinsically. The more I think about it, the more conscious I become of it: we have this push these days to see as much of the world as quickly as possible, as if the world could ever be seen!
Why is there such a strong, pervasive belief that we should travel, especially when we’re young? I’ve heard many answers: that we should see the world before we start taking an active part in it; that seeing other places will open our eyes and give us perspective; hell, that maybe we’ll learn something fundamental about ourselves on long train rides and hikes up mountains, surrounded as we are by the history and scenery of a new place.
But to be honest, I think we’ve heard these answers so many times that we’ve adopted them blindly to the point of being meaningless. It seems to me that these are the reasons we give to justify our travels, not the reasons for them in the first place.
Because to tell you the truth, I think most of us travel blindly. We travel partly because deep down, after a rigorous year at school, it’s easy to travel. It’s pleasurable and broadly exciting to escape “reality” and see something new and embark on an adventure, which is, after all, the surface-level attraction that Kerouac writes about. All the while, as an easy justification, we have the vague notion that it’s worthwhile, because others tell us it is.
In all honesty, we’re not traveling because we have any real desire to open our eyes to the world, or to see it before we start actively participating in it. We aren’t running off to Florence for the weekend to learn some fundamental truths about ourselves on the plane ride over there. We’re going to Florence because there’s a grueling itinerary we found online and we’ve got nothing to do, or because there’s pasta and gelato and hedonistic pleasures to chase — in either case, because it means that we don’t have to think for a while.
We run around the continent because it feels fun and easy and a little mindless, and honestly, because it makes you feel grown up to have been to a few more glorious places whose names you can casually drop into pretentious conversations at Maseeh Dining. “When I was at the Uffizi…” you can say nonchalantly over mysterious soup concoctions, like a character out of This Side of Paradise, and you get a bit of a thrill out of watching the other person’s eyes light up with wanderlust and a little envy. So you tell them about seeing Michaelangelo’s David and climbing to the top of the Duomo, never letting it drop that you thought the Florence you saw was honestly a little overrated, all those (undoubtedly beautiful) Renaissance paintings you contemplated because you were told to do so. You don’t say — maybe you don’t realize — you’d probably have gotten more out of those days if they were spent in Yosemite, or Marfa, Texas, or even at home. Or maybe you do go around telling people you found Florence to be overrated, because it means that you at least went there. You went there, and you were above it — that’s how much of an adult you are. So now you’ve seen Florence. It’s another city on the list you can check off. Don’t worry, you’re not letting your youth go to waste. Onto the next one.
This culture self-perpetuates. The pressure to go out and see as much as you possibly can is exacerbated by the fact that everyone around you seems to be doing it too. Everyone else is having a real thrilling, young people’s jet-set European summer — I mean, shouldn’t I be having one too? Okay, type “where to go in Europe” into Google. Pause a second while the AI Overview loads. Barcelona? Milan? Amsterdam?
Don’t get me wrong, I still want to see whatever it is I am “supposed to see,” as there is often great wisdom in the collective. It’s clear that cities like Venice and London and Paris are beloved for a reason — I would go back in an instant to visit each of them. Of course, I wouldn’t mind visiting Barcelona some day and doing some of the things tourists are supposed to do there, and naturally, I’ll do some research before I go. But my point is that if I miss something on my big ol’ American Gen Z Internet Age checklist because I was wandering through the city, stopping to remember things and bumping into hidden gems, I’ll try not to be so sorry anymore. It won’t be easy, but isn’t it worth a try?