I’ve heard many people say that their number 1 priority for retirement is to travel. Foreign visitors on Chicago Greeter tours have told me that they go abroad at least once a year. Conversations are often about the vacation people just returned from or will soon depart for.
I, however, am not taking every opportunity to see the world. Maybe it’s that everything would be crossed off if I had a bucket list. I have traveled a good amount in the United States and Canada and have gone to Europe three times. Or maybe it’s that I live in a big city with attractions people come here for.
Ambivalence about travel isn’t a recent development, though. It baffled me for a long time that I did not experience travel’s vaunted returns. Isn’t it supposed to uplift us in some way? I’d return home thinking that I was still the same.
Figuring there must be a skill to travel, I set out in the 1990s to learn it. Perhaps my problem was approaching travel like an assignment, crossing must-sees off a list. The plan was to learn how to travel in destinations within a four-hour drive. Because I could return to them easily, I wouldn’t feel pressured to rush around and see everything.
I took five weeklong vacations in the Midwest. The exercise resulted in a self-published book but not in an end to pondering the rationale of traveling. As I listened to people gush about their last vacation and plan their next; as articles, books, and advertising promoted once-in-a-lifetime trips, I detected an assumption that travel is a sine qua non of a fulfilled life. The more and farther you traveled, the more you had lived. If you didn’t have the money or the inclination to travel, you’d missed out.
The attitude seemed elitist, and it bothered me. I was glad, therefore, to read an essay by Phil Christman in the Hedgehog Review. “To imply that travel is necessary . . . is just snobbery,” Christman wrote. “I think the overvaluing of it is a species of privileged self-congratulation.”
University of Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard also wrote a derisive article, “A Case Against Travel.” “Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people,” she wrote in the New Yorker. We delude ourselves, Callard believes. While supposedly being open to experience, tourists rely on “conventional wisdom about what you are or are not supposed to do in a place” and are disappointed if a sight doesn’t match the postcard views. Discounting their own feelings, they are incapable of judging whether an experience is authentic. While they tell themselves that a trip was transformative, they return with the same interests and beliefs. If you doubt that, Callard said, have any of your friends been different after they returned from a trip?
“Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it,” Collard conceded. “What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. . . . [W]hy insist on its meaning?”
Googling, I found a few other bah humbug articles. I don’t share all of their negativity but admired their courage to dissent from the prevailing view. I realized that the source of my ambivalence wasn’t travel itself but society’s messages about its import.
What if I looked on travel as simply a fun thing to do and stopped seeking meaning from it? Indeed, the great majority of my trips were enjoyable. Some were memorable, like seeing my ancestral villages in Slovakia and Luxembourg, the historic sites of Boston and Philadelphia, the Alps and the Rockies. But were they necessary to my development? I’m no longer asking that of travel.
I adjusted my expectations and started to think of travel as an interest, not a necessity. Of exploration as something to do continuously instead of for a special week or two each year. I can be a traveler at home, regularly getting out to museum exhibits, performances, and interesting neighborhoods. That I can do at a leisurely pace, without must-see lists, without straining to find meaning.
“I don’t really travel much except at other people’s instigation. I never feel I am done seeing what’s around me,” Phil Christman wrote. “[T]he quality of attention we bring to things is more important than the freshness of the things we bring attention to.”
It’s not that I never leave home. I think that a change of scene is valuable. But I don’t need to go hundreds or thousands of miles away. I’ll get on an airplane now and then, but I’ve stopped thinking about must-sees. I’m not going to worry that I missed out by not getting to every destination in 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. I’m not going to worry that I went to New York but not to the top of the Empire State Building. Life offers many more possibilities than any of us could ever take advantage of.
Note: I had this post written before "Visiting ancestors’ homeland is a trip to remember” and hesitated about publishing what seems a contrary opinion. Trying to reconcile the two posts, I’ll say that while no longer seeking meaning from travel, I found it visiting ancestral roots.