What do your travels say about you?
Why are there people on social media who list all the countries they’ve traveled to?
In their profile, right next to their face and name, typically using a series of emoji flags. Sometimes there are so many they look like those military badges , but their supposed meaning is even more perplexing.
Other people instead seem to think that countries are like Pokémon, so they specify the amount they’ve collected using numbers, like, “43 countries visited out of 200” — they keep you updated on their Pokédex progress.
But in almost all cases there’s no other information about them other than a corny quote or a vague title such as Traveler, Wanderer, or even better… Wanderlust. They introduce themselves saying, “Hi, nice to meet you, do you know I’ve been to Japan, India and Peru? Now you do. I bet you can’t wait to get to know me now that you have this information about me. I have the same thought too, sometimes, when I look at my profile. If I could follow myself I would.”
Having traveled is not an identity
It’s as if they think that letting people know which countries they’ve traveled to is useful, because it sets them apart in some significant way, or at least communicates something unmistakable about them — a rare quality perhaps?
In reality, it betrays insecurity. The clearest thing it reveals about their personality is that they really want to feel special. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just not a good way to do it, because having traveled is not an identity. Collecting airline tickets — or anything else that can be bought with a credit card — is not a skill to be proud of. It’s more like an expensive pastime.
It would be much more useful, for example, to write how they earn their money to make people understand something about who they are and what life they lead. But no, they prefer letting the flags of Mongolia and Morocco speak for them.
The Traveler Costume
They use their passport as the shiny object in a bait-and-switch fraud scheme. To appear interesting they try to hint at the idea that behind the many destinations they’ve reached there are stories worth listening to — but they very rarely tell them in detail. It’s all implied, and in the end very little is revealed. This is a way of being typical of social media, which are ideal habitats for people without substance.
But they do it because they know that wearing the Traveler Costume has some type of positive effect on some, especially those who unfortunately have not traveled much, and therefore still have a somewhat naive view of it: They think that setting foot in a foreign country they’ll automatically have experiences out of the ordinary, they’ll see things that without having been there one can only imagine, and so they’ll come back different from those who have not done the same, perhaps a little wiser.
This story, however, is not very realistic. Maybe it could’ve been 100 years ago. Today the world is close at hand, interconnected, traveling is not the only way to learn about other cultures. In fact, countries are now so intertwined you almost can’t avoid being influenced by what happened yesterday on the other side of the globe.
More than ever, what enriches you as an individual is not where you’ve been, but what you’ve done where you’ve been, and with whom.
The Traveler’s Curriculum
Here’s a much more credible story: Sometimes you travel but you don’t end up doing anything particularly memorable.
Not all trips, in fact, are destined to be filled with exciting events. The more of them you do, the more evident this becomes. People who travel a lot, even around the world, often get so bored that they can’t wait to stop, get an apartment, and go to IKEA.
There are trips that change the way you see the universe, and trips that only make you regret not staying at home. You really believed that over-saturated ad of that exotic beach, but when you went there, there was a storm. Or you were on your period and you found out that your boyfriend was the most boring person in the world. Or you had diarrhea the entire week and now you can’t help but think of Belgium every time you flush.
But no one puts those trips at the beginning of their Traveler’s Curriculum. Or at least, people usually avoid mentioning the less appealing parts. Like that embarrassing thing you luckily did in that country where no one knew you, in front of people you still hope to see never again.
When someone asks you what Belgium was like, in the end you decided to simply answer with, “Interesting.”
Turkish McDonald’s
But even the trips where everything went smoothly aren’t always long adventures to proudly share with the world. This is one of the reasons why those who are close to getting a world map tattooed on their foreheads are particularly suspicious.
By putting on display the countries they’ve been to, it’s as if they wanted to signal that they’ve developed a certain familiarity and knowledge of them — surely enough to add them, at some point, to their public list of accomplished trips — but how credibile would that be if those trips lasted a few days, and consequently took place within the range of some kilometers, without having significant interactions with the local people?
That’s how the vast majority of trips go, so there’s no good reason to assume more. Indeed, the more someone seems to have traveled — especially if young and can’t keep it to himself — the more it makes sense to think they did this kind of hit-and-run traveling, hopping from destination to destination without soaking up much.
Alright, you set foot in that country, but can you say that you know anything of substance about it, without being dishonest with yourself and therefore with others? You’ve visited Turkey, but what did you explore of Turkey apart from a couple neighborhoods of Istanbul, in just one week, including the hours you spent at the airport? What did you see besides what that app recommended? Did you eat where the locals eat, or in the type of restaurant that deforms the local cuisine to make it palatable to tourists? Or even worse, at McDonald’s? Yes, it was Turkish McDonald’s… but it’s McDonald’s.
Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with having that kind of experiences, since they’re much better than sitting in a room looking at a screen. It would be foolish, however, if they had gone that way, to think you know little more than zero of the place you came back from, or to believe that the memories of that short stay represent the daily experience of those who live there. You don’t know what it’s like to be a citizen of that country because you spent a week among them on vacation. You had a privileged, detached point of view on it — ultimately, that was the reason why you went there: to take advantage of the good sides, be subjected to none of the bad, and leave a bit fatter.
So even if that hotel sucked, thinking that all the others did too would make no sense. And the same can be said in the opposite case, a positive experience. Two women gave you a little smile even if in your country you’re invisible to them, but trust me, you’re not the prototype of the ideal man in Spain. They were just polite, because one was a cashier and the other a waitress.
This all sounds banal, yet it’s surprisingly common to hear the latest traveler — even a sensible one — talk about that country and those people with total confidence, feeling more justified in using stereotypes than those who have not been there.
Mordor’s airport
But there’s a reason why we instinctively think of trips and travelers in a generous, romantic way, even if it almost never matches with reality. It’s a profound one because it has to do with our past, and with what distinguishes us from all other living creatures. No, it’s not the opposable thumb. Even frogs have that.
It’s our appreciation for stories. Stories are as important as food to us. We use stories to give order to the events of our lives, and we need stories to learn new ways of being.
The most important stories we have inherited are about travel. The plot usually goes like this: The protagonist, driven by an unexpected event, travels to a distant, unknown place. On the way there he learns new things, is subjected to tests, and eventually returns transformed, evolved.
It seems like an obvious formula, but it continues to be used, even if the world changes radically, because in it we can’t help but recognize ourselves all in some way. We seek to live lives that are as rich as that of a character in an odyssey, even if actually doing it isn’t possible, since life is not as simple as a story. And it’s for the same reason that those people try so hard to portray their lives in the same way on social media, posting every photo in a different country. But no matter how synthetic they may seem, for a moment we can’t help but be allured by them, because a series of photos is more than enough to convey a narrative that reminds us of the stories we heard. Most people must have had the same impression watching the shows of Anthony Bourdain — likely the first travel influencer — who seemed to live the ideal life being famous while getting paid to travel the world. (He hanged himself.)
One of the more pragmatic ways to explain the frequency of the traveling theme in old stories is to reflect on the fact that until recently doing it was a big deal. Every trip really was a long adventure to proudly recount once returned. It couldn’t be otherwise. Airplanes have been around for less than 120 years — cars, trains, and even bicycles, for a little more. And what are 100 years compared to the average age of politicians?
The most used means of transport for thousands of years, therefore, were: legs, four-legged animals, boats. Nothing to be nostalgic about, in short. Tourism could not exist in those conditions, also because hardly anyone could’ve afforded the luxury of wandering. The only way to get to know different cultures was listening to the stories of those who had encountered them — the alternative was going there in person, but reaching a foreign country meant going through a slow, tiring, dangerous process. Today we also take for granted the existence of electric light and public street lighting, but walking down any unknown path at night without a flashlight would still make the best horror movie seem like one from Disney.
The travelers of the past were not ordinary people, they were resilient and above all brave, since there was a good chance of never returning home, and those who succeeded often showed the signs of what they had been through. Because even if they arrived in one piece, they wouldn’t necessarily receive a warm welcome from the local people, who weren’t used to seeing foreigners. Traveling to a truly unexplored place you could literally risk dying pierced by the spear of a native, or more likely of some disease that was incurable at the time. If you were among the lucky ones, you had to see at least one of your companions die in an ugly way.
Today, it’s not quite the same.
In fact, traveling is now so pain-free that it can be one of the most uneventful activities one can do.
The most common difficulties that modern travelers face are:
Getting bored at the airport
Finding the seats slightly uncomfortable once they get on the plane
Panicking after finding out that they’ll have to exist without having an internet connection for a few hours
The risks they run, instead, are:
Not being able to make a reservation in their favorite resort
Losing their phone but whatever it was old and the screen was broken
Returning not having enough good photos where they’re surrounded by poor children to post as proof that they’re very good people
For better or worse, many of those classic stories would turn out much less interesting set in the current era. If Little Red Riding Hood had taken the subway instead of walking through a forest, the worst thing she would’ve found in her grandmother’s bed would’ve been a door-to-door salesman. If Frodo had landed at Mordor’s airport and had reached the volcano by taking an orc’s taxi, the movie would’ve been much shorter.
Unfortunately, there’s little that’s epic in queuing for check-in.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to brumale to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.