Thread by @RageSheen

Just back from a short holiday. The country is awash with travellers, and as vast numbers are now retired or retiring, it’s getting worse.

As a culture, a dominant desire at retirement is to ‘see the world’. Even the world at home. It’s a window we need to peer through. /1

Of course people don’t wait for retirement to get out there and travel. It’s an obsession now for all ages. But retirement is treasured because it can then become a near perpetual activity.

It’s always our most common, habitual things that hide our deepest secrets. /2

I’ve Tweeted a lot about travel, how I think it’s a desperate search for something we fundamentally don’t understand.

A search for place. By a culture still framed by old imperial categories of space, a very different thing. /3

Empires accumulate places, as spaces. As literal areas on maps. They live inside maps, not inside the places they accumulate.

In the West we’re still driven by desperate desires to accumulate places. What we as travellers call ‘sights’ and ‘experiences’. /4

Feeling that by visiting somewhere, we’re somehow experiencing it in a more authentic way, and it’s shaping us in turn.

That it’s broadening our minds. If this was true, the growth in travel in the past decades should have introduced transcendental levels of mind-broadening. /5

I’m not seeing it. If anything the world seems more stupid today than when the travel obsession began. And that travel is trashing locations, destroying them.

That’s because our itineraries are mostly in our own heads. We travel through our fantasies. /6

Fantasies spawned by our imitative social lives. We travel mostly so that we can tell and show other people, that we’ve travelled.

It’s another status game. The number of off-piste travel experiences proliferates, to differentiate the status of the ‘seasoned’ traveller. /7

All a wank. There is no more authentic travel. None that brings you any closer to where you’re visiting. You’re always just a visitor.

Last week I saw suburban streets with signs saying ‘only locals allowed’. That’s where we’ve arrived, as a culture. /8

People simultaneously obsessively driven to travel with every spare moment, and furious that everybody else is doing the same thing.

It’s stupid layered upon stupid. Because we’re not diagnosing this desire. /9

We feel compelled to travel, to try to fill an existential void in our own culture. The absence of place, of any understanding of what that means.

The incapacity to just BE. The desperate need for distraction from that void, an insatiable hunger for titillation. /10

Empires are never satisfied with their lot. It’s why they’re empires. They always want to expand, to accumulate more.

We’re still culturally infected by that desire, even though our empires are now crumbling. /11

We see the pinnacle of our life’s work now as the freedom to finally travel full-time. To become full-time tourists, not just in other lands, but even in our own.

Tourists in our own land! It’s absolutely, perversely bizarre even as an idea. /12

We’re accumulating more and more sights and experiences, trying to fill that simple void. That satisfaction of just being, which needs for nothing.

There was a time when a special place was accepted to be just that. Special. To be left alone. Make your own special place. /13

Now we must possess it, have it. Like geographical stalkers. Believing that if it’s beautiful, we MUST be allowed to have our share of it.

As a kid we looked at pictures of beautiful places. That was enough. Just as one human is usually enough, in a relationship. /14

You make your own place beautiful. And look at pictures of others. Those places are only beautiful in the first place because those cultures made them that. They understood place.

We won’t fill the void by accumulating more sights, more experiences.

/end