Opinion
Does travelling turn you into a worse person?
Ben Groundwater
Travel writerI love to travel. I’d always thought it was OK to say that, to claim it as a particular interest.
Some people love music. Some love sport. Others art. But the driving passion of my life is travel, the experience of going somewhere new, somewhere different, somewhere that moves me in some way, thrills me, educates me, stokes an emotional response.
I’d thought that was OK, until Agnes Callard told me it wasn’t. Callard is an American philosopher who recently penned a widely shared story for The New Yorker called “The Case Against Travel”.
A single trip may not change you completely, but each time you travel had an impact on who you are.Credit: iStock
“What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make?” Callard begins. “My nominee would be ‘I love to travel’. This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.”
What follows is Callard’s case against travel’s worth as a pastime, as a passion, even as an agent of change. Quoting the likes of Socrates, Kant and the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, she argues that travel doesn’t change the traveller at all – it merely forces change upon those being visited.
She talks a lot about “locomotion”, too: the idea that people who travel are just moving, rather than learning or understanding. It’s movement for movement’s sake. A box-ticking exercise that achieves nothing on any measurable scale of importance.
Travel gives you the freedom to break the shackles of normality.Credit: Switzerland Tourism
So, what’s the response to this? What’s the case for travel?
I would begin by pointing out the flaw in Callard’s opening paragraph, where she subtly shifts from the phrase “love to travel” to “nearly everyone likes to travel”.
Love and like are very different things. I’m sure nearly everyone does like to travel. But nearly everyone likes music, too. They probably listen to the radio all the time. Do they love music though? Do they make music? Would they say it defines their lives?
Not everyone loves to travel. Not by a long shot. (Though apparently Callard does: “In the great many cities I have actually lived and worked in,” she says at one point. Um… that’s travel.)
There’s also a misunderstanding in this piece of the way travel affects those who do it. Callard seems to expect sweeping changes in the personality of anyone who goes on a week-long holiday, and points out travel’s uselessness when that doesn’t seem to happen.
“Travel is a boomerang,” she writes. “It drops you right where you started. Cast your mind to any friends who are soon to set off on summer adventures. In what condition do you expect to find them when they return? They may speak of their travel as though it were transformative … but will you be able to notice a difference in their behaviour, their beliefs, their moral compass? Will there be any difference at all?”
I mean, maybe. Depends on where they went. What they did. How long they were away for.
Every single journey, to me – even if it’s just to a campsite a few hours from home – subtly moulds who you are, how you behave and what you believe.
It’s rare to have a mind-blowing and obvious epiphany. What’s more likely is that your travel experiences and your observations of the world will make just small adjustments to who you are, like a piece of clay with the lightest thumbprint. Over time, all those prints will have changed your form completely.
Think of all the travel you’ve done, all the places you’ve been, all the people you’ve met, all the things you’ve seen. Can you honestly say you would be exactly the same person you are today if you hadn’t experienced all that? I can’t. It’s ridiculous.
Callard also argues travel’s flaws by pointing out that the way we act in new places is completely different to the way we would act at home, and that that somehow makes it inauthentic as an experience.
But I would say that’s the entire point. Travel gives you freedom to break the shackles of normality. It gives you the chance to try out new interests, to experiment with new ways of being, to tinker with who you are and what you could be while no one is watching.
You have to try to ignore, then, the whiff of snobbery in Callard’s article, which implies that having the means to live and work in a “great many cities” makes your experiences more valid than someone who can only afford a few weeks off a year.
You encounter different cultures while travelling.Credit: Bloomberg
Instead, make the case for travel by pondering a world in which it doesn’t exist. No one moves anywhere. No one experiences life outside their small bubble of existence. No one sees other countries, no one discovers foreign cultures, no one witnesses any different ways of being. No one welcomes any visitors to their homes either, anyone with a different language, a different style, a different point of view.
Would that make the world a better place? Or worse? Would people have a better understanding of the Earth and humanity, or worse? Would they care about other people in other places more, or less? Would tourism-dependent countries, particularly in the developing world, be in a better position, or worse?
You already know the answer. Yes, travel might seem pointless sometimes, or a purely vanity-driven exercise. And certainly, it doesn’t affect everyone the same way: sometimes people return and you can’t believe their impressions, you can’t comprehend that they’ve been to the same places you have and come away with such fundamentally different conclusions.
But travel opens the mind. Of that I’m sure. Maybe it only eases it ajar. Maybe it blasts through the wall like the Kool-Aid man. That’s up to the circumstances, and your openness to them.
Travel is a worthy pursuit, one that’s a fundamental good. And some people – maybe even a lot of people – truly love it.
Sign up for the Traveller newsletter
The latest travel news, tips and inspiration delivered to your inbox. Sign up now.