The merit of travel

This is the second part of an article that I started to write in response to the piece that Agnes Cillard published in The New Yorker under the title "The Case Against Travel". There were just so many point where I disagreed that I decided to split my argumentation. I doubt you will ever read these lives, Ms. Cillard, but if you do, please stay assured that I have no personal beef against you, it is just that yours was an unfortunate piece of journalism.

In the first part I contested the formal parts of the argumentation, in particular the resort to authority and the assumption that all travel responded to the same reasons. Today I will argue why there are a number of reasons why travel shall not only be considered "an achievement", but it should even be advised to anyone who does not have compelling reasons against it.

Photo: David Wan

The main argument of the article is that the typical traveler can say without any intellectual discomfort that they will be the same person when they come back that they were before leaving, so there is actually no point in travelling. However, this argument relies on a well-known illusion: that our identity, our personality is only one and it is stable over time.

If you have ever been invited for dinner to a colleague's place, you have probably realized how they seem to be a different person, and that is because from a functional point of view, they are: actions and attitudes that they regularly apply at work are not visible in the family life and, vice versa, previously unknown traits show themselves when they are surrounded by their loved ones. Recently I heard a podcast where American psychologist Tim Wilson pointed out the inexplicable differences in the impression that a person can make depending on the situation. We can debate if that level of difference is just another manifestation of the same personality or a whole other personality whatsoever, but the contrast can be quite strong.

But even accepting that our personality could be just one, its permanence is only a useful illusion. Thinking about ourselves as essentially immutable is very useful because it saves us the effort of constantly reconsidering our opinions: since we reached that conclusion five, ten or twenty years ago and we are the same person we can stand by our old decision, even to the point of discounting evidence that might prove our opinion wrong. However, our personality is not less mutable than our face. It is true that we are inclined to think that we look the same, day after day, when we see ourselves in the mirror every morning, but that is only because the changes over a single day are mostly minuscule . Then we open the family album and recognize that "that is not what my face looks like" and stay in shock for ten full seconds before we forget about it and go back to thinking that we are who we have always been and will continue to be.

In spite of this useful delusion, I like to think of our personality as a boulder on the river bed: we start out with a given shape and the water flows around us. At the top of the river, where the current is strong, it frequently manages to drag us around, occasionally chipping our one edge or the other. As time goes by and we have less edges and a gentler current the changes in the shape of our boulder became few and far between. Even a moderate swell of the river might be insufficient to dislodge us from the comfortable position we have found, and we almost stop changing.

This is the part where travel (among other things) can be more than just helpful, a real blessing. By  Cillard's own admission traveling means renouncing your well-established preferences:

When you travel, you suspend your usual standards for what counts as a valuable use of time. You suspend other standards as well, unwilling to be constrained by your taste in food, art, or recreational activities.

However, contrary to her interpretation this interpretation is not wasteful but a designated period of open experimentation. Most people do not avoid museums in their daily lives, they just cannot afford to visit them in their tight schedules. In fact, it is common happening that, once we set some time aside to host visitors from out of town, we end up visiting the museums that we never found the time to visit. So when you find yourself with a whole week of vacation in Europe it is not surprising that you try to take advantage of the unusual availability of time and find yourself vising one museum each day.

Similarly, when it comes to food scarcity of time and occasions is an issue at home: you do not want to squander the one weekend per month that you have alone with your partner on a bad meal, but when you have a week of dining out every single day, there is plenty of room for experimentation. By setting apart a certain budget and period of time explicitly for the vacation, you are breaking free of the constraints of your everyday life and, as I wrote in a previous article, "be crazy".

One important aspect of the vacation is its exploratory nature. All (at least most) humans are naturally risk averse and introducing a substantial change in your life is always a risk. I have talked in the past about how the idea of an event or activity might be substantially different from the memory that you get after the fact, because reality is way more complex than we can usually imagine. Vacation gives us the rare opportunity of getting a change in our lives while we know that we will be safely back into our usual selves soon. And this is not, as Cillard pretends, that we are "the same person that we were before" or "change for the sake of change". Instead, it exposes us to a different situation and allows us to learn something in the process. Even if the lesson is "only" that we did not like what we did.

The journalist herself describes a perfect example from her visit to Abu Dhabi: she had never considered her own interest in falconry, but being there, where falconry is all around, unexpectedly lowered the barriers to get in touch with this activity. Something that would have taken her days of planning and possibly a full day to execute, happened for her in the middle of another trip in the course of an hour. Even if the only "achievement" was to confirm that falcons as just unpleasant to be around as she feared, she was changed by the experience, from a person with neutral-negative impression of falcons to one with a strong negative one. She also turned into a person that can tell an anecdote from a trip to Abu Dhabi ten years ago...

The final comment I would like to make is about the derisive tone that she uses by reducing the travel to the term "locomotion". I tend to agree that some travelers seem to have as their only goal the "right" to claim that they have been to a certain place, and that it is a poor justification for the travel. But this evaluation fails to appreciate that the locomotion entails a whole suite of other activities which are frequently not reported, but that are as much in the essence of the travel as the target. In fact, the expression "the journey is the destination" has almost become a trope in Western culture, because traveling outside our daily commute routes can be an endless source of happenstance and anecdotes for a person with a keen eye. From the scary eyes of the taxi driver taking you to the airport to the surprising weather in Laponia in the summer, there are hundreds of new experiences in any single trip that would go lost if the trip did not take place. And it is true that one can easily be underwhelmed by the view of the Grand Canyon, but if you have run into a friendly park ranger or discover and off flower in a corner between rocks the day has already paid off. In this direction, Russian-born psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky has conducted extensive research on the impact that these often-undervalued item have on us. The key is being ready to catch these glimpses of knowledge and happiness before they vanish. 

As a closing remark I would like to point out that, at the end of the day, traveling is a form of leisure not that different from others like taking a walk, reading a book or watching a movie. The fact that I understand and share those hobbies does not make them better, they are just mine. So as long as it happens within the legal framework that we have given to ourselves I do not believe that anyone should advocate against it. And the judgement of whether each individual trip is worth the time and the money, is something that I prefer (actually I insist on) leaving to the individual traveler. I might not share in the same alluring points as anybody else, but I will always defend their right to enjoy their own trips, walks, books and movies. Finally, to the question of "what for?" is something that I will try to answer another day. Have a nice evening.