The Global Travel Bug

Admittedly, the notion of "traveling the world" is a rather broad ⁠—⁠ nay, let's be honest: a massively vague and essentially meaningless ⁠—⁠ concept. What exactly does it mean to "travel the world"? Is it about hitting up every single nation-state on the map, like collecting caps for a beverage bottle? Is it about immersing yourself in each distinct culture, mastering the folkways and tongues, until you can pass as a native-born child of that landmass? Is it more of a Phileas Fogg-type gig, where you just hopscotch around different continents and cities, checking the boxes as quickly as possible? There are manifold ways to interpret the idea, each with its own respective merits and pitfalls.

But let's be real: for most of us, the driving force behind any sort of global trek is the insuperable American lust for newness, for novel sensory inputs, for a temporary escape from the existential ennui of our homebound routines. We crave the frisson of the unfamiliar, the subtle voltage that comes from being a fish out of water. We want to be regressed, however briefly, to a state of childlike wonder, where the most mundane sights and sounds have the lustered sheen of novelty. It's a sort of psychological caprice, this desire to slough off our jadedness through sheer changes in topography and culture.

But of course, the truth is that no matter how far afield we roam, we're never all that far from ourselves. Our particular cognitive conscriptions ⁠— our ingrained lenses of perception, the synaptic templates that determine how we process and integrate every experience ⁠— these are inescapable. They are the atmospheric constants through which every new landscape is inevitably filtered. No matter where we go, there we are.

And this, I'd humbly suggest, is the central paradox — and perhaps even the central tragedy — of world travel. We seek to slough off our habits and biases, but they remain stubbornly affixed. We crave the frisson of dislocation, but we're trapped in the familiarity of our own subjectivity. The world is radically new, but we cannot be radically new ourselves. We are, in the end, beholden to the tyranny of our own consciousness.

Not that this self-implicating reality should dissuade us from buying that plane ticket and hitting the road. There's still something to be said for the sheer spectacle of novel vistas, for the simple delights of tasting new cuisines and absorbing new aesthetics. But we'd be wise to retain a certain humility about the whole endeavor. We'd be prudent to acknowledge that, for all our wayfaring, we remain tethered to the perspectival singularity that is our own mind. We are, in the end, both rooted and rootless, both embedded and estranged, both cosmopolitan citizens and forever aliens. Such is the human condition when undertaking that supposedly fun thing of trying to travel the world.