What does travel mean today?
It has often been said that millennials prefer spending the little money they have on “experiences” rather than things. This usually means travel. Millennials travel more than any other generation.
But it is not the case that millennials are especially interested in foreign cultures and lands—far from it. They aren’t traveling to foreign lands to learn about different cultures or ways of life. They are traveling just to do it—for the pure form of moving around in space a lot.
In his essay on the meaning of the modern travel industry, the sociologist Siegfried Kracauer points out that “what people seek is less the particular being of a landscape than the foreignness of its face.” People don’t travel today because they want to see a particular foreign place—they just want to go somewhere that isn’t here, to some different point in space.
For Kracauer, travel has become formalized. Travel used to be a distinct event that had its own meaning and content—it just happened to unfold in space. Space was covered during the unfolding of the event.
But now the transformation of space—going to a different place within space—has become branded as the event itself. Travel is purely about form—the event doesn’t matter.
Travel used to be about an event in someone’s life. You would be doing something, as part of your life, and it would happen in different places. You would be moving around a lot in your life doing things, and that leads to different places sometimes. That’s what travel used to be—something that happened in your life.
Not anymore. With travel now, you put your life on hold, and you travel to a place just to do it. It isn’t a part of your life at all—rather, the opposite; it requires a pausing of your life. You travel to get away from your life, rather than as something that just happened to take place in your life. Life used to be so expansive and full that you would go to different places as part of it—now, life is so narrow and empty that you never go anywhere unless you make a specific point to do it.
The effect this has on travel itself is doubly negative. It makes too much out of travel, by focusing on it as its own thing, rather than just as part of your overall life—and it also makes too little of travel, by emptying it out of its natural content and meaning, and making it just a formal exercise.
Travel has thus become both more and less than it ought to be—an impressive achievement, making something both more and less than it ought to be, isn’t it? How could we have managed this kind of thing? But this is how effortlessly skilled we have become at inventing new ways of making everything awful.
Multiple times when I've traveled, I developed a bad case of ennui which is almost paralyzing. Maybe it's because so much looks and feels the same now.
I agree with this but then the more I read your blog, the more I get annoyed with all your frankly inane rants. They are well-written but so full of projections and repressed sadness that they become tedious for anyone that isn't completely frustrated and sick (which you might argue is impossible in a sick world). I enjoy what Deleuze says about travelling. He hates it, but first of all, he says that he only speaks for himself, which is more modesty than most intellectuals are able to muster. He does mention that it can present a kind of false rupture for some people (a false event, something disconnected from life, as you say), or a clownish attempt to "find a father" (a jab at psychoanalysis). This is all fine, but he also mentions for example that for immigrants, travel is something else entirely : it's something sacred. That's an important thought, I think. It also helps one decenter from their little personal problems.