The pendulum is starting to swing back on travel, and I don't know how I feel about it.
I couldn't open Instagram last summer without getting smacked in the face with a photo of someone from my high school calculus class on the Amalfi Coast. The idea of "revenge travel" to make up for time lost during the pandemic was and is still very real, and like most things that give Millennials and Gen Z pleasure, some people just aren't having it.
Fodor's, the popular guidebook company, named traveling "like a local" as the travel trend they most hope to see die in 2024, which in itself felt like a middle finger to anyone in their 20s with a passport. But then I read Agnes Callard's piece "The Case Against Travel" in The New Yorker and all of a sudden it felt like the middle finger was directly pointed at me. Reading it was borderline masochistic in the same way that it's a turn-on to get rejected by the hot girl at the bar in a sexy way. The things Callard was saying really stung, but they were said so potently that I couldn't help but enjoy it, and more importantly, I couldn't help but agree in a lot of ways. I do travel a lot of places expecting to be changed when really I'm inflicting more change on that place than it will ever inflict on me. I do spend most of my time in other places aimlessly locomoting around city centers and pretending to suddenly enjoy art museums. I do feel extremely cheated when I wind up in a beautiful place on a cloudy day. Even just the pull-quote — travel "turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best." — cut me to a level only accessible by things I know deep down are to some extent true.
But also like the hot girl who rejected me at said bar, I think Agnes Callard is mistaken in some ways, most notably that any of this is inherent in "travel" itself and not something we can change about it.
I was visiting friends in New York City last week and was taking a long frigid walk through Central Park on Presidents Day morning when a man in an orange vest approached me and started spouting off something about dying puppies. I tried to use the "I don't live here" card but he didn't accept that, and when he pleaded for "just a few minutes," my Midwestern hospitality kicked into gear and I gave in. We started talking about what he does and what it's like having to spend all day bugging people in Central Park for donations and why his girlfriend insisted on popping a pimple on his face this morning and how that left a bloody mark on his nose. When I told him I actually lived in San Francisco, he said, "That figures. No one from New York ever stops. You're the first person I've talked to in four hours." The dude looked as broken as the puppies in his commercials.
I've had Agnes Callard whispering in my ear most of the time I've thought about traveling lately. But ever since that interaction, I've had Jon from ASPCA whispering in my ear a bit too, saying, "Thank God for the tourists." It got me thinking: what if I went into every new place asking the question, "What's one thing I can do to give to this place rather than take from it?" Is it possible to be a net positive on somewhere you visit, and if so, how? Or is that impossible, and telling myself otherwise is just kindling for Agnes Callard's bonfire of virtue signaling and manufactured fulfillment?
It's a dangerous question to ask. The last thing Florence needs is a yuppie like myself in sweats and HOKAs handing fivers to homeless people without any genuine context on the issues impacting that city. And we're too deep in bed with Instagram as a culture for travel to not still look frivolous and status-oriented in aggregate. But I also have trouble believing it's not true. That we can't visit a place and leave as a net positive on it. That feels achievable. I don't know if that means donating to local charities or spending 20 minutes picking up trash or giving coins to buskers or literally anything. But it has to mean something.
If you're reading this and have thoughts, I'd love to know what they are. I haven't solved this for myself, but I'm not sure I want to go anywhere else before I do.
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