WHAT’S GONE WRONG WITH MODERN TRAVEL
Why Modern Travel Doesn’t Change Us Anymore (And How It Became About Comfort, Not Curiosity)
Travel, we are reliably informed, is good for us. It broadens the mind, nourishes the soul and makes for excellent dinner-party currency. “We did Lisbon properly,” someone will say, which usually means they ate three custard tarts, stayed somewhere with linen napkins, and returned home unchanged except for a mild opinion on tiles.
The idea that travel is inherently virtuous is one of the great unchallenged assumptions of modern life. Like yoga, sourdough, or having a view on olive oil, it is simply accepted as a marker of a life well lived. If you travel, you must be curious. If you travel far, you must be interesting. If you travel often, you must be doing something right.
And yet, the longer one travels and the more planes one boards, the harder it becomes to ignore the suspicion that something has gone slightly wrong.Because modern travel, for all its promises of transformation, is remarkably good at delivering sameness.
How Modern Travel Became So Comfortable
You can now land almost anywhere on Earth and be eating a decent burrata within the hour. The hotels look reassuringly familiar. The coffee is flat white by default. The neighbourhoods recommended are always “up-and-coming,” which is travel-speak for “recently made safe for people like us.”
We are no longer explorers. We are consumers with better luggage.
The great trick of contemporary travel is that it allows us to feel adventurous while removing almost all actual risk. Translation apps mean we never really have to misunderstand anyone. Ride-hailing apps mean we never really get lost. Instagram means we know exactly what a place will look like before we arrive, often down to the chair we will sit on.
The result is a peculiar sort of motion without movement. We go very far, but not very deep.
The Rise of Mass Tourism and the Illusion of Discovery
There is also, it must be said, a faintly exhausting performance element to travel now. The documenting, the recommending, the quiet pressure to extract value from every meal, view and sunset.
We do not simply visit places; we do them. We collect cities like badges. We speak of countries as if they were weekend errands. “Japan was amazing,” we say, which is a statement so broad it means almost nothing at all.
Travel becomes less about encountering difference and more about confirming taste. We are not changed by places; we curate them.
And then we come home, slightly tired, faintly smug and strangely relieved to be back somewhere we understand.
Why Slow Travel Feels More Meaningful Today
And yet, despite all this, the case against travel never quite holds. Because every so often, something slips through the net.
A city that refuses to perform. A rhythm that won’t adjust to you. A place that doesn’t care what you expected. These moments are usually small and unspectacular. They don’t come with hashtags. They arrive quietly, often when you’ve stopped trying to make anything happen at all.
Real travel, the kind that does something to you, is not about escape. It’s about mild, sustained discomfort. Being out of sync. Not knowing the rules. Having to pay attention.
It’s staying long enough for the novelty to wear off and something more interesting to take its place: familiarity without ownership. Understanding without mastery.
Rethinking Travel Without Giving It Up
Perhaps the answer is not to travel more, but to travel like adults. Fewer places. Longer stays. Less broadcasting. More walking without purpose. More sitting still. More time spent noticing how people actually live, rather than how places are presented.
Travel, in this sense, is not a lifestyle flex. It’s a temporary loss of control. A reminder that the world does not exist to impress you. Which, when you think about it, may be the most useful lesson travel still has to offer.
The case against travel is really a case against treating it as a solution. It doesn’t make you wiser. It doesn’t make you better. And it certainly doesn’t make you interesting on its own. But approached with patience, humility and a willingness to be slightly wrong-footed, it can still do something quietly valuable.
Not change your life. Just nudge it
We don’t need to stop travelling. We need to stop pretending that travel, on its own, makes us wiser. Wisdom still requires effort. So does curiosity. So does being present. Travel can help, but only if we allow it to unsettle us, rather than simply entertain us. And that, perhaps, is the journey still worth taking.
