The Trouble With Travel
Has the internet ruined one of the last magical experiences we have left or are we just unable to let anyone have fun anymore?
“What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.” -Agnes Callard
“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.” -Anthony Bourdain
In June 2023, The New Yorker published an essay that made me livid.
It was gratuitously intellectual—even by their standards—and distressingly out of touch with the concerns of non–New Yorker columnists.
It was called, “The Case Against Travel.”
In it, Agnes Callard argues that travel is bad, actually, because:
It doesn’t really change us—we return with the same beliefs and habits.
Tourism encourages hollow visits without real interest or context.
We overstate its value—treating leisure like spiritual growth.
It distracts us from deeper truths by pretending to mean more than it does.
Some of her points were valid. Others were baffling feats of navel-gazing. I just couldn’t understand why this, of all things, was her chosen hill to die on.
Travel—one of my favorite things, one of the last transcendent, joyful, possibly even sacred acts still available to us—is “bad,” because a philosophy professor said so in The New Yorker?
It felt like being told that chocolate is overrated or sunsets are a scam. Thankfully, the internet agreed. The backlash was swift, funny, and cathartic.
One commenter pointed out that Callard might’ve had a better time if she’d spent less energy philosophizing and more time unwinding:
“It seems like the possibility of talking to people was excluded here to begin with. But some of us actually talk to people when we travel! Whether or not to travel or anything else makes us more virtuous is a question, but some things you don’t learn from a reason schedule.”
Others pointed out how she named many theoretical problems with travel without mentioning the real one:
“Didn’t even realize there could be a rich, entitled take on *opposing* travelling. Use a bunch of centuries-old, decontextualized quotes to complain about this incredible privilege of experience but never once mention the actual barrier: finance? Amazing.”
Some even conceded ground:
“Callard’s piece is important. A good number of influential people substitute the experience of travelling for introspection”
While irritating, the piece helped me clarify my beliefs. Travel isn’t inherently virtuous. But it’s not inherently selfish, stupid, or performative, either. Like most things, its meaning depends on the intentions and energy you bring to it and if you can remain curious, self-aware, and open-minded while doing it.
Yes, you can shovel frozen daquiris down your maw in any number of interchangeable outposts of Margaritaville without once speaking to a local outside of slurring a drink order. However, if your trip to Athens or Teotihuacan left you unmoved, maybe the real ruins were inside you all along.
More striking is how quaint Callard’s contrarian thesis feels two years later. Since then, our collective travel anxiety has reached dizzying new heights. The once-benign act of going on vacation is now loaded with more existential baggage than a season of The White Lotus. The specter of climate change, income inequality, racism, and neo-colonial exploitation hover over the most idyllic getaways like tropical storm clouds.
The problem isn’t just how we travel, but how much. As COVID thawed, the travel industry came roaring back and a new narrative emerged: everyone (but me) needs to stop traveling ASAP.
Many of the world’s most beautiful places are being loved to death.
In Bali, where tourism makes up 60–70% of the GDP, a crush of visitors has caused traffic jams, environmental damage, and the desecration of sacred sites—a tragic and familiar tale echoed in places like Maui, Machu Picchu, Santorini, and Uluru.
Frustrated locals in Barcelona shoot tourists with squirt guns to protest overtourism and soaring housing costs.
Even Mount Everest of all places is seeing too many visitors. Summiting the world’s tallest mountain now entails the kind of line you’d expect outside of a hip bakery, not a windswept Himalayan peak.
Then there’s the surreal scene in the Riviera Maya. Fueled by climate change and agricultural runoff, rotting seaweed now smothers once-pristine shores. Resorts wage a daily D-Day battle to clear it—only for it to return by high tide. Tourists arrive chasing Instagram dreams of turquoise water and white sand, only to recoil at the brown sludge and sulfuric stench, while workers haul it away by hand in a Sisyphean struggle. It’s hard to imagine a more literal metaphor for the futility of preserving the illusion of paradise.
It’s no longer sufficient or even possible to just have a good time on vacation anymore. We are now in the age of ethical travel anxiety—the sense that every trip must justify itself morally, spiritually, ecologically, and politically.
In spite of all this, and Callard’s downer essay, I still love travel, going all the way to Tanzania to do a safari for my honeymoon. It was on this fateful trip that I became acquainted with a new reason to loathe travel: Travel Instagram.
One of the most nauseating parts of modern life is when Instagram guesses what you’re doing and inserts itself like an over zealous friend. As with exercise, male self-improvement advice, and wedding planning, something truly terrifying happens when travel is fed through the prism of Instagram. Instead of useful advice, honest perspectives, and self-aware narratives, you quickly descend into a funhouse mirror of self-proclaimed experts projecting privilege and judgement in every direction.
On the long journey from the Serengeti back to Berkeley, I encountered a buffet of travel reels that brought up every flavor of rage, jealousy, and befuddlement I know about, and several I didn’t even realize were possible.
It triggered the kind of irrational fury normally reserved for memes about millennials and avocado toast— pure “old man yells at cloud” outrage.
So I righteously drafted a rebuttal to Callard: travel doesn’t suck— travel Instagram sucks, and I alone can prove it.
As I wrote it, I realized this is much deeper than social media.
Travel Instagram reveals what modern travel has become: moral performance, well-branded class warfare, the last socially acceptable way to flaunt wealth, and the hardest true joy to feel guilt-free about.
When did leaving home get so problematic?
The World is Flat(tening Complexity)
Travel Instagram, like much of the internet warped by engagement metrics, thrives on provocation: smug roundups of “overrated” destinations, regretful “never again” trips, and horror stories about scams, robberies, and the dreaded Bali Belly.
I always seem to find these hot takes right after returning from a place I loved. Nothing kills the high of a trip to Thailand or Tanzania like a 27-year-old from Utah declaring both countries terrible because she had a weird cab ride once.
The most maddening genre is rankings of countries people would or wouldn’t return to. These are always hilariously biased, yet offered as universal truth. One poster said she’d revisit Saudi Arabia—an authoritarian petrostate where lack of AC can be fatal—for the car culture, but dismissed the entire Caribbean because she felt unsafe a few times.
Scroll long enough and patterns emerge. Egypt gets written off for pushy salesmen. India’s poverty and chaos are critiqued with a callousness that borders on parody. Indonesia, Thailand, and Italy are dismissed as “overrated,” a synonym for over-visited.
Travel Instagram, like “How I Built This” content, collapses messy realities into oversimplified narratives, inflating personal anecdotes into universal advice.
The truth is: travel is deeply personal. Some people love chaotic, noisy places like Hanoi or Mexico City; others find them overwhelming. Some crave the quiet of Little Corn Island or the order of Oslo; others find them dull. Some adore museums and hate beaches; others feel the exact opposite. Some travel to feel comforted, others to be challenged. Your dream trip might bore—or terrify—me. And that’s the point.
But Instagram doesn’t reward nuance. It rewards certainty—and its cousin, outrage. Travel Instagram turns cities into Yelp reviews and cultures into clickbait.
Privilege Blindspots
If I could ban one genre of Instagram reel forever, it’d be the ones showing off a lie-flat business class suite with a caption like: “Can you believe we flew from JFK to Dubai for just $150???”
Yes, I can. Because I already know the punchline: credit card points.
Becky and Bradley didn’t pay $150—they spent $15,000–30,000 or more on flights, hotels, or business expenses, then redeemed the points. Calling four-figure plane tickets “cheap” or “free” is misleading and tone-deaf. Most people can’t travel like this. They don’t have unlimited budgets, flexible schedules, or hours to spend hacking the Chase portal like it’s a part-time job.
The fantasy being sold is that luxury travel is accessible to anyone clever enough to “hack the system.” The truth is that travel—like everything else—is deeply stratified by class. Boarding groups, seating zones, and lounge access are constant reminders of where you fall. Since airlines keep gutting economy and upgrading the front of the plane, where they make most of their money, this contrast has only gotten starker. Soon, United will start charging economy passengers extra not to be crop-dusted and berated mid-flight, while the front row enjoys mimosas and a pedicure. It makes you pine for the lower class accommodations we saw in James Cameron’s Titanic, which at least compensated for their lack of lifeboats with banging Irish folk music.
Travel is one of the most potent forms of cultural capital we have—expensive, exclusive, and coded as status. It disguises wealth in a trendy outfit, which is increasingly the point.
Travel Instagram—like Wedding Instagram—has been hijacked by a narrow, moneyed aesthetic. The curated, high-status journey of the wealthy white digital nomad dominates. It’s no longer aspirational; it’s treated as definitive.
The result is a warped sense of what’s possible or desirable—when planning a trip. It breeds a kind of dismissive elitism that steamrolls other people’s experiences in favor of “the best” way to travel.
When Debbie from Cincinnati says she loved the Acropolis, why do influencers get to declare Greece “overrated”? If Doug saves up, carves out four precious days off, and spends them at the Sheraton Kauai, can’t the internet let him have his dream vacation—instead of dunking on it from an infinity pool in Ubud?
The Journey From Complexity to Content
Flattening experience into hot takes while ignoring privilege is only part of the problem with modern travel. The other starts before we even get to the airport.
Travel today has the same problem as concerts: we can’t just do the thing—we have to film it, frame it, filter it, and post it. The point of seeing a beautiful painting, beach, or wild animal isn’t just to feel something; it’s to harvest its meaning through documentation. As Susan Sontag famously put it:
“Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.”
Travel isn’t an activity—it’s content. It’s the most coveted kind: proof of taste, freedom, wealth, and aesthetic curation—a sunrise hike here, a safari lion there—stitched into carousels of turquoise coves, each image coated in envy like a dart in frog venom.
Travel content performs to the role of self-brand maintenance. It isn’t just about where you go—it’s how you signal that you’re still fun, worldly, and interesting. What began as a joyful, personal experience becomes just another public transaction in the attention economy.
The Tyranny of the Itinerary (Optimization is The Enemy of Wonder)
Content turns travel into performance, but optimization may be worse, flattening what could be soulful or surprising into a checklist.
Thanks to Instagram and travel blogs, it’s nearly impossible to discover anything for ourselves. The best parts of many destinations have already been pre-photographed, packaged, and reviewed to death. We’re not stumbling into wonder—we’re chasing a highlight reel.
Visit Machu Picchu or the Mona Lisa and you’re not just experiencing them—you’re reenacting them. You already know what they look like. And because everyone else documented them, you feel obligated to do the same. What might have been awe-inspiring becomes an act of reproduction.
With awareness of everyone else’s itineraries comes pressure to maximize every second of ours. We can’t just eat good tacos—we have to find the best tacos. We leave our chaotic lives hoping for freedom, and end up stress-scrolling TripAdvisor in a towel, wondering if we’re having enough fun.
Social media ruins travel twice: first by eliminating the thrill of surprise, then by making you question whether you’re enjoying it correctly. We’ve replaced discovery with strategy—and wonder with management.
But the best parts of travel aren’t optimized. One of our favorite moments in Ireland wasn’t a famous pub, castle, or cliff—it was chatting with strangers in a restaurant in Cork. The kind of small, spontaneous exchange that doesn’t show up in a guidebook and can’t be planned or turned into content.
The Sidelining of Most Real Emotions
What’s most conspicuously absent from travel discourse today is how it actually feels to be somewhere new: the bumbling awkwardness, the anxious transitions, the jet-lagged bickering, the disorientation of watching your world stretch and reorient in real time.
Instead, we’re served a steady stream of curated joy and soft-lit gratitude. Emotion becomes aesthetic—filtered and framed for inspiration, not truth. It’s Bo Burnham’s White Woman’s Instagram wearing a bikini in the Maldives.
Even the most generous viewer can start to feel emotionally gaslit. You want to be inspired—but something rings false. The people “living the dream” rarely seem to wrestle with what that dream costs: to themselves, to others, to the places they’re temporarily occupying.
This probably sounds hypocritical coming from someone who just returned from a five-figure safari honeymoon over 9,000 miles away.
But that’s my point.
I am part of the problem—and I still loved every minute of that trip. Enjoyment can’t fully resolve the tension. It lingers. It should.
The Safari of Cognitive Dissonance
Being on safari, I was in awe—of the animals, of the landscape, of the extraordinary hospitality extended to us as honeymooners.
Then, mid-trip, as if to end the honeymoon phase of my honeymoon, YouTube recommended a poignant video about the impossible ethics of safaris, where one night of lodging can cost what the average Tanzanian earns in a year.
Of course watched it. I usually let my self-loathing win. To be honest, most of my favorite trips have had undercurrents like this. I just don’t always know how to talk about them.
In Grenada, I toured a rum distillery and swam in gin-blue water—then remembered Ronald Reagan invaded this country during my sister’s lifetime for some reason. Years later, I watched tranquil Cariacou—a highlight of that trip—get flattened by a hurricane.
That’s when the original title for this post came to me: The Trouble with the Tropics.
I wanted to unpack my lifelong draw to coastal, tropical destinations. This simultaneously makes sense for someone whose ancestors rarely encountered good weather or spices and embodies a disturbing form of neocolonialism. People like me flock to poorer, formerly colonized nations without fully acknowledging the history—much less the present—beneath the palm trees.
As research, I read Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Carribbean from Columbus to the Present by Carrie Gibson.
Gibson argues that globalization began in the Caribbean. As the birthplace of modern capitalism, its tourism has always been inseparable from colonization, slavery, and genocide. It’s another form of extraction, repackaged with coconuts and swim-up bars.
The shadow of this history surfaces every time The New York Times runs a story on over-tourism in Mexico, Indonesia, or Hawaii. There, the comments reliably split into dueling camps:
Gringoes/bules/haoles don’t come—locals have been telling you this for decades/centuries.
What do you mean don’t come—aren’t they like, economically dependent on tourism?
Both are partially true—and that’s the trap. Yes, many economies rely on tourism. But that doesn’t make its harms any less real. Just because a system runs smoothly doesn’t mean it’s fair—it just means the gears of exploitation are well-oiled.
Travel now carries this tangle of competing truths. It’s a symbol of freedom, curiosity, and personal joy—and also a flashpoint for conversations about inequality, racist colonial legacies, and climate collapse.
You can fly to a beach resort in a country where locals can’t afford a night in the hotel. You can hike through a rainforest knowing your plane emitted more CO₂ than most residents will all year. You can visit a place shaped by centuries of extraction and feel confused when you’re treated like part of the problem, or worse, part of the solution.
We all marvel at the sheer cognitive dissonance of it all.
The hardest part of travel is no longer choosing an itinerary or gaming points—it’s squaring your itinerary with your politics, your budget, and your conscience.
My shifting between we and you is telling—sadly mirroring how Travel Instagram turns personal angst into universal truth. More saliently, it reflects how hard it is to talk about travel without falling into the trap of framing systemic issues as personal responsibility.
Even though the problems travel exposes—exploitative economies, water-guzzling infrastructure, colonial residue—aren’t fixable by individual choices, the conversation defaults to behavior: who’s being thoughtful, who’s being selfish, who’s “doing it right.”
How you travel becomes a reflection of who you are—your ethics, your awareness, your virtue. We scold influencers for tone-deaf selfies, dismiss tourists for not speaking the language, shame strangers online for enjoying the wrong country.
We keep trying to fix systemic problems with aesthetic tweaks, moral posturing, and self-improvement—treating travel like a test you can pass with reef-safe sunscreen, a locally-owned ecolodge, and a sufficiently long streak on Duolingo.
It’s a rigged game. Because personal change ≠ political change.
But since the ultra-rich are too shameless to care, and governments are ensnared in conflicting incentives, we fall back on shaming individuals online.
It’s easier to do than organizing politically. It feels righteous. It feels efficient. But it’s like going to a baseball game and blaming the peanut vendors for the score.
The ire is legitimate. The targets are flawed.
This doesn’t mean we give up on fixing travel. But we have to be honest about the scale and nature of the problem.
Travel, like most choices under late capitalism, is not something we can solve or condemn at the individual level.
The real trouble with travel is that’s it’s far too fun, too lucrative, and too meaningful for any of us, including me, to stop. I suspect we’ll keep doing this—flying, photographing, philosophizing—until the oceans are too hot to swim in.
In light of that, we’d better find a way to navigate it, awkwardly, imperfectly, and, ideally, more honestly.
1,000 Places to See Before You/They/Everyone Dies
Alexis and I came to international travel from opposite childhoods.
Thanks to an embarrassingly privileged upbringing and grandparents who arranged indulgent trips like summer on Paxos or winter in Kitzbuhel, my passport has been steadily collecting stamps since I was six.
Alexis’s first international trip was one she planned and paid for herself at twenty two—a visit to Spain with her ex-boyfriend.
Our first international trip together was Costa Rica. We went there because it was the farthest we could fly using her Alaska companion fare.
Despite getting robbed on the flight to San José and a mid-air mishap in a bush plane that forced an emergency landing, we had such a good time between disasters that we started planning our next trip as soon as we got home. Travel became a shared priority. She craved more of it, and I was delighted to indulge her. We kept up a rhythm of one international trip per year—until COVID hit.
Grounded by the pandemic, I longingly cracked open 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, a doorstop I’d bought in the early days of our travel mania.
The introduction noted: “This book represents travel opportunities in an ideal, peaceful world. However, that’s not the world we live in today,” mentioning that several entries in Syria or Yemen might be best appreciated by reading, not visiting.
I didn’t think that warning would ever apply to me. Then, forty-eight hours before our return flight from Tanzania, Iran began shelling Qatar in retaliation for Israeli airstrikes. Our itinerary hinged on the Doha airport remaining open and the surrounding airspace, navigable.
As the grasses of the Serengeti waved serenely in the breeze, we read ominous headlines about grounded flights and stranded passengers. The contrast felt surreal— peace here and violence far away, present bliss and future cha os. Our dream and nightmare trip home were both nestled inside Schrödinger's itinerary. As a herd of elephants wandered over to our tent, we were forced to consider a darkly hilarious first world problem: World War III might ruin our honeymoon. Yet all we could do was show up to Seronera airstrip on time, with charged phones and a positive attitude.
It added new fragility to the already-tenuous state of modern travel. Now, in addition to scanning the State Department’s dour travel advisory page, which reads like it was written by a paranoid aunt who has never left Milwaukee, we apparently need to pick our layovers more carefully, too.
It’s starting to feel like the golden age of affordable, democratized travel is ending just as it began. I honestly don’t know whether that’s cause for mourning or celebration.
I’m not the only one who is unsettled.
Once we’d arrived miraculously, safely home, I listened to a New Yorker Critics at Large podcast entitled “Why We Travel.”
It brought up how two of the most viral news stories in recent years—OceanGate’s imploding sub and Katy Perry’s trip to space—were tales of the excesses of travel. What made many people furious about OceanGate wasn’t just Stockton Rush’s hubris, but the resources poured into the search for the survivors, who had each paid a quarter of a million dollars to go on that doomed voyage. This made us confront what it means to travel for pleasure in a world grappling with refugee and migrant crises—where the rich explore space and the ocean floor while others drown trying to reach dry land. Who gets to leave home voluntarily—and who is forced to?
Travel is always about reckoning with our mortality.
We only get so many summers, so many trips, so many new places. Capturing it—especially through photos on Instagram—makes our short lives feel expansive.
However, travel is increasingly about the mortality of the planet, too.
There’s a growing wave of “last-chance tourism,” visiting glaciers before they melt, the Maldives before they submerge, Venice before it becomes Jeff Bezos’s vacation home like Lanai to Larry Ellison. The ticking clock adds urgency but also complicates the ethics. Are we honoring or accelerating the demise of these fragile locales?
Narrating all of this is Travel Instagram, demonic but revealing, refracting rich, contradictory experiences into simplistic shades.
Tone-deaf white people offer sweeping critiques of cultures they barely know; enraged leftists police anyone who dares to take a vacation in These Unprecedented Times.
White tourists in Bali = evil. My joy on safari = good. Both contain truth. Neither tells the whole story.
Charting my travel anxieties revealed they share the same headwaters as Agnes Callard’s. “Area intellectual is annoyed by oversimplification” would’ve been a more honest (if less clickable) title to her essay, and this one.
Travel discourse keeps trying to snap us back to simplistic poles. We have to keep fighting for nuance. We live and travel in the messy middle: aware of the harms, grateful for the joy, trying to hold both without short-circuiting.
I fully understand the damage Airbnb has done to housing affordability—and I’ve still had some of my most magical birthdays in rented cabins with friends. Emissions are easier to measure than the joy visiting my siblings on the East Coast provides. Tourism is extractive—but modern work is exhausting. People crave beauty, rest, and novelty where they can get it. While we should be able to find peace in staycations, there’s still nothing quite like the reset and shift in perspective that comes from going somewhere new.
Travel today is so complicated because it doesn’t just signal status—it performs meaning. For the secular millennial, it’s the new pilgrimage: a carefully optimized ritual meant to prove we’re not spiritually bankrupt, just overworked, okay? Burned-out professionals quitting tech jobs to “see the world” are less rebels than seekers—trying to recover purpose via $17 smoothies in Chiang Mai.
Maybe we all keep arguing about travel because in a world that’s distracted, jaded and burnt out by everything else, travel is one of the last things that reliably makes us feel something: joy, wonder, guilt, envy, discomfort, longing, disbelief that someone would wear that on a plane or at the beach.
While this whole debate feels more complicated than ever, the irony for me is that what I actually want from travel feels simpler than ever.
I want to remember the beauty of nature, the beauty of people, the connection between them—and, when I can, enjoy a cold beer and something grilled on a warm beach.
No one can get travel “right,” because the answer doesn’t exist. If you can hold all of these contradictory truths in your head at the same time and still feel joy in motion, you’re probably doing it right, or at least as right as anyone of us can.
I try. I try to ask questions, tip well, speak Spanish, make new friends, and not pretend my vacation makes me anything other than someone who is fortunate enough to be able to travel.
I’ve stopped thumbing through 1,000 Places to See Before You Die like it’s a checklist. My new list is messier—full of places I might never go to, places that might disappear, places that may underwhelm or scare me.
I’ve already accepted that the whole quest is doomed.
Maybe the point isn’t to see everything before we die, but to see a few places more clearly while we’re still here.
How do you feel about travel? Where is the coolest place you’ve ever visited and what made that trip meaningful? Any travel pet peeves? I want to hear from you.
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