On the ego that turned exploration into consumption.
People often ask why I spend weeks in one place when I could be crossing several countries off my list instead. I suppose I’ve never understood how moving more is supposed to mean seeing more.
I don’t travel to collect countries.
I travel to disappear into one.
Backpackers don’t stay anywhere anymore.
They arrive. They sleep. They photograph. They publish. They leave.
Then they repeat the process somewhere else until the trip ends and they return home exhausted, convinced they’ve seen the world because they were physically present in it.
They haven’t.
They’ve consumed it.
That’s what backpacking has become.
Not exploration.
Consumption.
Call me a gatekeeper if you want, but I don’t think making travel accessible to everyone was a good thing.
Some things deserve to remain difficult.
Difficulty isn’t just an obstacle.
It’s a filter.
Backpacking once demanded uncertainty. You hitchhiked because there wasn’t another option. You camped because you couldn’t afford hotels. You got lost because Google Maps didn’t exist. You depended on strangers because there was nobody else.
You didn’t stay three weeks because slow travel was fashionable.
You stayed because leaving wasn’t simple.
That difficulty selected people.
Not better people.
People with different motivations.
People who wanted to understand rather than display.
Then technology removed almost every barrier.
Flights became cheap.
Hostels multiplied.
Google Maps eliminated uncertainty.
Translation apps eliminated effort.
Social media eliminated the need to tell stories because photographs could pretend to tell them for you.
The filter disappeared.
The culture changed.
Today, travel isn’t sold as curiosity.
It’s sold as identity.
The tourism industry doesn’t ask what a country might teach you.
It asks who you’ll become once other people know you’ve been there.
Travel has become one of the cheapest ways to manufacture an identity.
You don’t need to become interesting.
You just need to stand somewhere interesting.
That’s why so many people return with bigger egos instead of broader minds.
Ask them what they learned.
Most will tell you what they saw.
Ask them about the people.
They’ll tell you about the monuments.
Ask them about the language.
They’ll proudly repeat the three words they learned after spending 90 days crossing six countries.
They’re collecting locations, not understanding and certainly not growth.
Tourism has become another branch of consumerism.
Countries are products.
Experiences are products.
Cultures are products.
Even people become products.
Everything exists to be consumed, photographed and replaced by the next destination.
The strangest part is how proud we are of this.
“I’ve been to 25 countries.“
Why is that impressive?
Wouldn’t it be more impressive to deeply understand one?
To speak its language.
To know its neighborhoods instead of its viewpoints.
To have friends instead of recommendations.
To return home with your certainties broken instead of your passport filled.
Movement has become confused with growth.
They’re not the same thing.
Most people don’t travel to become different.
They travel to confirm the person they already believe themselves to be.
Travel becomes evidence.
Proof that they’re adventurous.
Proof of their supposed open-mindedness, despite the racist behavior they display toward locals.
Proof that they’re successful.
It’s ego disguised as curiosity.
The environmental hypocrisy follows naturally.
People cry in front of ancient forests before buying products linked to deforestation.
They snorkel around coral reefs while financing industries that destroy them.
They admire wild animals, then return home and continue consuming the system driving those animals toward extinction.
Nature isn’t changing them.
It’s entertaining them.
People tell me tourism creates conservation.
I think that’s backwards.
Conservation is usually the bill we pay after treating the natural world like a warehouse.
The less we consume, the less there is to rescue.
The same thing happens with culture.
We’re constantly told cultural exchange is inherently beautiful.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it spreads destructive habits faster than wisdom.
The world is becoming culturally flatter.
Walk through enough cities and they begin to blur together.
The same cafés.
The same apartment blocks.
The same shopping streets.
The same influencers taking the same photographs.
We’ve mistaken imitation for development.
We’ve decided that progress means looking like whoever industrialized first.
Traditional architecture disappears because concrete and glass looks richer.
Buildings that evolved over centuries to suit local climates are demolished so cities can resemble places they were never meant to resemble.
I don’t call that progress.
I call it forgetting.
A yurt isn’t inferior because it doesn’t resemble a skyscraper.
An earth house isn’t backward because it isn’t made of concrete.
Architecture should answer the climate before it answers fashion.
A society should adapt to its environment before adapting to global trends.
That’s my definition of progress.
Better adaptation.
Not better imitation.
The same principle applies everywhere.
The easier photography became, the less people learned photography.
The easier publishing became, the less people learned to write.
The easier backpacking became, the more it became tourism.
Convenience doesn’t simply allow more people to participate.
It changes why they participate.
And once the reason changes, the activity changes with it.
That’s what happened to travel.
The greatest journeys aren’t measured by distance.
They’re measured by transformation.
You should come home questioning yourself more than the people you visited.
If all you brought back were photographs, opinions and a stronger sense of your own importance, then you didn’t really travel.
You consumed another place.
The tragedy isn’t that the world became accessible.
The tragedy is that accessibility turned one of humanity’s greatest opportunities for humility into another marketplace for ego.
Backpacking didn’t disappear.
Its soul did.
Thanks for reading.
Teekay
Teekay Rezeau-Merah 