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To a certain extent, this how we used to travel back in the day. You hung out in a hostel, had conversations with other travelers (instead of thumbing through
by et-al 9y ago
To a certain extent, this how we used to travel back in the day.
You hung out in a hostel, had conversations with other travelers (instead of thumbing through Instagram), and let the randomness of other people and life, not apps, dictate your itinerary. You walk down a street, "oh hey that looks interesting", and wander down a quiet alley that leads to cute cafe, or jump in the back of a tuk-tuk headed to a waterfall that may or may not really exist, but who cares? You're riding the wave. One of the main reasons for travel/holidays is to break from routine, and the single most significant one can do, bear with me Silicon Valley, is to put away that smartphone. Try exercising your intuition instead of apps.
Many folks nowadays have optimised their lives so much that they've needed to create a noise-generator to bring back some humanity.
- losteric 9y agoSpot on, apps have optimized our lives... to local maxima. Apps can't guide us to peak happiness because the best is disconnected from the rest. Even when it comes to something as "simple" as music, I've never found a "favorite" band through something like Spotify. Good music, sure, but the "bar raisers" alway comes from randomness - radio, odd bar show, personal recommendation, cabbie's CD player, etc.
- thegreekfish 9y agoThat's why I ditched the Spotify recommendation engine and started letting other people pick music for me: https://www.jqbx.fm https://www.jqbx.fm
- throwaway91111 9y agoThis is still subject to a popularity distribution, although you may want that.
- msla 9y agoThe more popular that gets, the more it will approximate Top 40 radio, pretty much by definition.
- throwaway91111 9y agoTo be fair, you can get "true randomness" with apps (spotify particularly) too; it's just something you need to proactively do.
- SolarNet 9y agoThis is why I subscribe to internet radio instead. It's cheaper and has better discovery features. For example di.fm
- tomsthumb 9y agoI find music by choose a word from the dictionary and listening to the top dozen results, or for searching for a song i really like then listening to the dozen or so results that come after it.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoI've found a lot of great new artists through Spotify's discover weekly.
- thejosh 9y agoAgreed, discover weekly is great, I have a couple of different tastes in music depending on what I'm doing, and each discover weekly/daily is separated into genre. It's great.
- WalterSear 9y agoWe call it Spotify week. First week, suggestions are amazing. Second week they are great. From then on, they are terrible.
- endless1234 9y agoThat's just not true IMO. The weekly playlist's "quality" varies, sure, but it doesn't get worse over time for me.
- WalterSear 9y agoWe call it Spotify week. First week, suggestions are amazing. Second week they are great. From then on, they are terrible.
- maxhawkins 9y agoCheck out my Daily Random playlist on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/user/machinebrother/playlist/6p21dRudS9FmcyGvKWPq2R https://open.spotify.com/user/machinebrother/playlist/6p21dR... It updates with 30 random songs every day.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoThe 'old way' is exactly how I traveled Vietnam. My and my friends didn't have any plans at all, all we had booked was our first night's accommodation in Saigon. The rest we planned from talking to people at hostels, we ended up with a big group of about a dozen of us by the time we got to Hanoi. In my opinion, it's the only way to travel. I have never understood planning in advance your entire holiday down to the hour. I guess it's more important if you're American and only get 2 weeks of holiday a year.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dfmooreqqq 9y agoWhen I was in grad school, this is how I traveled each summer with my brother and cousin. We'd pick a country and have our first night (maybe a couple of nights) accommodations picked out and then let the feel of the day guide us. Some of our best times were with random people we'd meet at the hostel and then travel around with for a couple of days before going our own way.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- YouKnowBetter 9y agoI am >50 with grown up kids: this is how we spend our holidays and we get not much more then the "American 2 weeks". Planned is just the timeframe & means of transportation, the rest is pure accidental. We run in to the most boring places and move on, we hit the most surprising gatherings, fall in love and stay. Whatever happens we decide on an hourly basis what to (not) do next, exactly that what we cannot do in our daily lives. We find that it takes on average 3 days to completely reset from city slickers to travelers: hygiene rules change, food preferences, clothing & make up, luxury requirements, sleep rhythms & most of all the perception of time.
- spaceknarf 9y agoWhat age were your kids when you started with this style of traveling?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- vosper 9y agoOn the flip side, having just spent a year traveling to 18 countries - including most of SE Asia - the internet has made travel a hell of a lot easier (I've done it pre-internet, too). My wife is vegetarian, so rather than wandering around trying to find something she can eat in Vietnam (one of the least veggie-friendly countries we went to) we can do a little research on TripAdvisor and know where we're going for lunch and dinner. Likewise, with a few hours working on the laptop we can book several weeks worth of flights and accommodations, and not have to worry about that anymore. I think you end up with a lot more free time because you can take care of the necessities so easily. Why take a tuk-tuk to a waterfall that might not be there (that sounds like what you'd call a scam, to me) when you can take a tuk-tuk to a waterfall that definitely is there?
- galfarragem 9y agoBecause "life begins at the end of your comfort zone." -- Neale Walsch Some people travel for sightseeing, others for personal growth.
- vosper 9y agoI don't think the two types of travel are mutually exclusive, and you can certainly mix them both into one trip. Spend some time helping orphans, then go to the beach. That's actually what a lot of people do.
- somberi 9y agoIn the same vein - "Life begins on the other side of despair" -Jean-Paul Sartre
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- brightball 9y agoMy wife and I bought an old RV last year and that's exactly what we've done. We plan a general route and make sure we have stops lined up...and just explore. Do whatever looks interesting along the way.
- johnfn 9y agoI agree with the substance of your comment, but these types of comments would be much more effective if you dropped the superior air that you treat the people you're conversing with.
- et-al 9y agoThanks for the critique. (Admittedly, I did roll my eyes pretty hard at the original article, so I could've tried more to reduce that tone. Cheers.)
- moneytalks 9y agoThe article strikes as very Anglo-centric and the worst of first world problems with a solution that is both condescending and out-of-touch. His problem was the monotony of life and a feeling of being basically too secure and too happy. With all the homeless shelters, soup kitchens and other places where people have tremendous need within a short Uber ride, it just strikes me as odd to devote so much time to building first world toy to take you far away. Want to live and feel like your life has a purpose? Volunteer or pick a random needy person to send on the trip Europe. Give them a camera and hope they bring you back some pictures. I know this is an unpopular perspective, but when your job and life isolate you from the suffering and need (and risk and danger) around the corner, then the answer shouldn't "build me an app so the world can dance for me. Dance, world, dance! I'm boooorrredd." Hell, build an app that actually helps more than one person. The irony of ironies was acknowledging his white privilege while being clueless to the larger Western-world-privilege and too-much-disposable-income-privilege. Bahh. By all means travel. By all means make apps to entertain yourself. But do we need an national news agency covering the guy who got bored with life so found a way to make it work harder to please him? And what the hell, NPR, really? The guy who burns tons of CO2 cause he got bored -- no environmental impact assessment? And don't get me wrong, the guy sounds like a good guy. I'm sure he's friendly, sociable and all the good things.
- galfarragem 9y agoIt's more positive to see this app as the way he found to get courage to change his life. Paradoxically he is still following rules..
- maehwasu 9y agoLife is way too short to spend in soup kitchens worrying about how much and what form of privilege you may have.
- thinkfurther 9y agoLife is too short to not spend it in great company rather, to spend it being so weak you consider a bit of reflection and having compassion for others as "worrying". An unexamined life is not worth living, as Abe Lincoln said during the Super Bowl show, so what are you even calling life? Furthermore: Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens, But always pity brought me back to earth; Cries of pain reverberated in my heart Of children in famine, of victims tortured And of old people left helpless. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, And I too suffer. This has been my life; I found it worth living. -- Bertrand Russell Who also said this: > Although both love and knowledge are necessary, love is in a sense more fundamental, since it will lead intelligent people to seek knowledge, in order to find out how to benefit those whom they love. But if people are not intelligent, they will be content to believe what they have been told, and may do harm in spite of the most genuine benevolence. Life is a big word, and I find a collection of unrelated experiences without connecting any dots to be more a hysterical undertaking born of lack and leading to more want. Others can disagree, but they cannot tell me what fulfills me in my life. Life is too short to be a coward about it, life is to short to not face the music, life is too short to not own up. Ultimately, I care more about saving myself than anyone else: I need to not be crooked, I can't help everybody but if I help nobody who would I be? And frankly, I don't know a single selfish person who seems happy, they all seem scared, like feeding some monster in their basement that is never full and just keeps growing. Life is too short to have pity on them, or to accept what they offer. > Say honestly, "I love arm-chairs better than free men, and pursue them because I choose; not because circumstances make me. I love hats, large, large hats, with many feathers and great bows; and I would rather have those hats than trouble myself about social dreams that will never be accomplished in my day. The world worships hats, and I wish to worship with them." > But if you choose the liberty and pride and strength of the single soul, and the free fraternization of men, as the purpose which your life is to make manifest then do not sell it for tinsel. Think that your soul is strong and will hold its way; and slowly, through bitter struggle perhaps the strength will grow. And the foregoing of possessions for which others barter the last possibility of freedom will become easy. -- Voltairine de Cleyre, "The Dominant Idea"
- JoshMnem 9y agoI worked in the hostel industry for a long time. In "the old days", it was ridiculous to even travel with a cell phone. Laptops made no sense unless you had to work remotely. (I'd argue that they still don't make sense while traveling unless your work requires a laptop and you're going to work on the road.) These days, the common areas of hostels are full of people staring at glowing screens, while hostel managers try to figure out how to get the guests to interact...
- cannonpr 9y agoFeels to me like romanticising certain experiences more than they have merit. Yes I've also traveled before the Internet, and frankly we just sought information from books and locals or friends that had gone before. In some ways collecting the information was slower but less prone to gaming via online methods/interests. There were also several regions where taking the tuk-tuk to the non existent waterfall was a pretty good way to end up in very bad to your physical safety situations, and burdening the locals with bailing someone one out of their own 'exploration'. Saying this from having to rescue several brits from risk of death from dehydration and sunstroke.
- aninhumer 9y agoI think this romantic view of bohemian travelling is also betraying a certain amount of privilege. It's a lot more comfortable to wander where the world takes you when you know you have money to throw at problems if you really get in trouble. Not to mention, people who frantically try to optimise their time on holiday do so because it's the only week off they can afford this year, and they don't want it to be wasted.
- ensiferum 9y agoYes indeed, this is the "app" equivalent of backpacking. I did 3 backpacking trips (total around 27 months) back when smartphones weren't prevalent and it was (and has always been) mostly about trying out weird shit (such as fruit picking) going to places and meeting (loads) of people. Sadly even that is probably changed now and I bet that the modern hostels are places were people stay in isolation and stare at their phones instead of socializing with each other ;-(