I'm 25, just got back from hiking in a somewhat remote part of Georgia (the country). Haven't read The Beach, but got a good sense of it from the article. I th

I'm 25, just got back from hiking in a somewhat remote part of Georgia (the country). Haven't read The Beach, but got a good sense of it from the article. I think hiking culture, where you either camp or stay in people's homes as you move from village to village through the mountains, is one of the last/best ways to travel and stay disconnected. No cell service in a lot of these places, no room for a laptop in your backpack. Also, no party culture in these hostels, just appreciative eating of a simple meal at the end of a long dusty day of hiking. Read a book and record the day in your journal. Have a snickers bar and a few beers for dessert. Lots of young people from eastern europe and israel doing the hikes in Georgia. No tour companies (yet), the infrastructure isn't good enough. Still, as you chat with other trailgoers, you realize that everyone is generally following the same webpage/guide because it's the only one on the internet. Georgia is on trend now and being marketed everywhere, so I expect the infrastructure to be built up similar to the way popular destinations in SE developed in the past 20 years. Quicker if they are able to join the EU. Check out Switzerland if you're looking for a similar but less rugged experience, I did a 14 day hike there last year and can't recommend it highly enough. You can do it with wife/kids/managing a job for sure if you pick the right route. And easy to access from the UK. To your other point - yes, I feel like time periods are condensing from war/early tech infrastructure-defined 20-30 year intervals where one author is able to capture a zeitgeist snapshot of their era, into a large gray mass/melting pot of media that tells all stories at once, but no specific story at all. The meta story is one of globalization and blurring of identity, and a growing global middle class, where it's difficult to capture and affirm exactly what is going on because everything can and does change in an instant. The modern-day equivalent might be a book about traveling Instagram influencers/festival goers living the jet set life between LA, NY, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Bombay, Ibiza, etc. This last line of the review is dark, but basically nails it: What will the generation that reads the novel now, and those that come after them, find in its pages? They will find what generations before them found in the pages of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, as their protagonists drank and smoked and gazed at the landscapes of Italy, or Spain, or Africa: characters damaged by where they have come from, looking for release – or correction, or illumination – in strange new corners of the world and finding only disaffection, ugliness, self-absorption and ego. Finding only the things they have brought with them.