8 ms·

I have been toying with the idea that travel is the ultimate expression of selfishness and narcissism. I have a place that's very dear to me that is similarly b

by rland 8y ago

I have been toying with the idea that travel is the ultimate expression of selfishness and narcissism. I have a place that's very dear to me that is similarly being eroded by a crush of visitors. They are loud, cause crazy traffic, carve into the natural rock, fall down cliffs and require medical help, etc. 20 years ago, you might have had 3-4 people on a given weekday sunset visiting to see the view. Now, that number is probably approaching 100. On weekends it's a throng of people, almost like standing room only. It's a beautiful place, and it's inarguable that anyone should be able to see and enjoy it. But really, are most of those people there to see the beauty of the place? Would they be there if not for the opportunity to post it on social media? It's not like this is a hidden spot whose location was revealed by social media. It's a well known natural area. It just didn't get this crowded until it became hip to take photos of yourself in some beautiful place. And then I realize, this is what people who live in areas with real tourism must feel like, except magnified to nightmarish proportions. Travel contributes greatly to carbon emissions, destroys environments, puts stress on local wildlife and people... just so that someone can have an ~experience~ for themselves. The thing is, I think most people have a great deal of "interesting-ness" right near home. They just compete globally on Instagram, which requires a plane ride. I don't hold this opinion, I'm just trying it on for size -- I've traveled to a lot of very beautiful places and had cool experiences, so it'd be hugely hypocritical. But yes, I really dislike the Instagram effect.

speedplane 8y ago
> just so that someone can have an ~experience~ What is life if not an accumulation of experience?
- rland 8y ago
  Yes, I mean, that's almost my point. I think for a big portion of the people I see in that throng of 100, the experience of going someplace, joining the crowd, getting in line for the photo angle that trends best on Instagram, then packing up and going home -- is actually a pretty mediocre experience, not a beautiful one. They'd be better off enjoying a quiet moment in their front garden.
  - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
    That’s not really for you to say, is it? Even assuming they’d agree with your cynical characterization, which is doubtful.
oh_sigh 8y ago
Hire 2 fat guys to stand around shirtless drinking beers to ruin the photos. Eventually the tourists will slow down. Also, that place was not yours. Yeah, it sucks that you can't get 100% pleasure out of it because 1000 people are getting 5% of pleasure out of it...so maybe find a new spot? There isn't a shortage of wild places out there
- dagw 8y ago
  Eventually the tourists will slow down Either that or getting your photo with shirtless fat guys becomes the new point of the exercise (with people getting more likes the fatter the guys).
  - cm2187 8y ago
    A european, gym-free version of the naked cowboy in NY.
- throwmeback 8y ago
  >Hire 2 fat guys to stand around shirtless drinking beers to ruin the photos. Eventually the tourists will slow down. I'll take a photo with them - it'd be 3 fat guys standing around shirtless drinking beers. :')
maaaats 8y ago
> I have a place that's very dear to me that is similarly being eroded by a crush of visitors. But why is you visiting it okay, but others not? It's like being stuck in traffic and hating on other drivers. In the article's case, it's their homes, so I can see it being annoying. But for landmarks that get popular, I don't see how one is justified in hating on other people going there. It's just a tragedy of the commons. I also dislike how Barcelona and others are handling the problem. Taking tourists' money and harassing them. I say this as someone who grew up in a mountain resort. Yes, it is annoying during winter when people flood to "my nature" and "my ski spots". But if it weren't for those people, my family or no one else would live there as there wouldn't be any jobs. So then it wouldn't be "mine" anyways.
- rland 8y ago
  You’re right, of course. I grew up nearby and spent many summers there as a kid, that’s why I have some connection. But the place is not mine. The reason I brought it up in the first place is because only within the last 10 years has it really gotten “bad” — completely because of instagram.
  - treerock 8y ago
    I don't think you can blame instagram. These problems are happening all over the world, and I doubt that many of the tourists actually use instagram. I suspect cheap flights and accommodation, changes in fashion (city breaks vs package holidays), more disposable income and free time are all contributing.
    - Moru 8y ago
      Yes, this has been happening the last 100 years or so, to different locations over the world. There is always something that gets noticed on TV or whatever channel exists att he time. And then some entrepreneur uses the hype to make trips with tourists to this location. Just an example: https://www.slice.ca/travel/photos/most-popular-travel-spots-by-decade/#!The_Catskills_Popular-Destinatons-by-Decade_ https://www.slice.ca/travel/photos/most-popular-travel-spots...
_hardwaregeek 8y ago
I think there's a distinction to be made between travel as accumulating social capital masquerading as "experiences" and travel as seeking genuinely novel experiences. It's the same difference between going to Instagrammable restaurants and seeking out places that have legitimately good food. Then again, I don't think this distinction is new. There's always been a dichotomy between people who travel like an RPG where they have to see X monument and have Y experience in order to tell their friends about it, and people who come in open minded.
- cm2187 8y ago
  Yes and no. Before instagram you had tourist guides (books). If a major guide mentions a location as lovely and must seen, you will have hordes of tourists raiding the area, often to just take a quick picture and mark a notch next to the entry. Like I just don’t get people going to the Trevi fountain in Rome. The place is so crowded that all they get is pushing their way to a tight spot where they can see some of the horses, take the same picture than the first 1,000,000 results on google image and then push their way out. What’s the experience?
  - bsder 8y ago
    One could just as easily say this about the Sistine Chapel. And yet most people who go there still regard the experience as profound.
  - dantheman 8y ago
    The choice is - don't see it or see it in a slightly less than optimal way. It's an amazing fountain, it's different than anything at home for many visitors, and it's super easy to get to.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  This is a false dichotomy. When I travel to new places, I like to see the standard tourist stuff, but I also like to walk the back alleys and go "off the beaten path". I'm not unique in this either. The gatekeeping people have around the right kind of travel is amazing.
yakshaving_jgt 8y ago
Until you said "sunset", I was almost certain you were referring to Wedding Cake Rock, a similar victim of new-found Instagram popularity. That's in the town where I grew up, which is often ruined by tourists. I don't know what it is about group dynamics, but as I perceive it (and it may be confirmation bias), large groups of tourists do far more damage (especially littering) than if the same number of people had visited individually.
dtrump2020 8y ago
I would build a big wall around it and get the Instagrammers to pay for it.
csomar 8y ago
> I have been toying with the idea that travel is the ultimate expression of selfishness and narcissism. As far as I understand, you don't own the place. From my perspective, you are more selfish than these people. You don't want people to access public property because it "inconveniences" you? Seriously, what is wrong with the world. The reason people didn't visit your place before because internet didn't make it popular enough and transportation wasn't that good. The fact that you were there first or had memories of it being empty doesn't make you own it (and thank god for that). ps: I used to live in a very nice part of the city. I ended up moving because the outsiders "wrecked" it. But it is fair. I only rented an apartment and the nearby small mountain and sea was public property.
- ip26 8y ago
  The thought is more like, if everyone goes to the city park nearest them, each city park can bear the traffic. If everyone around the world visits just this one city park, it becomes unsustainable. So nobody owns anything, or has exclusive right, but when each area is used mostly by the respective locals, it's more sustainable all the way around. That's the tension.
prawn 8y ago
Instagram is replacing the guide book. And because people are more digitally connected, a lot of their storytelling has become visual and so visually remarkable sights have grown in popularity. I can't see it going away anytime soon - my state tourism authority uses social media as a key tool in their efforts. This weekend just been, I was flown to a location by said authority, given a car for four days and basically set loose to photograph whatever interested me. (I shoot with a drone.) Anyway, at the first of the two fixed experiences of the weekend (an oyster farm), I was sitting near two girls who had driven 700km for a weekend in this location all because they'd seen a girl's photograph on Instagram, shared by the authority. Coincidentally, that girl was seated five metres from them and also in the area shooting for the tourism authority because of how powerful social is now. The authority chaperone was right there in the middle to witness the power of her daily work. For anyone who cares, this is my work: https://www.instagram.com/__serio__/ https://www.instagram.com/__serio__/ This is the shot the girls had seen: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs2aWsbHxT0/ https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs2aWsbHxT0/ I imagine the average HN user imagines these "travel couples" to be particularly obnoxious and I'm sure some are (like any subset of people), but this couple were very genuine and great people. Like me, they get out there because one hobby is photography; just a bit different to that of the typical landscape photographer. No where we shot that weekend was anywhere near crowded. I almost always had miles and miles of pristine beach to myself. At this location, there would've been no one on that beach for 3-5 km in either direction, just 15+ dolphins playing in the waves. https://www.instagram.com/p/Buo4NcFDxU7/ https://www.instagram.com/p/Buo4NcFDxU7/
- Cederfjard 8y ago
  >No where we shot that weekend was anywhere near crowded. I almost always had miles and miles of pristine beach to myself. At this location, there would've been no one on that beach for 3-5 km in either direction, just 15+ dolphins playing in the waves. Isn't this point a little disingenuous when you live in a country that's almost the size of USA or Europe, but only has 25 million inhabitants, and people from other countries have to travel far to get there?
  - prawn 8y ago
ciconia 8y ago
I'm with you 100%. Try visiting the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. The room is packed and everyone's taking selfies with the painting as a background. It's beyond ridiculous...
mc32 8y ago
For local attractions like that what municipalities can do is set access for locals as free and access to out of town tourists at some price. Foot traffic will degrade natural sites, with the fees they can better take care of these sites and ensure they don’t become overrun. Bhutan has an interesting system for foreign tourists, they have a visa cap as well as a hefty visa fee. It’s one way to dampen demand to more sustainable levels. Historically tourism has been very bourgeois, now it’s become ‘democratized’ bug that has untaxed externalities.
tobtoh 8y ago
To take a counter view, you could argue that not travelling is the ultimate expression of narcissism. An unwillingness to see beyond your own small environment, to expose yourself to different views/culture/people.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  A 5 to 10 day jaunt to other major cities or developed countries that you spend in a Hilton/Marriot/Hyatt, ride in Uber/Lyfts, and take selfies to put on instagram/snapchat all the while not speaking to anyone outside of the staff you communicate with at the hotel/restaurant is not exposing one's self to different views/culture/people. And I think that's what the original commenter was alluding to.
- zinclozenge 8y ago
  The more I traveled and experienced other cultures, the more I realized people are the same everywhere.
  - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
    Sounds like it was worth it then!
DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
> I have been toying with the idea that travel is the ultimate expression of selfishness and narcissism. travel isn't the problem. People experiencing their lives via the lens of their phone/camera is. Take pictures by all means. But taking pictures to get likes from strangers in order to experience it as a valuable memory is pathological. Edit: I hate to bring my phone with me when in nature because I feel it robs me of the experience I could have actually enjoying the moment. My ex always complained "why you never take pictures of these special moments?" ... If I would have my eyes on the phone it wouldn't be special. 10 or 20 years later I still have rich memories of those times where it mattered and I guess not having a phone/camera with me at the time was big part that it actually became a great memory.
- bmj 8y ago
  I reckon it's a bit of both. As the internet allows people to share information about "special places," more people will travel there. I see this all the time with rock climbing--areas get more publicity, and climbers flock there, and there are real impacts because of increased traffic. I guess that is tangentially related to more social media posts, but there are also just more people climbing now than there has been in the past.
- ASpring 8y ago
  It's not just you, taking photos of something can impair your actual memory of the moment itself https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211368117301687 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221136811...
  - DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
    thanks for that link!!
- afiori 8y ago
  > "why you never take pictures of these special moments?" ... If I would have my eyes on the phone it wouldn't be special. 10 or 20 years later I still have rich memories of those times where it mattered and I guess not having a phone/camera with me at the time was big part that it actually became a great memory. For me it is in the other direction. I do not avoid social media (think I am on most on them...) but interact sparingly (less than once a month). Still I am sometimes an obsessive photographer exactly because I know I have a terrible memory.
ip26 8y ago
One question I wonder that I don't quite know how to answer- perhaps the important part is how does tourism compare to the other hobbies people might engage in to fill their time. It's probably worse than intramural sports, but how does it compare to automobile racing or what have you. Or, how does modern tourism compare to tourism of ages past- is ten thousand people taking a photograph better or worse than a couple British guys shooting a lion? You could also speculate about much harder to prove thesis. For example, if travel & "global citizenship" helps avoid a great war, that's quite a lot of damage & destruction averted.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  From a carbon footprint standpoint, international travel is about as "bad" as you can get. From a social media narcissism eating the world standpoint, it's also pretty bad to be spending thousands of dollars to travel somewhere just to shoot an instagram shot and hope for likes (imho).
  - ip26 8y ago
    Cruise ships are worse than planes, although maybe that would also be considered international travel. There's a lot more focus on getting drunk on a boat though.
zwkrt 8y ago
I agree with you up to the point of claiming that having experiences is not a worthy reason to travel. The issue in this article is that people aren't attempting to 'experience' Rue Cremieux but instead to picture it and make it their own. The first is a complicated and respectful process whereas the second does not require understanding or compassion.
overthemoon 8y ago
I'm really sympathetic to this, and I'll try to explain why: It's not technically yours, sure, not in any sort of legal sense, but your cultural and historical connection to it is meaningful. Your SENSE of ownership over it wouldn't hold up in court, but that doesn't mean it's immaterial. It doesn't afford you the right to kick people out, but it does excuse some frustration over the crowd, and a sense that maybe they're not as entitled to it as the locals are. No, no one can tell those people to leave. But I think tourists have a serious responsibility to consider how their presence impacts the area. But there's a tension there, of course. It's selfish to hoard and hide things like this, and the world has a lot of wonderful things in it. But I think I'm more sympathetic to locals than I am tourists. More broadly, the elevation of travel to a spiritual practice is a big time lie. I don't doubt it has some benefit but it's moral and spiritual inflation is similar to people's attitudes about aesthetic appreciation--you can be a shitbag and have good taste. You can be an utter bastard and be well-traveled.
doctorRetro 8y ago
> I have been toying with the idea that travel is the ultimate expression of selfishness and narcissism. Really? Because although I may not have travelled much, I can't say it's ever been "about me". Quite the opposite. For me travelling is about where I'm going, what I'm experiencing, who I'm meeting. I think your applying your perception of a subset of travellers on the body at large.

by rland 8y ago

speedplane 8y ago

> just so that someone can have an ~experience~ What is life if not an accumulation of experience?

rland 8y ago
Yes, I mean, that's almost my point. I think for a big portion of the people I see in that throng of 100, the experience of going someplace, joining the crowd, getting in line for the photo angle that trends best on Instagram, then packing up and going home -- is actually a pretty mediocre experience, not a beautiful one. They'd be better off enjoying a quiet moment in their front garden.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  That’s not really for you to say, is it? Even assuming they’d agree with your cynical characterization, which is doubtful.

oh_sigh 8y ago

Hire 2 fat guys to stand around shirtless drinking beers to ruin the photos. Eventually the tourists will slow down. Also, that place was not yours. Yeah, it sucks that you can't get 100% pleasure out of it because 1000 people are getting 5% of pleasure out of it...so maybe find a new spot? There isn't a shortage of wild places out there

dagw 8y ago
Eventually the tourists will slow down Either that or getting your photo with shirtless fat guys becomes the new point of the exercise (with people getting more likes the fatter the guys).
- cm2187 8y ago
  A european, gym-free version of the naked cowboy in NY.
throwmeback 8y ago
>Hire 2 fat guys to stand around shirtless drinking beers to ruin the photos. Eventually the tourists will slow down. I'll take a photo with them - it'd be 3 fat guys standing around shirtless drinking beers. :')

maaaats 8y ago

> I have a place that's very dear to me that is similarly being eroded by a crush of visitors. But why is you visiting it okay, but others not? It's like being stuck in traffic and hating on other drivers. In the article's case, it's their homes, so I can see it being annoying. But for landmarks that get popular, I don't see how one is justified in hating on other people going there. It's just a tragedy of the commons. I also dislike how Barcelona and others are handling the problem. Taking tourists' money and harassing them. I say this as someone who grew up in a mountain resort. Yes, it is annoying during winter when people flood to "my nature" and "my ski spots". But if it weren't for those people, my family or no one else would live there as there wouldn't be any jobs. So then it wouldn't be "mine" anyways.

rland 8y ago
You’re right, of course. I grew up nearby and spent many summers there as a kid, that’s why I have some connection. But the place is not mine. The reason I brought it up in the first place is because only within the last 10 years has it really gotten “bad” — completely because of instagram.
- treerock 8y ago
  I don't think you can blame instagram. These problems are happening all over the world, and I doubt that many of the tourists actually use instagram. I suspect cheap flights and accommodation, changes in fashion (city breaks vs package holidays), more disposable income and free time are all contributing.
  - Moru 8y ago
    Yes, this has been happening the last 100 years or so, to different locations over the world. There is always something that gets noticed on TV or whatever channel exists att he time. And then some entrepreneur uses the hype to make trips with tourists to this location. Just an example: https://www.slice.ca/travel/photos/most-popular-travel-spots-by-decade/#!The_Catskills_Popular-Destinatons-by-Decade_ https://www.slice.ca/travel/photos/most-popular-travel-spots...

_hardwaregeek 8y ago

I think there's a distinction to be made between travel as accumulating social capital masquerading as "experiences" and travel as seeking genuinely novel experiences. It's the same difference between going to Instagrammable restaurants and seeking out places that have legitimately good food. Then again, I don't think this distinction is new. There's always been a dichotomy between people who travel like an RPG where they have to see X monument and have Y experience in order to tell their friends about it, and people who come in open minded.

cm2187 8y ago
Yes and no. Before instagram you had tourist guides (books). If a major guide mentions a location as lovely and must seen, you will have hordes of tourists raiding the area, often to just take a quick picture and mark a notch next to the entry. Like I just don’t get people going to the Trevi fountain in Rome. The place is so crowded that all they get is pushing their way to a tight spot where they can see some of the horses, take the same picture than the first 1,000,000 results on google image and then push their way out. What’s the experience?
- bsder 8y ago
  One could just as easily say this about the Sistine Chapel. And yet most people who go there still regard the experience as profound.
- dantheman 8y ago
  The choice is - don't see it or see it in a slightly less than optimal way. It's an amazing fountain, it's different than anything at home for many visitors, and it's super easy to get to.
ryanwaggoner 8y ago
This is a false dichotomy. When I travel to new places, I like to see the standard tourist stuff, but I also like to walk the back alleys and go "off the beaten path". I'm not unique in this either. The gatekeeping people have around the right kind of travel is amazing.

yakshaving_jgt 8y ago

Until you said "sunset", I was almost certain you were referring to Wedding Cake Rock, a similar victim of new-found Instagram popularity. That's in the town where I grew up, which is often ruined by tourists. I don't know what it is about group dynamics, but as I perceive it (and it may be confirmation bias), large groups of tourists do far more damage (especially littering) than if the same number of people had visited individually.

dtrump2020 8y ago

I would build a big wall around it and get the Instagrammers to pay for it.

csomar 8y ago

> I have been toying with the idea that travel is the ultimate expression of selfishness and narcissism. As far as I understand, you don't own the place. From my perspective, you are more selfish than these people. You don't want people to access public property because it "inconveniences" you? Seriously, what is wrong with the world. The reason people didn't visit your place before because internet didn't make it popular enough and transportation wasn't that good. The fact that you were there first or had memories of it being empty doesn't make you own it (and thank god for that). ps: I used to live in a very nice part of the city. I ended up moving because the outsiders "wrecked" it. But it is fair. I only rented an apartment and the nearby small mountain and sea was public property.

ip26 8y ago
The thought is more like, if everyone goes to the city park nearest them, each city park can bear the traffic. If everyone around the world visits just this one city park, it becomes unsustainable. So nobody owns anything, or has exclusive right, but when each area is used mostly by the respective locals, it's more sustainable all the way around. That's the tension.

prawn 8y ago

Instagram is replacing the guide book. And because people are more digitally connected, a lot of their storytelling has become visual and so visually remarkable sights have grown in popularity. I can't see it going away anytime soon - my state tourism authority uses social media as a key tool in their efforts. This weekend just been, I was flown to a location by said authority, given a car for four days and basically set loose to photograph whatever interested me. (I shoot with a drone.) Anyway, at the first of the two fixed experiences of the weekend (an oyster farm), I was sitting near two girls who had driven 700km for a weekend in this location all because they'd seen a girl's photograph on Instagram, shared by the authority. Coincidentally, that girl was seated five metres from them and also in the area shooting for the tourism authority because of how powerful social is now. The authority chaperone was right there in the middle to witness the power of her daily work. For anyone who cares, this is my work: https://www.instagram.com/__serio__/ https://www.instagram.com/__serio__/ This is the shot the girls had seen: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs2aWsbHxT0/ https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs2aWsbHxT0/ I imagine the average HN user imagines these "travel couples" to be particularly obnoxious and I'm sure some are (like any subset of people), but this couple were very genuine and great people. Like me, they get out there because one hobby is photography; just a bit different to that of the typical landscape photographer. No where we shot that weekend was anywhere near crowded. I almost always had miles and miles of pristine beach to myself. At this location, there would've been no one on that beach for 3-5 km in either direction, just 15+ dolphins playing in the waves. https://www.instagram.com/p/Buo4NcFDxU7/ https://www.instagram.com/p/Buo4NcFDxU7/

Cederfjard 8y ago
>No where we shot that weekend was anywhere near crowded. I almost always had miles and miles of pristine beach to myself. At this location, there would've been no one on that beach for 3-5 km in either direction, just 15+ dolphins playing in the waves. Isn't this point a little disingenuous when you live in a country that's almost the size of USA or Europe, but only has 25 million inhabitants, and people from other countries have to travel far to get there?
- prawn 8y ago

ciconia 8y ago

I'm with you 100%. Try visiting the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. The room is packed and everyone's taking selfies with the painting as a background. It's beyond ridiculous...

mc32 8y ago

For local attractions like that what municipalities can do is set access for locals as free and access to out of town tourists at some price. Foot traffic will degrade natural sites, with the fees they can better take care of these sites and ensure they don’t become overrun. Bhutan has an interesting system for foreign tourists, they have a visa cap as well as a hefty visa fee. It’s one way to dampen demand to more sustainable levels. Historically tourism has been very bourgeois, now it’s become ‘democratized’ bug that has untaxed externalities.

tobtoh 8y ago

To take a counter view, you could argue that not travelling is the ultimate expression of narcissism. An unwillingness to see beyond your own small environment, to expose yourself to different views/culture/people.

lotsofpulp 8y ago
A 5 to 10 day jaunt to other major cities or developed countries that you spend in a Hilton/Marriot/Hyatt, ride in Uber/Lyfts, and take selfies to put on instagram/snapchat all the while not speaking to anyone outside of the staff you communicate with at the hotel/restaurant is not exposing one's self to different views/culture/people. And I think that's what the original commenter was alluding to.
zinclozenge 8y ago
The more I traveled and experienced other cultures, the more I realized people are the same everywhere.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  Sounds like it was worth it then!

DyslexicAtheist 8y ago

> I have been toying with the idea that travel is the ultimate expression of selfishness and narcissism. travel isn't the problem. People experiencing their lives via the lens of their phone/camera is. Take pictures by all means. But taking pictures to get likes from strangers in order to experience it as a valuable memory is pathological. Edit: I hate to bring my phone with me when in nature because I feel it robs me of the experience I could have actually enjoying the moment. My ex always complained "why you never take pictures of these special moments?" ... If I would have my eyes on the phone it wouldn't be special. 10 or 20 years later I still have rich memories of those times where it mattered and I guess not having a phone/camera with me at the time was big part that it actually became a great memory.

bmj 8y ago
I reckon it's a bit of both. As the internet allows people to share information about "special places," more people will travel there. I see this all the time with rock climbing--areas get more publicity, and climbers flock there, and there are real impacts because of increased traffic. I guess that is tangentially related to more social media posts, but there are also just more people climbing now than there has been in the past.
ASpring 8y ago
It's not just you, taking photos of something can impair your actual memory of the moment itself https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211368117301687 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221136811...
- DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  thanks for that link!!
afiori 8y ago
> "why you never take pictures of these special moments?" ... If I would have my eyes on the phone it wouldn't be special. 10 or 20 years later I still have rich memories of those times where it mattered and I guess not having a phone/camera with me at the time was big part that it actually became a great memory. For me it is in the other direction. I do not avoid social media (think I am on most on them...) but interact sparingly (less than once a month). Still I am sometimes an obsessive photographer exactly because I know I have a terrible memory.

ip26 8y ago

One question I wonder that I don't quite know how to answer- perhaps the important part is how does tourism compare to the other hobbies people might engage in to fill their time. It's probably worse than intramural sports, but how does it compare to automobile racing or what have you. Or, how does modern tourism compare to tourism of ages past- is ten thousand people taking a photograph better or worse than a couple British guys shooting a lion? You could also speculate about much harder to prove thesis. For example, if travel & "global citizenship" helps avoid a great war, that's quite a lot of damage & destruction averted.

malvosenior 8y ago
From a carbon footprint standpoint, international travel is about as "bad" as you can get. From a social media narcissism eating the world standpoint, it's also pretty bad to be spending thousands of dollars to travel somewhere just to shoot an instagram shot and hope for likes (imho).
- ip26 8y ago
  Cruise ships are worse than planes, although maybe that would also be considered international travel. There's a lot more focus on getting drunk on a boat though.

zwkrt 8y ago

I agree with you up to the point of claiming that having experiences is not a worthy reason to travel. The issue in this article is that people aren't attempting to 'experience' Rue Cremieux but instead to picture it and make it their own. The first is a complicated and respectful process whereas the second does not require understanding or compassion.

overthemoon 8y ago

I'm really sympathetic to this, and I'll try to explain why: It's not technically yours, sure, not in any sort of legal sense, but your cultural and historical connection to it is meaningful. Your SENSE of ownership over it wouldn't hold up in court, but that doesn't mean it's immaterial. It doesn't afford you the right to kick people out, but it does excuse some frustration over the crowd, and a sense that maybe they're not as entitled to it as the locals are. No, no one can tell those people to leave. But I think tourists have a serious responsibility to consider how their presence impacts the area. But there's a tension there, of course. It's selfish to hoard and hide things like this, and the world has a lot of wonderful things in it. But I think I'm more sympathetic to locals than I am tourists. More broadly, the elevation of travel to a spiritual practice is a big time lie. I don't doubt it has some benefit but it's moral and spiritual inflation is similar to people's attitudes about aesthetic appreciation--you can be a shitbag and have good taste. You can be an utter bastard and be well-traveled.

doctorRetro 8y ago

> I have been toying with the idea that travel is the ultimate expression of selfishness and narcissism. Really? Because although I may not have travelled much, I can't say it's ever been "about me". Quite the opposite. For me travelling is about where I'm going, what I'm experiencing, who I'm meeting. I think your applying your perception of a subset of travellers on the body at large.