I’m not sure directly about Narcissism, but I think the meaning of travel today is very different from what it was 20 or 50 years ago. The world was a lot bigge

I’m not sure directly about Narcissism, but I think the meaning of travel today is very different from what it was 20 or 50 years ago. The world was a lot bigger. Foreign places a lot farther and a lot more foreign. Discovering that thew world was so big and had so much stuff in it that you had never considered was a sort of awing experience. Being a fish out of water in a way that a German would have felt in 1960s Marakesh was a lot greater. The traveller’s ability to plan and control the experience a lot more limited. Inevitably, the traveller was faced with a lot of experiences, people and places that they had no stereotypes and biases to understand through. They couldn’t make make sense of things. They would have just had to accept things without classifying, judging or using the normal mental models we have for making sense of our world. It was much more possible to have a humbling experience. These days not just travel, but all contact with foreign place is a much more accessible, easy and unchallenging recreation. That doesn’t mean it’s bad. It just isn’t as character building as it was, in general. Regarding narcissism… The desire to travel has always been part and parcel of the desire to have adventures. Stories to tell and memories to look back on. I think the stories to tell is the thread that narcissism pulls. I’m not sure how that relates to then and now.