The Travel Myth

How a recent European trip unraveled my romanticization of travel

When I was a child, I idealized travel. Every couple of years until the age of seven, my family flew to the UK for Christmas — Scotland, the English countryside, and London — to visit family. I loved packing my little suitcase with my initials on it, showing the TSA agent my passport in my pink Vera Bradley passport holder, watching the planes take off out the airport gate window, and feeling my body levitate as the ground grew smaller under me, escaping reality. I would pull out my colored pencils and lean over the airplane tray table, drawing adult me traveling the world.

Fast forward to age twenty-one; I had one more year of my undergraduate degree and was ready to leave Boston behind. I wanted to escape my past, and my solution was to travel the world alone. Of course, life rarely follows our little plans and designs, and God then introduced me to the love of my life. However, Kyra and I ended things three weeks into dating because of my travel plans. If I had no choice but to eventually leave her behind for my ventures, we might as well end things before either one got hurt. (It is now almost a year later, and we have signed a lease together.) Since I decided to stay in Boston with her, I’ve thought about what my ideal of traveling the world might look like with a home base. I have former au pairs living in Vaxjö and Berlin, and after graduating from college in May, we decided to visit them as an excuse to see Europe.

I packed my pink Vera Bradley holder with my updated passport, and Kyra and I jetsetted across the Atlantic Ocean; we’d see three countries in ten days: Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. While finishing our weekend in Copenhagen, we relaxed in a large bookstore, waiting to catch our next flight. There, Kyra picked up a thin booklet containing a 2023 essay titled “The Case Against Travel,” by Agnes Callard. I flipped through the pamphlet as we boarded the hour flight to Berlin, feverishly taking notes in my notebook on the airplane tray table.

I was horrified — were my grand travel plans nothing but a hedonistic pursuit of avoiding the absurd? Perhaps. Callard creates a convincing philosophical argument against the psychological and existential delusions of the bucket-list tourist. While she largely left out the devastating ethical consequences of over-tourism, her argument was enough to get me to reevaluate why I’m traveling in the first place.

Constant movement cannot produce meaning. There is no pause, no time for reflection when whizzing off to the next site.

Nyhavn, Copenhagen

I will not needlessly repeat Callard’s essay — you can go read it for yourself — but I will add what I believe her critique lacks and detail my proposed solution:

Firstly, I’d like to contend that many of the problems with travel as an endeavor do not apply to moving to a new place. Immigration requires assimilation into a new culture. You immerse yourself in a new life, not yet knowing what new perspectives and lessons you will learn. There is an adjustment period marked by clumsiness, disorientation, and feeling out of place. You are forced to get lost, navigate language barriers and transportation systems, and rely on strangers. This requires resilience, adaptability, and humility.

These are, funny enough, the most common arguments for travel. However, a ten-day trip is not enough time for any of this, especially locomoting to three different countries during that period. Kyra and I barely sat down for the entire trip because of self-imposed pressure to “make the most of” each country, not knowing when we’d return next. Constant movement cannot produce meaning. There is no pause, no time for reflection when whizzing off to the next site.

Not to mention locomotion’s cost to the planet; it is a luxury the environment cannot support. A single flight can emit more carbon dioxide than a single person’s sustainable annual carbon budget.¹ Global tourism also causes mass socio-economic displacement, pricing locals out of their own homes. The explosion of short-term vacation rentals (I’m looking at you, Airbnb) hyper-gentrifies historic cities such as Barcelona, Lisbon, Amsterdam, and Venice. Landlords convert residential housing into tourist units, skyrocketing rent, driving out multigenerational families, and replacing community staples with souvenir shops and overpriced cafés.²

Callard argued that tourists seek to be changed by a place, but unknowingly are the ones causing mass change. What she just began to touch on is that when thousands of people descend on a destination simultaneously, it is a massive burden on local systems, draining water tables, overwhelming waste management systems, and bottlenecking the transportation locals use to get to work. It creates a volatile economic monoculture in which local economies cater entirely to the tourist dollar. This requires low-wage, seasonal, and precarious labor that can devastate a community, God forbid a global shock like a pandemic or recession happens.³

Finally, there is the elephant in the room — the enormous financial privilege required to travel. Callard alluded that only philosophers like Socrates, Kant, Emerson, and Pessoa resist travel, but neglected to acknowledge that most people don’t travel because they simply cannot afford it, and some of the poorest communities are in tourist destinations.

We can not exist in our little bubbles, ignorant of the ways we affect the world.

Brandenburg Gate, Berlin

As I attempt to lead an intentionally slow life (an essay on my new flip phone coming soon), I think about how it will change the way I approach travel. I still contend that immigrating is unmatched in its capacity to produce meaning and fulfillment. If I am to travel temporarily, I want to do so only if the place offers an experience I cannot have at home — and actually care to have. The best part of our trip was the quality time Kyra and I spent with my former au pairs and their families. Before I go to the Louvre, have I explored every exhibit of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts? Wherever we go, we bring ourselves, our character defects, and our interests. These won’t suddenly evolve in a new place over the course of a couple of weeks. How can we get to know ourselves at home? If the purpose of travel is for the sake of travel, of movement and change, then perhaps we need to examine why we feel the desire to regularly shake up our lives in the first place. I see this a lot in the service industry. Coworkers wait tables for sixty hours a week, making thousands of dollars a week. They then take indulgent vacations, coming home with a new tattoo and bragging about their worldly adventures, while complaining about their lives the other 330 days a year.

If we insist on a trip for a specific purpose, how can we slow down as much as possible to show the land and people we visit respect? Can we take less air travel and more trains and ferries? Can we skip destinations already overrun by tourism? How can we minimize the social and economic strain we impose on a place, not forcing it to adapt to us and our travelers’ needs?

There is intentionality that must go into how we move through life, especially when engaging in something as impactful as travel. What do the places you go to mean to you? Did you take the time to learn about a city’s history while there? What drew you to the Mona Lisa? Was it da Vinci’s artistic technique or did you fall for a tourist trap, snatching a photo to bring back home? We can not exist in our little bubbles, ignorant of the ways we affect the world. Yes, immersing ourselves in a new place can expand our minds. However, not if we travel in a manner curated for us, the foreigner. To connect with locals, you become a local. You assimilate into the culture and provide something meaningful to the place where you now live. That is how you become a citizen of the world, not through cursory visits to cities as if they were a collectible.

1. Tuppen, Holly. “Is There a Sustainable Way to Fly?” The Independent, 29 July 2021, www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/sustainable-living/sustainable-flights-flying-travel-emissions-b1891586.html.
2. Batalha, Mafalda. “Short-Term Rentals in Europe: When Tourism Re-Shapes Neighbourhoods.” La Fonte, European University Institute, 15 May 2025, lafonte.eui.eu/short-term-rentals-in-europe-when-tourism-re-shapes-neighbourhoods.
3. Brajcich, Kaitlyn. “What Is Overtourism and Why Is It a Problem?” Sustainable Travel International, 15 Aug. 2024, sustainabletravel.org/what-is-overtourism/.