TRAVEL IS DEVALUED ​A few decades ago, I walked across my own country under the naive illusion that…

TRAVEL IS DEVALUED

​A few decades ago, I walked across my own country under the naive illusion that I would sleep wherever exhaustion overtook me, and that the bald wasteland belonged as much to me as to anyone else. But the road quickly demonstrated that no such common ground existed: every corner was a stranger’s estate, a monitored zone where the simple act of passing through or resting constituted a transgression.

​"How can anyone call themselves a citizen if there is not a single inch of the motherland where one can legitimately stand?"

​During that tramping, it was inevitable to ask myself how I had made such a blunder, believing I could reach places where I could walk free.

​"Does freedom exist?"

​Having to sleep clandestinely showed me that reality contradicted the stories and films about travellers. As I forged ahead, I wondered how much real growth I could extract from that journey; I sensed that the leap in maturity and wisdom that travel supposedly grants would always elude me if my days were reduced to the urgency of survival or finding a hidden corner to spend the night.

​A country, by definition, ought to be the common ground for those of us who share the same geographical zone. If there is the remote possibility that the State might ask me to lay down my life for the nation, or if I must spend my life paying taxes to it, that homeland should exist somewhere, and I should have the basic right to stand upon it. The answers from that first journey altered my worldview forever and forced me to look at the meaning of displacement from another perspective.

​THE MUTATION OF TRAVEL (FRICTION VS HYGIENE)

​Until little less than a century ago, travelling constituted a radical anomaly and, therefore, an adventure that inevitably signified an inner transformation. Being in other places implied the vulnerability of adapting to another culture, the weight of communication barriers, or a violent clash with alterity. Consider the logbooks of explorers or the dissident youth of Arthur Rimbaud, for whom travel was not about accumulating miles, but a process of mental demolition and the dismantling of one’s own identity.

That friction forced the individual to look inward, to shatter their certainties, and to grow through the radical experience of estrangement. ​Today, however, we live in a world that, following the constant tide of global cultural homogenisation, has pushed us to align under a single mould of values and consumption. Just as waves wear down the rocks on a beach until they become indistinguishable sand, the world’s cultural variety has been reduced to the price difference of a McDonald's product in different countries. Late capitalism no longer produces mere objects; it produces reproductions of reality that substitute reality itself. ​It is here that Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum becomes meaningful: mass tourism is the ultimate expression of a technical design that has extirpated danger, surprise, and the foreign. The contemporary traveller no longer seeks difference; they seek predictability. They cross oceans to lock themselves inside an air-conditioned Starbucks with Wi-Fi, staring at the exact same screens they watched in their living rooms, consuming a sanitised replica of the world.

​This dystopia of displacement finds its most grotesque monuments in industries such as cruises or all-inclusive resorts, which operate as literal architectures of confinement and social anaesthesia. The cruise ship is a floating captivity: thousands of people confined within a plastic infrastructure facing the most homogenous landscape imaginable, a flat, two-tone horizon, who only set foot on land at artificial ports to acquire identical trinkets.

​"What real value do these souvenirs hold?"

​They are the fetish of a false provenance, objects whose only reality is a mass-manufactured matrix.

​For its part, the all-inclusive resort perfects this logic through a fortified perimeter where any local friction has been eliminated. The tourist consumes a coastal farce where local residents are reduced to smiling servants in a staging designed to shield them from the reality of the country they are supposedly visiting. Along with global food chains, these complexes configure an ecosystem of absolute isolation.

​This process of assimilation is so relentless that it has reached even the margins of society: marginality itself has become homogenous. Following the logic of Antonio Gramsci’s cultural hegemony, we see that the criminal underworld or the social periphery no longer possess a purely local identity or a genuine territorial dissidence. From European suburbs to the fringes of large Latin American capitals, the marginalised individual consumes the same type of delinquency aestheticised by streaming platforms, the same industrially designed drugs, and pursues the same consumer aspirations imposed by the global market. Crime is no longer a symptom of resistance; it is the adoption of the very same commercial script.

​The exact same pattern of isolation operates in the youth who, under the safety net of their family, allows themselves the luxury of experimenting and emigrates to pick apples on the other side of the planet, in the fields of New Zelanda or Australia. Under the label of an alternative experience, this temporary worker uses the internet to check their home country's media, socialises endogamously with their compatriots, and consumes the same products they used to consume in their city of origin.

​Physical displacement is thus revealed as an illusion; it reflects the experience of a mind whose very structure has been colonised. When the psyche executes that predictable script, the journey is entirely devalued: it is reduced to a movement of bodily mass transporting its own cell wherever it goes.

​THE ILLUSION OF STATUS

​The true value of travel lies in it being an intellectual and human experience born from a lack in one’s present situation. It is a quest, the act of testing oneself in an unknown environment outside our control. In that space, stripped of daily certainties, the individual is reduced to their barest essentials. It is through that vulnerability, and the obligation to navigate the environment using the life tools carried within and those acquired along the way, that growth occurs. One returns as someone greater than the self that initiated the journey; it is a quest to live deliberately, generating human maturity and the development of the being. ​However, contemporary displacement has been transformed into a mechanism to annul this process. Today, people travel not to expose themselves, but to armor themselves; the market offers the illusion of roaming the world without ever running the risk of being nobody. The entire current infrastructure is designed to protect the traveller’s identity, ensuring it remains intact and under control, turning the exercise of travel into a crude accumulation of social capital and distinction, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms. The journey becomes a cosmetic commodity used as a form of capital to acquire status.

​This urgency for protection and validation manifests across different sectors of society under the same logic. The wealthy move by encapsulating themselves in identical luxury hotels to provide images for their network of contacts. They pay an outrageous premium to ensure the environment does not challenge or graze them, returning with the same intellectual narrowness with which they departed.

​In the same manner, the professional sphere recycles this displacement on networks like LinkedIn, where geographical experience is sold as corporate value. The middle-class executive goes into debt in instalments to pay for short courses at foreign universities, whose primary admission filter is the payment of tuition fees. The real objective is to obtain the profile picture that simulates a competitive advantage. Ironically, the actual technical understanding attributed to those destinations is available, in greater depth, through self-directed study on the internet. But this pursuit of status generates no real social mobility: the employee may be well-remunerated, but remains a subordinate who needs to sell their labour power to live, operating within the corporate machinery and compensating for their frustration through contempt toward those they consider below their station. ​Even in crime, this pattern of cosmetic validation is replicated through so-called "international pickpockets", who cross borders not for transformation, but to return to their origin flaunting stolen luxury brands and visual records to validate their standing within their underworld.

​In all these cases, the aberration lies in using displacement as armour. The enrichment of the experience is nil. The journey is devalued because it is reduced to an investment with a calculated return in visibility. The subject does not expose themselves to another culture nor expand their mind; they simply relocate their own psychological cell and consume the same global infrastructure at a different geographical point. They travel shielded against uncertainty, using resources to cover up discomfort and returning just as small, but now backed by a flight log and a portfolio of digital evidence to claim their status within the tribe.

​CONCLUSION – RETURN TO THE INNER JOURNEY

​In the end, this display of global infrastructure, digital validations, and simulacra of status only reveals one truth: consumer society ends up confirming, by default, that journeys were always internal. Geographical displacement alone lacks the faculty to modify the mind of the person moving; accumulating miles is not equivalent to accumulating lucidity. ​There is an exact correlation between this mass tourism and the passive consumption of culture. In the same way that reading a book without critical thought does not enrich the reader, but merely robusters their arrogance by allowing them to boast of a library they do not comprehend, travelling without the intellectual disposition to be challenged by the environment does not expand consciousness. The individual who moves shielded by their resources, their social media, or their prejudices is incapable of assimilating the density of the reality they tread upon. They return to their routine with the same mental rigidity with which they boarded the plane, but now compounded by a false intellectual superiority backed by a stamped passport.

​The devaluation of contemporary travel is the result of turning it into an interchangeable consumer good. Faced with a privatised territory and a homogenous culture that offers the comfort of the predictable, the only real alternative for transformation cannot be bought with a credit card or validated on a screen. Human maturity and the growth of the being do not depend on the physical distance covered, but on the deliberate will to dismantle one’s own certainties wherever we may find ourselves. If the mind remains shackled to the market’s script, physical relocation is a useless illusion: a mere movement of bodily mass transporting its own psychological cell to any corner of the planet.

​That initial journey of my youth, which ended in a violent clash of idealism against material reality and altered my worldview forever, occurred under that very logic. It was due to the raw friction of having to face the world with the only tools I possessed back then: absolute naivety and a sense of adventure. Nonetheless, this does not mean that precarity or vulnerability are the obligatory "tools" of any legitimate voyage; in my case, it was simply because I lacked alternatives. The true tool of travel, one accessible to anyone regardless of their resources, consists of conscious renunciation: setting one’s own comfort and routine aside to throw oneself into the experience of a different reality, stripped of the plastic wrapping of being a market product.