The Big "Travel" Lie

Travel is fun. The meme of it all is classist & anti-American.

“Congrats on not being like other Americans.”

The Australian in Budapest who said this to us had just twisted his face in surprise at the fact that people from North Carolina had found themselves living, working, in a major European city. I want to believe he thought that he was giving a straightforward compliment, in the same way that a man who congratulates a woman on being unlike “other girls” for, say, having a conservative position on immigration, believes himself to be sincere. Both fail to see the presumptuous contempt baked into their backhanded flattery.

There’s a common refrain especially among millennials now, mysteriously attributed to St. Augustine: “the world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” I’ve read plenty of Augustine, I cannot remember him ever writing such a thing, and it doesn’t sound like him, anyway, but I digress. The meme has colonized the collective conscience; it doesn’t matter who never said it in the first place.

The real problem isn’t that the quote is likely misattributed—it’s that the sentiment itself has been absorbed uncritically, as if travel was inherently a signal of personal enlightenment, rather than a lifestyle commodity, as it now is. The concept of travel has become a meme, similar to what I’ve written about regarding religion, tradition, and fertility. And like all such things, it relies on a convenient caricature of those who don’t participate in the ritual: the pitiable, provincial, unwashed, unsophisticated American, hopelessly trapped on a single, unread page.