Welcome to Play Fool, a newsletter about the games we play and the games which play us. This is the second of three pieces about re-imagining the holiday experience, and looks at the idea of a ‘tourist,’ as a kind of non-player character we all try (and fail) to avoid becoming. The first is here (it isn’t required reading). If you enjoy it, please consider sharing and subscribing.
A friend and I were speaking on the phone a few weeks ago. He and I both spent a significant chunk of our 20s and 30s in the air or on the road, engaged in a diffuse search pattern, always findings things but never quite sure what was lost. That period of life now feels peculiar, or even indulgent, reminiscent of a time when our cultural malaise was less urgent and better suited to exploratory wandering. I can’t think of that period of my life without feeling disjointed, as if viewing the past through a cracked windowpane. My memories of my travel experiences are pervaded by a low-intensity melancholy, in which the actual specifics of all those experiences blend into a singular mood. Picking apples on Long Island, snorkelling in Malawi, and eating pancakes in northern Thailand all feel similar in hindsight. What I remember, mostly, is simply finding myself unhappy wherever I happened to be. Travel experiences were failed experiments in losing myself.
Today, my friend & I have both given up recreational travel. He and his wife are building a tiny house south of Hobart and I have, more or less, committed to living in Perth for the forseeable future. The reasons for our localism are spiritual and material. Materially, it is difficult to justify non-essential air travel during the final decade we have to do a U-turn on climate change. These days, I can’t board a plane without recalling a grim image from another writer—that they imagine the turbines as being fuelled by “ground up babies.”
However, I want to background these material concerns. I’m not interested here in promoting guilt or shame, nor sharing a sermon1. For my friend and I, the material concerns were only the genesis of a deeper series of questions about what travel does for us, and what we might be able to do instead of travel.
In my most recent post, I suggested that the conventional holiday experience is a kind of foolishness. The experience which focuses on maximising pleasure and minimising pain is bound to lead to disappointment as we are, for the most part, unable to ever be satisfied in any enduring capacity—adding pleasure and removing pain only raises our baseline expectations2, making pleasure and comfort ever more elusive. I suggested that an alternative might be to think of our holiday experiences as a kind of Live Action Roleplaying Game (LARP), in which we are able to explore different ways of being in the world.
A perhaps simpler way to put this is that a ‘foolish’ holiday experience focuses on the where (the location) and the what (the activities, pleasures and displeasures) and underemphasises the who (who our holiday allows us to become). In my 20s and early 30s, you could say, I was fooled into thinking that changing my where would change who I fundamentally was. I remember quite vividly being utterly wracked with self-effacing melancholy on New Years Eve, 2016, sitting in the bleachers while listening to some DJ set in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. I was hanging out in the periphery, running through a mental rolodex of memories like a guilt-ridden detective. I had this fluttering recognition that I was, basically, doing the same thing I did at the first ever house party I went to back in 2002. The holiday can be an expensive lesson in neurogenesis: The capacity for our minds to generate our emotional and intellectual landscapes. When you are unhappy, as I have often been, everything resolves to dull gray and static.
The reader, might, at this point, want to suggest that the point I am making is not about holidays but is instead about unhappiness3. They may point out a happy person would be more capable of enjoying their holiday and would have more vivid experiences. The point, however, remains the same. As I was the navel-gazing wallflower in Zimbabwe, so too were those partygoers as they usually are with most other parties they go to. Those who enjoy their holidays have an enviable capacity to enjoy life. The ‘where’ changes, but the ‘who’ remains the same, like an actor running in place in front of a green screen. A holiday is quite often just a change of scenery.
A question we may productively ask of any travel experience, then, is: When I change my where and what, who might I be invited to become?
To understand who the holiday invites us to become, we need to consider the figure of the Tourist. When I say ‘figure,’ I mean some category of person who is the subject of official or institutional interest. As with all figures of official interest (the Criminal, the Empoyee, the Student, the Patient), the tourist is a two-dimensional caricature, like a swashbuckling pirate or a bubblegum-chewing valley girl. The tourist is the key figure throughout the entire travel-industrial complex. There are national bodies interested in generating more tourists, industry and professional associations with a psychoanalytic interest in the tourist, and countless small, medium, and large businesses intended to serve the tourist. When we go on a holiday, most of the time we are being asked to be a tourist.
Tourism is why you can buy a can of Coca-Cola halfway up Mount Kilimanjaro. It is why, in David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a biting work of cultural anthropology about life onboard a luxury Cruise Ship4, “upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet, whether the skeetshooting will be held outside, whether the crew sleeps on board, and what time the Midnight Buffet is.”
The tourist, generally speaking, seeks variety without difference (glamping, wine tours), experience without expectation (the museum, the safari, the aerial tour), thrill without risk (the zipline, the rollercoaster), and culture without confrontation (a dance, a spicy meal). The tourist is afraid of anything which might disrupt their own sense of who they are in the world. The tourist seeks, through accretion, to incorporate more and more of reality into their self-concept. As the hoarder hoards material things, the tourist hoards immaterial experiences. This is why people speak of having ‘done’ Paris, Madrid or Nairobi.
The most remarkable thing about the tourist is that while everyone seems very interested in there being more tourists, nobody wants to be one. Most tourists go to great lengths to not think of themselves as tourists. They want to be treated as individuals. They want experiences which are off the beaten track. Tourism bodies are then in the awkward position of having to convince tourists they are not tourists. Cruise ships now pass through Antarctica as a result. Airbnb offers ‘experiences.’ Marketing campaigns are algorithmically personalised according to opaque psychographics. Rented campervans announce the driver’s individuality with spray-on art.
Australians speak of how the Indonesian island of Bali has become a ‘tourist trap.’ The use of the word ‘trap’ here is appropriate5. The tourist, we could say, is an individual who has been trapped by an imaginary idea created by a coalition of state and market interests. They have become something less than their whole selves: a foreign ego with foreign currency. There are those who are interested in giving us this particular kind of agency. The tourist is of serious interest to the government and businesses. Unlike the migrant or refugee, who come to a country with all the rich and particular interests of individuals in communities, the tourist conveniently seeks only market exchange. In gamespeak, the tourist is a non-player character (or NPC) who must not be allowed to recognise themselves as such.
The ‘tourist trap,’ we could say, is a trap for our agency. In a proper tourist trap—Disneyland, a cruise ship, or a souvenir store, our agency becomes attenuated to a hypercommercialised version of ourselves. We become reduced to our likes and dislikes. The tourist trap provides maximum comfort and minimal risk, with all the variety of a cereal aisle. The reflexive tourist, I suspect, feels melancholy as they find themselves confronted by themselves in extremus. This is how I felt in Zimbabwe. I had come so far from home only to experience a music festival like any back home. The band names were different and the beer was cheaper, but in Zimbabwe I was the same bundle of likes and dislikes I was back in Australia.
The tourist trap is an extreme case, but there are degrees of variation all the way down. Drenched as the world is in complex, self-reflexive expectations and demands for authenticity and that most horrid thing—self-actualisation—the contemporary tourist operator has to be more savvy. What makes a tourist experience a trap, however, is not the experience itself but who the experience enables us to be. And, whether we like it or not, we are always partly responsible for our own agency. For the socially anxious person with agoraphobia, Disneyland may indeed provide a genuine experience of an alternative agency. For the world-weary backpacker, even the faintest trail through the most remote National Park might be a too-familiar stroll through the worn crevasses of her mind.
The problem, we could say, is not the tourist but the trapping. There are official interests—states, associations, and corporations—who try to trap us. However, we can also trap ourselves. What gets trapped is our agency. The trap limits who we can be, what we can like and dislike, and what constitutes a meaningful experience. The good travel experience, we might say, is one in which we’re able to evade the trap and wander in the psychic wilderness beyond.
Moralising about climate change is almost always a self-serving act and, as a friend described to me once, ethics is more complicated than CO2 accounting.
Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? is a famous study about this. Essentially, wellbeing gains from the lottery tend to even out over time, and may even reduce a person’s ability to enjoy more mundane pleasures.
As a sidenote, the attentive reader might notice I’m avoiding medicalised terms like ‘depression’ or ‘mental health.’ This is partly an attempt to normalise bad feelings in the course of life, and also an effort to deprofessionalise the language we use to describe inner states. I use the term ‘melancholy,’ to describe a way of seeing the world that is, while often unpleasant, not pathological or maladaptive.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (paywalled).
See the parable of the monkey trap from Foolishness and Mere Stupidity.