Oh, shut up already.
I’ll admit that I’ve been up since 4am almost every morning this week, woken by a wide-eyed toddler towering over me in the early morning half light, adamantly making the ASL sign for water, food, ball, whatever in my face, and am coping with so much strong Vietnamese coffee that my brain is twitching.
This may account for some of my possibly hyperbolic irritation, but by no means all of it.
See the link to the article I screen shot above, which I posted on my Facebook wall this morning?
This was yet another in a long line of similar articles that have been making the rounds of social media over the past year or so, each one written by someone on their gap year or in year 8 of their never-ending-solo-travel-whatever or by the TEFL teacher who has been in China for three months and is now an authority on it.
The general theme running through these articles is, wow, gosh, I travel a lot or I live in a foreign country and so I am inherently more:
And so on.
And the comment sections both at the ends of the articles and on the Facebook pages that linked them are often rich with people shouting Yay me! I’m awesome! I can hop on planes and trains and rickety boats and that makes me smart and lovable and not crap and dull and enslaved like those narrow-minded suburban drones who are shackled to their jobs in their monochromatic hometowns! and patting themselves on the back so hard that they pull muscles and the collective twang can be heard ’round the world.
I don’t want to sound jaded but, damnit, this is so much bullshit that it needs to be called.
In order to not repeat myself too much, because we’ve been here before, I’m going to link back to my old privilege post.
Read it first and answer the questions posed within if time permits.
Done?
Good.
Now, the next time you feel like telling everyone how special you are because you stayed in a few (dozen/hundred, etc) crappy hostels in obscure places (and hung out with other travelers like yourself) or have X number of passports stuffed with exotic visas or tasted the culinary pleasures of tongues, tails and testicles or drank moonshine with the locals or quit your job to travel the world for X months or years, I want you to watch this documentary for perspective.
An excerpt from the review linked above, for context:
The three, who ranged in age from their mid-20s to their early 30s, were among the 25,000 “lost boys,” ages 3 to 13, who fled their villages in the 1980s to escape extermination or sterilization. They traveled on foot for five years, while starvation, dehydration, disease, wild animals and attacks from rebel soldiers reduced their number to a few thousand, before they landed in a United Nations refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya.
I have, over the past 20-odd years, been guilty of taking unjustified pride in my travels, in my expattery, my old passports full of stamps and visas. I’m sometimes quietly smug, despite my best efforts or wishes, because I can say I’ve eaten bear paw and sheep lungs and have slept out in the open in vast deserts and on train station floors and drank shots of homebrew Romanian moonshine with a pair of crazy grandmothers on Christmas morning, 1998. Yay me, right?
I am so full of it sometimes. It’s embarrassing.
The thing is, we, as travelers and expats and people who move around semi-secure in the knowledge that a bed and safety and a meal and a beer await us at the end of most (if not all) days, aren’t more lovable. We aren’t smarter. We aren’t freer. We aren’t, as a collective, more or less anything.
We all do the shit we want to do- or at least try to the best of our abilities. Some of us have far, far more restricted abilities than others. Some of us do it at home and are happy with it. Some of us go elsewhere. Some do both. Some have no choice.
No one is better. No one is more lovable. No one is smarter.
You just are whoever the hell you are.
Ok?
KthanxBye.
Yeah, I dunno.
16 Responses
Sing it sister.
To those who describe themselves on social media, in their bios or in conversation by noting How Many countries they’ve travelled to (or by noting that their passports are ‘as thick as a bible’ — yes, saw this on a popular travel blog):
Thanks for the warning. I do not want to know you.
Yup. I’ve strayed far from the path of bloggery in the past few years (back in 2010, I thought I wanted to be there). Now i feel a bit older and more jaded. Or maybe just older.
This is good. And rabbit-holey. Which is also good. As a result, I’ve just rediscovered a whole load of things about myself that I’d forgotten/blanked out of my mind, and this, while being not entirely comfortable, is good. As you pointed out above, being aware of where you’ve come from to get where you are today is important.
Kate Bailward recently posted..It takes a village
I’m here to drag you down rabbit holes, whether you want them or not. Was it a good journey, overall?
Interesting, especially the part about privileges.
I was reading “Red Dust” by Ma Jian last week and thinking about how lucky I am by having a Western Passport, a VISA card and so on.
And yes, in my parents house there were 500+ books (although not for children).
As for people “masturbating” each other for having traveled in 10+ countries, I think it will never change.
I was also soooo proud of myself when I started to travel because, before I did, I was way more retarded than I’m now.
Traveling will certainly open your mind, to some extent.
However, reading how traveling opened the mind of a 21 years old student in his gap year is way boring. Almost as boring as travel bloggers that can only brag about their 342343 visited destinations.
Just ignore them and read – or write – a good novel instead , )
I think living in places like China and Turkey gave me a good sense of perspectives about at least a few of my privileges. They were certainly made more apparent whilst living there.
And yeah, personal histories are far more important than all of the false dichotomies that we have created. Me in 1994 or 1999 or 2005 or whenever is a whole different beast than me now- so many different choices along the way, so many lessons learned the hard way— the embarrassing way…
Time to go read something good. Yes.
Hi Mary Anne,
Really like your post! Yes, I saw myself quite a few of those posts.
The number of 20-something who Travel-Blog and self-congratulate for being a mix of Indiana Jones, James Bond & Albert Einstein is quite stunning. Especially when you see the reality “on the road” in hostels where it’s a lot about getting drunk…
Cheers, Gilles
Gilles Barbier recently posted..Brazil – A Selection Of 30 Pictures
Yup. Thank you. I have a feeling these guys will grow and mature as they age and that if I had been given access to a blogging platform in 1994, I’d be horrified now by what I’d written and done and taken pride in and thought were important. Things change.
Also, of course, all our kids are TOTALLY GENIUSES BECAUSE WE TRAVEL WITH THEM WHICH YOU UNENLIGHTENED PEOPLE DON’T BECAUSE YOU”RE TOO HIDEBOUND. Right? Err, right? Right?
I’m going to enrol Thwack in a Malaysian Mandarin school when he’s two because I CAN.
Also: his babysitter and our housekeeper are Vietnamese so he’s the most multi-culti toddler ever.
Yes, but has he started VIOLIN lessons yet? And how is his PHYSICS?
Aw, crap- I forgot about that violin. Would a toy xylophone count? As for physics, they’re awesome by toddler standards. Better than ALL of the other inferior toddlers.
Simply thank you saying what needed to be said.
Ana O recently posted..7 things to do in Chicago
Thank you. I needed to get it out of my head. It ached.
I take a great deal of pleasure in my adventures, my Mandarin skills, and all the wild stuff I’ve seen in my travels. But I think we should be really wary of this idea that getting a lot of visa stamps makes us inherently better people (or wiser, more loving, whatever). Sending a gap year in expat bars doesn’t magically convey wisdom, and staying home doesn’t keep us from living good lives.
Meg recently posted..As One Does