getting away from it all

notes on travel and alienation

Photo by Nicole Geri on Unsplash

Earlier this summer, the University of Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard published a much-discussed essay in The New Yorker, provocatively titled “The Case Against Travel.” In the essay, Callard situates herself among a “small but articulate” group of thinkers and writers who have rejected the conventional wisdom that travel is socially enriching and spiritually nourishing. Among this group’s number are Ralph Waldo Emerson, who once called travel “a fool’s paradise,” and the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, who wrote in his Book of Disquiet that “travel is for those who cannot feel.” Echoing these figures, Callard argues that “travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best.” This, she argues, is “the traveller’s delusion.”

“Travel is fun,” she writes, “so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue.” This, it seems, is the core of her argument—that while our culture tends to venerate travel as a uniquely transformative way to broaden our horizons and imbue our perceptions of the world with renewed respect and wonder, the actual experience of traveling all too often falls short of the life-changing transformation that we are promised. “Travelers tell themselves they’ve changed,” she argues, “but you can’t rely on introspection to detect a delusion.” Instead, she urges us to consider how we regard other people in our lives who tell us about their upcoming travel plans:

In what condition do you expect to find them when they return? They may speak of their travel as though it were transformative, a “once in a lifetime” experience, but will you be able to notice a difference in their behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass? Will there be any difference at all?

The question, of course, is intended to be rhetorical, its answer so obviously negative in Callard’s mind that she does not bother to answer it explicitly. The only real transformation that we undergo when we travel, according to her, is the temporary suspension of our “usual standards for what counts as a valuable use of time,” as well as our usual “taste in food, art, or recreational activities”—all with the knowledge, of course, that when we return we will simply revert to our usual tastes, standards, and habits.

For Callard, this seems to be little more than an exercise in futility. “If you usually avoid museums,” she asks, “and suddenly seek them out for the purpose of experiencing a change, what are you going to make of the paintings?” (The possibility that even people who do not usually frequent art museums can enjoy and admire and, yes, appreciate art when they do encounter it does not seem to have crossed her mind.)

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Callard, it should be noted, is no stranger to controversy on social media—over the past few years, she has gone viral for throwing away her children’s Halloween candy, boasting about crossing campus picket lines for a “philosophical emergency,” and leaving her husband for a graduate student. Given these previous brushes with online villainhood, it is hardly surprising that Callard’s New Yorker essay was met with considerable backlash on social media. Even renowned writer and prolific poster Joyce Carol Oates weighed in, calling it “one of the weakest New Yorker pieces I’ve ever seen.” Much of the negative online response to Callard’s essay seemed to focus less on the substance of her arguments, and more on the perceived condescension of her tone, as well as the general dislike that many people feel toward Callard herself—one Twitter user called it a “tough day for those of us who find travel about as annoying as Agnes Callard.”

Source: Twitter

It is, perhaps, too easy to dismiss this essay out of hand. The real problem with Callard’s “case against travel,” however, isn’t that there aren’t critiques to be leveled against travel—there absolutely are, and I say that as someone who loves traveling more than just about anything else. The problem is that Callard passes over substantive critiques in favor of superficial ones, filtering her argument through an individualist lens that places a disproportionate emphasis on the supposed philosophical failings of individual travelers—ignoring (or even obfuscating) the crucial role that capitalism plays in shaping our society’s undeniably flawed relationship with travel.

It is true that travel is all too often sold to us as something with the potential, if not the outright guarantee, to open our eyes like they have never been opened before and radically transform us into smarter, kinder, more cultured, all around better people. It is equally true that travel typically fails to live up to these expectations, that most of us come back from our voyages largely unaltered on any fundamental level. This, however, is not an indictment of travel—it is an indictment of capitalism, under whose increasingly oppressive conditions the idea of travel has come to function as a sort of escape fantasy. Far-off destinations are marketed to us as “escapes” and “getaways”—even the word “vacation” has its roots in the Latin vacātiō, meaning “exemption from service” or “respite from work.” Underpinning all of these cultural associations is the escapist notion that traveling is a way for us to “get away from it all,” where “it all” is the tedious slog of work and life in our contemporary capitalist society.

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But what exactly are the dimensions of that tedious slog? To answer that question, we must turn to the philosophy of—you guessed it—Karl Marx, in particular the theory of alienation that he famously articulated in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Alienation, in Marxist thought, refers to the process under capitalism by which workers are led to feel a sense of estrangement from the products of their own labor—and by extension, estrangement from their fellow workers, from nature, and even from their own humanity. This process, according to Marx, owes itself to

“the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself…The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home.”

In his 1978 essay “Marx’s Theory of Play, Leisure, and Unalienated Praxis,” American philosopher Laurence M. Hinman extends this analysis of alienation to encompass leisure as well as work. Hinman argues that the early writings in which Marx lays out his theory of alienated labor, also contain the foundations of a “theory of alienated leisure and play”—a theory which, Hinman contends, requires articulation because the increased “potential free time” of workers in the industrialized world has served to reinforce rather than to eliminate “the fundamental alienation of labor.”

Hinman observes a number of conditions under which, according to him, alienation takes place even during a worker’s leisure time. Of these conditions, two in particular are especially salient to understanding the relationship between travel and alienation in contemporary capitalist society—“when leisure activity is transformed into consumer activity,” and “when [leisure] becomes a flight from the alienation of work.”

In the context of travel, the first of these conditions speaks to the commodification of travel itself, its transformation from an activity that we do for leisure into a full-fledged industry. According to Hinman, as leisure activity—including travel—“becomes a specific type of economic activity whose meaning and value are determined by the forces of the marketplace,” it also “becomes alienated from its human meaning.” Similarly, the second condition speaks to the implications of the escapist function that travel has come to serve. “The attempt to find in leisure the freedom, creativity, and meaningfulness that is unavailable in work,” Hinman writes, contributes to leisure’s alienation in two ways. Not only does such an attempt “trivialize” leisure by “[isolating] the freedom and creativity characteristic of creative activities,” but it also serves to “insulate work from demands that it be transformed. By viewing leisure as the primary sphere of freedom, one undermines the strength of demands that work be transformed into a freer and more creative activity.”

It is not difficult to see the relevance of this argument to our society’s relationship to travel—when we buy into the marketing campaigns and social scripts that present travel as a means of escaping the tedium and exhausting banality of our ordinary lives, we reinforce the notion that our ordinary lives are supposed to be tedious, exhausting, and banal. We shrink the horizons of what our world and our lives could look like, reinforcing our own alienation in the process.

In her case against travel, Callard walks up to this crucial point but stops just short of it. “Imagine how your life would look,” she writes, “if you discovered that you would never again travel. If you aren’t planning a major life change, the prospect looms, terrifyingly, as ‘More and more of this, and then I die.’ Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation.” Had Callard been concerned with offering a substantive critique of modern-day travel rather than a superficial one, she would have noted here that travel obscures not only the certainty of annihilation, but the certainty of alienation in the purest Marxist sense.

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The transformation that travel purports to bring about, which Callard so condescendingly rejects, is inseparable from the escape fantasy that has been constructed around it. It is in the opportunity to “get away from it all” that travel promises the transformation of our everyday selves—even if only for the duration of a trip—from alienated cogs in the capitalist machine into non-alienated creatures of leisure, capable of experiencing and enjoying life to the fullest. Even this temporary transformation, however, is illusory at best.

In the introduction to his 1976 book The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, American sociologist Dean MacCannell writes that “the alienation of the worker stops where the alienation of the sightseer begins.” Travel is presented to us as an escape, and yet the actual experience of travel proves that getting away from the capitalist alienation that prompts us to seek this escape in the first place is far easier said than done. Recall that one of Hinman’s key arguments was that leisure itself becomes alienated when leisure activities are commodified and transformed into consumer activities. Travel, of course, is a prime example of this—in 2022, the travel industry’s contribution to the global GDP was estimated at around $7.7 trillion, or more than 7.6 percent of the total for the entire world. In 2023, those numbers are projected to rise to $9.5 trillion and 9.2 percent, respectively.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

A particularly egregious dimension of this is the commodification and fetishization of “authenticity”—particularly for travel destinations in the Global South, which are incentivized to dilute and bastardize local cultures in order to cater to the whims and wallets of Western tourists. Travelers, MacCannell notes, “are motivated by a desire to see life as it is really lived, even to get in with the natives,” and as a result they “make brave sorties out from their hotels, hoping, perhaps, for an authentic experience, but their paths can be traced in advance over small increments of what is for them increasingly apparent authenticity proffered by tourist settings. Adventuresome tourists progress from stage to stage, always in the public eye, and greeted everywhere by their obliging hosts.” The “authenticity” that they find, of course, is inevitably a mere simulacrum of the real thing, processed beyond recognition and packaged for easy consumption.

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The fact that travel, like everything else in modern society, is an industry—and a massive one at that—means that when we travel, it is impossible for us to avoid falling into the same patterns of consumption and market exchange that characterize our daily lives under capitalism. But as the Marxist philosopher and social psychologist Erich Fromm reminds us in his 1955 book The Sane Society, consumption under capitalism is no less alienating than labor itself. Under capitalism, Fromm argues, we feel compelled to consume for its own sake, so that the very act of consumption itself becomes “the satisfaction of artificially stimulated phantasies, a phantasy performance alienated from our concrete, real selves.” We consume, he writes, “without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal…and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.”

The alienation of consumption, for Fromm, is not limited solely to our consumption of tangible or material commodities, but extends also to the ways in which consumption shapes our leisure time. Even outside of work, Fromm argues, “[a worker] always remains the passive and alienated consumer,” consuming everything from ball games to social gatherings “in the same alienated and abstractified way in which he consumes the commodities he has bought. He does not participate actively, he wants to ‘take in’ all there is to be had, and to have as much as possible of pleasure, culture and what not.” In other words, the enjoyment of life itself becomes a commodity to be bought and sold, its value “determined by its success on the market” rather than by “anything which could be measured in human terms.”

As perhaps the pinnacle of all commodified leisure activities—one which promises, in addition to fun and adventure and new experiences, the illusory satisfaction of “escape” from the mundanity of ordinary life—travel is a prime example of alienated consumption in action. When we use “tourist” as a pejorative term, or affix the much-reviled epithet of “touristy” to certain sites and activities and experiences (both hypocrisies of which I am absolutely guilty), this is exactly what we are referring to—the idea that most people who travel only go certain places and do certain things because the tourism industry has told them that this is what they are supposed to do, rather than because of any genuine connection to or interest in their destinations and activities.

This, then, is what Callard is really critiquing—or at least, what she ought to be critiquing—when she condemns the tourist as a “deferential character” who “outsources the vindication of his experiences to the ethnologist, to postcards, to conventional wisdom about what you are or are not supposed to do in a place.” And yet, in the absence of a nuanced Marxist critique like that offered by Fromm or Hinman, which shines a light on the trap laid for us by the very concept of leisure in a capitalist society, Callard’s argument comes across as little more than elitist finger-wagging, shaming the masses of unenlightened plebeians for their sheeplike impressionability. Travel, as it currently exists, is clearly not above critique—but surely we can do better than that.

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In an ideal world—the world that we should all be fighting for—travel will be open and accessible to all. Every human being will be free to roam and wander without visas or borders or checkpoints, without regimes of surveillance or control to prevent us from seeing and cherishing as much as possible of this planet that we all hold in common. There is reason why we use phrases like “free as a bird,” a reason why the monarch butterfly, whose annual migration traverses more than 3,000 miles from the northeastern United States to southwestern Mexico, has been adopted as a symbol by the migrant justice movement. It is because these winged creatures represent in our collective imagination the untrammeled liberty to go wherever one chooses, to quite literally raise oneself above the arbitrary constraints and restrictions that humans have placed on the freedom of movement.

In this radically liberated future, capitalist exploitation will have been abolished, and with it the alienation of both labor and leisure—and therefore, of travel as well. Travel will be a source of fulfillment rather than alienation, a way for us to open our minds and hearts and develop a deeper appreciation for the incredible richness and diversity of the world around us. We will be able to approach the people we meet, the places we travel to, and the things we see as sources of inspiration and education and spiritual enrichment to be respected and cherished, rather than merely as commodities to be consumed. We won’t have to treat travel as an escape, because to put it simply, we won’t see our lives as something that we need to escape from in the first place. In a world without exploitation or alienation, travel will no longer be about “getting away from it all”—instead, it will finally be about actually going somewhere.

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culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer, essayist, and cultural critic Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new essays in your inbox: