As a Gen Z travel journalist with over five years under my belt writing within the travel space, I’ve learned there are many different ways people can view travel: as liberation, as personal growth, as escape, as privilege (especially during the pandemic, when many of us missed our usual trips), as a list to check off as quickly as you can afford, before old age or ill health or family becomes the major life priority.
Yet one thing I’ve noticed is that oftentimes, at least in our American mindset, travel becomes more about consuming destinations than truly experiencing them.
We prioritize trips and tours and cruises with more destinations than not, so we can say we’ve been to Barcelona and Marseilles AND Rome, instead of visiting just the one or two. We spend twelve hours in a place and consider it finished before jetting off to the next place. We Google all the best sights to see, and, when we see them in person, we are disappointed when we cannot appreciate them.
We follow what the crowd values, instead of what our hearts are seeking.
And in the end, we return home a little empty, a little disappointed, a little lacking in genuine gratitude for the major life experience we’ve just had. We are left only with fridge magnets with identical “Made in China” stickers on the back to show for our hard-earned and easily spent travel experiences.
This ennui can lead us to believe that maybe travel isn’t a major life experience after all, isn’t as satisfying as we thought it would be, and isn’t exactly the bragging right that everyone nowadays sees it as—the more destinations visited, the cooler the person.
We need a Renaissance in the way we perceive travel.
The first travelers had to go it slow. They took only what they needed, began the long walk to a place of worship, or loaded their caravan up with goods and meandered, painfully slowly, in hope of a market to sell their wares. They set sail knowing it would be months, or more, before they saw their homeland again.
And while on their long journey, the unexpected would happen—new friends made, or enemies, dangers or surprises would befall them, new sights and sounds and smells experienced firsthand.
In short, travel was an adventure, largely because the world was less connected, less known and wider—travel took time, and if you traveled for three months straight, even now, wouldn’t an adventure also find you?
Today, travel has become something to consume, but in the past, it was an experience that changed people’s lives—sometimes for the worse, and oftentimes for the better.
As Gen Z becomes a larger group of travelers, I hope their trend of de-digitalizing their lives, of going back to analog ways of life, journaling instead of typing, re-learning traditional crafts like knitting and watercolor, of sobriety for health and digital detox for the spirit, will also make their mark on the way we perceive travel.
I hope we as a generation will empower the world not to grow this endless consumption of hollow, fast experiences and quick dopamine fixes, but to slow down, to take it in, to breathe deeply in every place we are so that we can still smell the way the streets of Paris and Bangkok and Mumbai smelled years later, and smile at the memories we've formed while we were there.
I hope we will take things slow, and practice a more intentional form of travel that echoes back to the way people once traveled: not for necessity, not for months or years at a time, but for transformation, for experience, to be changed.
And to do that, we have to step out of our comfort zones, out of our guidebooks, out of the Google hivemind, and just go. Experience. Be and do and see—and learn.
We can use the technology we have today as tools—airplanes to get us there and back again, if we so choose; our phones to get us out of a tricky situation, or to contact friends we’ve made across the seas.
But robots and forums can’t replace human connection, genuine experience, or personal transformation.
“...There will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right,” Albus Dumbledore said something like that. And while he is a fictional character in the Harry Potter universe, that makes his words no less true.
AI and the Internet make things like travel planning worlds easier—but will they give you the experience you’ve been craving, or a simulation of it, a one-size-fits-all experience that millions before you have already checked off their lists?
I think the latter. So now, comes the great choice as travelers: do we choose what is easy, or what is right? Do we choose convenience and consumption—or experience and authenticity?
So the next time you travel—even if it is to a bucket-list destination—take some extra time to just…be. Sketch the sky over a place you’ve never been before. Buy a book on the local architecture, or history, or sewer system. Drive to a village no one ever visits, and smell the flowers and eat the bread and drink the wine. Turn off your Google Maps and ask a local for directions, or recommendations on what to see and do. Better yet, get lost a little.
You’ll find your way—or, like how all good stories begin, your way might just find you instead.
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