In an op-ed in The New Yorker, Agnes Callard argues that travel turns us into our worst selves, that the urge to cross borders is little more than vanity in a backpack. I think she has confused poorly behaved travelers with travel itself.
There are tourists who stomp through piazzas, flattening culture into the backdrop for their selfies. But to dismiss travel wholesale because some people Instagram their Aperol spritz is like dissing literature because Fifty Shades of Grey sold millions of copies.
Tourism can be ugly - discover, expose, consume, abandon, repeat. A beach once whispered about becomes a carnival of plastic and discarded gear, locals left to sweep up after us. Remoteness vanishes the moment it’s mapped. Tourism does not just bring people, it multiplies them, creating the illusion of discovery while producing the very crowd that erases it. And then there is the grotesque theater of Instagram destinations, those brightly colored traps where the backdrop matters more than the culture, queues forming not for temples or markets but for a single photo that will pretend you were the only one there.
This is not travel. This is performance.
The truth - staying home makes it easier to be your worst self. You cocoon into routine, you can scroll yourself into numbness. Travel breaks this all down. You cannot cling to illusions when the bus you thought was going north is going south. Travel is not escape from life, it’s a collision with it.
Travel stories matter more than ever. Rising nationalism, algorithm driven echo chambers, lazy oversimplification of otherness into caricature - all of it feeds fear. The fewer real encounters we have, the easier it is to demonize one another. Sitting at a table with strangers is the antidote.
No, Agnes, travel does not turn us into our worst selves. It exposes the selves we did not know we had. Every conversation, every moment of listening, every refusal to turn a place into content, is an act of resistance.
The case against travel may be tidy on paper, but the case for travel is written every time one of us packs a bag and chooses to encounter the world with open hearts instead of closed assumptions.
