The Lost Art of Staying Put

The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

- Marcel Proust

Max and I stayed put in one place having the time of our lives for 13 plus years.  

Lucy Ellmann wrote this piece, The Lost Art of Staying Put in 2017 but yet even with COVID humans are incapable of sitting in one place quietly. This is a modern disease.

We are not talking about big governments nor big corporations. These are common people unleashing  tragedy of the commons at economies of scale. 

The crazy thing about this modern disease is that these common people are convinced that they are "poor" victims who work hard and "just" need a break. The core traits driving this insanity are self pity and pure signaling to up the number of places they visited in the name of "I love to travel". 

Animal suffering, ecological and biodiversity destruction, spreading disease, diminishing localized uniqueness (replaced by global chains), accelerating climate change, airlines delays - these are only the known suffering these "love to travel" common people unleash. There are tons of localized unknown sufferings which we cannot comprehend. 

Any country which depends on travel for their economic growth is always doomed to fail. A country cannot outsource their fundamental livelihood to the fantasy of people in other countries. 

Your reward is that you then must fly. During the airless, comfortless journey that follows (for which you more and more wondrously have to pay), amid air contaminated by engine oil and other toxic substances, you will also be at risk of radiation, congestion, constipation, nausea, dizziness, headaches, hypoxia, jet lag, flatulence, the flatulence of all (and I mean all) the people around you, deep vein thrombosis, fleas, bedbugs, and whooping cough. No one delays a flight because of illness anymore—that would be costly and cowardly. Instead, they leap on board in the service of their microbes, dutifully coughing, sniffing and exuding right next to you for hours. If you’re very unlucky, you may catch Ebola or TB while innocently trying to untangle your gratis audio set; to be capped by Montezuma’s revenge on arrival at your destination.

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Travel is killing as much culture as it spreads. Languages, dialects and accents die out whenever Cloaca-Cola, Pizza Hurt, and Brook No Brothers arrive. To ensure this, all major cities now offer the same chain hotels, stores and restaurants, the only acceptable receptacles for the unthinking on the move. But if Prada, Superdry, Nike, and H&M are everywhere, what the hell is the point in city-hopping shopping?

In her best book, The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler deals with the ardent belief of many American travelers that they can remain completely untouched by the places they visit. In Trump’s case, it seems highly possible: he takes his own steak supply everywhere he goes. My uncle from Birmingham, Michigan, would not visit anywhere in Europe that didn’t have a Holiday Inn, and spent his trips to England correcting the pronunciation of Birmingham. There is an American blind spot to other cultures that really gets in the way of deriving any discernible benefit from travel. So why go? Stay home and eat ham in Birmingham. And what’s with the sneakers, the raincoat, the Bermuda shorts, the camera, and the fanny-pack? Is it some kind of Pop Art joke? In this getup, Americans descend on foreign places like boulders, speaking in very loud voices and squashing flat any locals who get in the way.

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But you simply must see the Taj Mahal, pussycat, or Machu Picchu, or Outer Mongolia, before you peg out, we’re told again and again and again. All exotic places must be trampled immediately. It torments people to think of leaving a single one in peace. Just mention the Galapagos, or the Faroe Islands, and watch them jump—because they’ve got to get there before everyone else. Before it’s ruined. By people like them. The seagrass meadows of the oceans are disappearing at the rate of two football fields an hour, just so people can soak up the sun or bother a turtle in some unfamiliar hemisphere.

What’s the big deal? Locusts, too, have bucket lists. They, too, want to see the world before they die. The truth is you don’t personally have to survey every spot on earth, no matter what the reams of newspaper and magazine travel porn tell you. What is more important in all of this than reading Dickens? Humankind should be your business, not mass hypnosis.

If only people would stay home and read about foreign lands—that’s what books are for! But now every single work break, school break, birthday, divorce, death, bicycle accident, and basketball game have to be acknowledged (and drained of meaning) by a long, hazardous flight or drive somewhere. There are a million family occasions that require your presence—as if we all still lived in villages and the bris or graduation ceremony were only a block away. One blogger in the sad world of online airline fetishism flew with his wife from Houston to Frankfurt on his own nickel, just to try out United’s new Business Class perks. They probably flew straight back again afterward. “This flight was also special,” he claimed, “because my wife—who is an entrepreneurial coach—would become a United Million Miler. I can think of worse ways to celebrate.” I can’t.

A million new reasons to travel are manufactured every moment. Pageants, banquets, fairs, and jamborees. Courses for this, courses for that. You can, you must, attend a week of weaving, and maybe weeping, in Wales—or for the more myopic, a five-day dolls’-house furniture-making workshop. Or you might do a writing cruise; a hill-walking, pottery, juggling and watercolor course; a yoga, Pilates or karate retreat; a crash course in straw-hat manufacture, the I Ching, sock-knitting, croissant twisting; wildflower and mushroom differentiation; or even scything. Scything! What they need is a creative writhing course.

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The New York Times, hopelessly behind on the ethical travel fad, continues to pedal the wonders of Cornwall or India. But The Nation’s now offering $6,000 trips to Cuba, as if there’s something extra responsible or heartfelt involved in gadding about a country America tried to boycott out of existence. These do-gooding olive-branchers would presumably never dream of sacrificing six thousand bucks each to help Cuba.

Another popular destination for the conscience-stricken tourist is the European concentration-camp circuit. What a great day out for all the family! Sergei Loznitsa has covered this new leisure pursuit in his new movie, Austerlitz. The Nazis themselves put fossil fuels to previously unimaginable uses, and you too can use some up by (voluntarily) transporting yourself to Auschwitz to gawp at gas chambers in a Hawaiian shirt.

World-saving travel is one realm in which the means almost always defeat the ends. Apart from the opthalmologists who fly around Africa fixing cataracts (hoorah), and maybe a few UN or Peace Corps employees here and there (hard to verify), it’s time to consider the real possibility that there is no altruistic travel. Ever tried to save a stray cat or mistreated donkey in some foreign country? It’s not easy. They don’t have passports. No, your trip is much more likely to damage an animal. A young sniffer dog was shot dead at Auckland airport in New Zealand, for capering around loose on the runway, delaying flights. This is what you unwittingly commit to when boarding a plane: the diktat that all animals that threaten flight schedules will be executed (and not just to make beef medallions).

Meanwhile, the Great Barrier Reef dies for us. It’s eighty percent bleached already, cooked alive. You’d do more good if you would just stay put and use the cash to help somebody who hasn’t got any disposable income. In 1999, a friend of mine took his fiancée to Istanbul for a romantic tryst. They arrived just in time for the earthquake. He was moved to help dig people out; she wasn’t, and when they got home she dumped him. She hadn’t enjoyed twiddling her thumbs in the hotel while he was out being noble. That’s amore.

The wealthy-and-mobile 20 percent are causing most of the environmental damage in the world. As Bob Hughes observes in The Bleeding Edge, his book about the ways in which technological liberation has failed to liberate anybody, bikes and even horses are not only cleaner forms of transport, but quicker, if you calculate the actual time and energy invested. Airlines claim that ever-bigger aircraft are more egalitarian and environmentally friendly, but they never add in the costs of enlarging runways, building the damn things, and hiring enough goons to flatten all those passengers—I mean, to protect passenger safety.

So there’s nothing admirable about getting your ass on an Airbus. In Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, George Monbiot says long-distance travel should be accomplished slowly, if at all. We should all try walking those love miles.

Reinhold Niebuhr in his classic The Irony of American History captured these traits brilliantly

Our experience of an ironic guilt when we pretend to be innocent is thus balanced by the irony of an alleged guilt when we are comparatively innocent.