My friend Johnny recently posted two entries about festivals and tourism and why he’s not particularly a fan of either.

I started writing this blog post as a comment, and realized it got way too long. I didn’t want to monopolize the conversation over there, so I’m posting it here instead.

What is it about opinions that contradict our own that make us want to stand up in vehement self-defense? After all, it’s not like Johnny intended his posts to be an indictment, a judgment, or a denouncement of my lifestyle choices. But I can’t help but feel a personally attacked.

In leisure, as in all other things, we seem to feel a compulsion to ascribe some sort of higher meaning to every individual choice, even when there’s no basis for that judgment. We see reading a book and reading the newspaper as being more worthwhile than watching TV or surfing the internet, even though the book being read is Twilight and the person surfing the internet is actually going through MIT’s Open Courseware to teach themselves advanced mathematics.

The same judgment, too, is projected onto the ways we choose to spend money. To demonstrate that I’m not actually bitter at him, here’s another quote from Johnny:

Spending $2000 on a week to Europe is seen as soul-enriching and vital, but spending $2000 on a wardrobe that expresses who I am, makes me feel more confident, and allows others to see me at my best is considered the height of vanity and narcissism.

But on the flip side, does that mean that someone who chooses to go to Europe with their hard-earned cash is merely self-delusional in their fantasy of enriching their cultural education, and that the average debutante dropping enough money to feed a family for a month on a pair of jeans she’ll discard in a year is intensely self-reflective and thoughtful in her pursuit of self-actualization? No, not necessarily. Context matters.

I don’t think there are clear-cut ways of assigning to worth to one activity over another. In this, as in anything else, my position reverts to the default: do what makes you happy and I shall do what makes me happy, and we’ll get along fine as long as you don’t try to impose your views on me. But that’s a pretty naive way of looking at the world, especially since I know that other people will judge me for my decisions regardless of what my actual motives are. This is especially tiresome in wake of hipster culture, where you can only enjoy yourself if you’re doing it ironically, and even earnest attempts at encouraging individualism despite widespread criticism have turned into cynical internet memes. Haters gon’ hate, indeed.

I’m not pretending that I’m above all that, by any means. Are you kidding? I can be as judgmental as the rest of ‘em. But when I perceive judgment to be pointed at me, I feel the need to defend myself.

And after that excessively long pre-amble: thoughts on traveling.

I enjoy traveling for the same reason I enjoy going downtown on a Saturday and wandering in the crowd. I enjoy the idea of losing myself in a different milieu, and for a while, forgetting about the stuff I worry about at home. I enjoy seeing cool things not necessarily because I think my soul will be all that more wise for it, but because cool things are, well, cool, and I enjoy the break from the regular rhythms of my daily life. But it is, inherently, a break, and a rest. It’s why I want to go to Australia and Japan and Europe but not, say, Africa. Africa holds little interest for me, and I’m not convinced the fascinating cultural experience I would be sure to have compensates for the loss of worldly comforts. It’s about the ‘local flavor’, to an extent, but it’s also about escaping my life.

It’s a slightly less critical way of looking at the world than, say, David Foster Wallace, who sees tourism as existentially loathsome. In turn, by being less critical (and less self-critical), I take on less responsibility as an individual for my role in the admittedly culturally destructive effects of tourism as an economic driver. I don’t identify as a tourist any more than I identify as an anthropologist observing the ways of the exotic with a smug sense of being above it all, or as a vessel for greater income. I visit someplace because I want to see things that are interesting, and attach no greater meaning to the act.

It is simpler, both in the sense of being easy, and in the sense of being stupid, and also perhaps more realistic, than torturously trying to reconcile a normative view of “tourism” with whatever self-identity you happen to have crafted. So, no, I shouldn’t have any moral high ground for prefering a week-long trip to Europe over a wardrobe full of clothes or a beauty routine [1], but nor should I be derided for being arrogant and/or insufferable.

(I may still be those things, but for entirely different reasons.)

So I resist the attempt to impute a significance into the act of travelling the way I resist people reading my career choice as a reflection of my fundamental character, because sometimes a spade is just a spade. Why read deeper meaning into, and thus demand justification, for every individual action?

Live and let live.

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[1] Though, that said, if someone has a spare $2,000 lying around, I certainly wouldn’t mind refreshing my wardrobe, which is a combination of leftovers from my “I’m a proud geek and therefore only wear oversized hoodies” days and formal work clothes that I wouldn’t be caught dead in when I’m not actually at work. Are you kidding? People hate me enough as it is.

Though, knowing me, I would spend $1,600 of that on a new computer instead.