What are your hobbies? If you were about to reply with “Travelling”, congratulations - you are entirely non-unique. Travel has become sort of a new religion - you don’t question it, you blindly do it. Of course, you may be picky about the destination, or specific activities, but not about travel per-se. You just travel. I enjoyed reading this piece, as it makes an unpopular case, that against travel. Come to think of it, it is not surprising that only very few people argue this way - there are no economic incentives (certainly not on the part of the arguer) in making people travel less. It made me question what I am looking for when I think of traveling, and it is some mix of rest and exploration. Certainly I can get these without airport lines, malfunctioning ACs and occasional diarrhea. More broadly, it made me think about where else would similar logic apply - where else is the, potentially highly valid, minority opinion massively crowded out by those with strong economic incentives? “Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. “Tourists are less likely to borrow from their hosts than their hosts are from them, thus precipitating a chain of change in the host community.” We go to experience a change, but end up inflicting change on others. For example, a decade ago, when I was in Abu Dhabi, I went on a guided tour of a falcon hospital. I took a photo with a falcon on my arm. I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals. But the falcon hospital was one of the answers to the question, “What does one do in Abu Dhabi?” So I went. I suspect that everything about the falcon hospital, from its layout to its mission statement, is and will continue to be shaped by the visits of people like me—we unchanged changers, we tourists. (On the wall of the foyer, I recall seeing a series of “excellence in tourism” awards. Keep in mind that this is an animal hospital.) When you travel, you suspend your usual standards for what counts as a valuable use of time. You suspend other standards as well, unwilling to be constrained by your taste in food, art, or recreational activities. The problem was not with other places, or with the man wanting to see them, but with travel’s dehumanizing effect, which thrust him among people to whom he was forced to relate as a spectator. Travel is fun, 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. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning?