People might accuse me of dissing on traveling because I can’t do it. Not the case at all, I assure you. I lost my taste for traveling at a very young age. I was just a little over 20 and living in Hawaii, going to school at Brigham Young University – Hawaii.

My Tourist Experiences

I was technically a student. I did occasionally play tourist on the weekends. In Hawaii, you are surrounded by tourists. The natives despise tourists, and it wasn’t difficult to discern why.

Tourists are completely obnoxious.

Most of them are determined to get everything they can out of their “once in a lifetime trip to Hawaii” and push their way toward every experience and view they think they are entitled to. They wear plastic Hawaiian leis, short shorts, and skimpy tops.

Natives know that the flowers to make leis last about 24 hours, so it’s fine to pluck them and wear them. Long, flowing clothing like traditional Hawaiian muumuus or shirts is most comfortable because they keep off the sun and lets the air flow.

I had a Polynesian Crafts class while I was there. It was held in a small administrative outbuilding at the Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC). Occasionally, we would have tourists wander in and gaze at us. It was embarrassing. I felt like saying, “We’re not one of the attractions here.”

At least the PCC was a reasonably authentic experience, unlike the rest of Hawaii. Authentic Polynesian villages had been erected at the PCC. They were staffed by natives. Authentic food was served, and authentic customs and crafts were explained. Natives also demonstrated authentic dancing, music, and other skills – like harvesting coconuts.

In the rest of Hawaii, you saw nothing but commercialism. Everything was inauthentic, down to the Hawaiian souvenirs made in China.

It was only the inauthentic experiences that the Tourists had access to. To really experience the authentic Hawaii, you had to live there.

This was all reinforced when I worked as an Intern in Washington D. C. I spent time being a tourist on weekends but for the most part, I operated as a resident. I lived in Alexandria and commuted on the Metro and bus system into Washington D. C. to work on Capitol Hill in the United States House of Representatives. I shopped locally, did my laundry, and went to Church.

I did what the residents there did every day.

The tourist experience was inauthentic, kitschy, and ultimately, empty.

Why Do People Travel?

I think people travel because they are led to believe it is the desirable thing to do, as well as the expected thing to do if they can. It has a certain cachet, especially after you retire.

You have to have money to travel, so if you travel, you must have money. This sets you apart and makes other people jealous. I’ve decided jealousy is a main component of this.

You want to impress people when you get back home. I’ve concluded this over time because traveling can be a nightmare. Driving endlessly, flying endlessly, waiting at airports endlessly, etc. None of this is fun.

Once you get to your destination, you often battle crowds, intestinal issues, confusion, pickpockets, lost luggage, incessant tipping, bed bugs, etc. How is this fun? How is this enlightening, etc? And then, you go home with authentic souvenirs made in China.

I didn’t like the tourists I saw. They seemed intent on recreating. I like more meaning in my life. I loved what I learned when I lived in Hawaii and Washington, D.C. Being there wasn’t half the fun; learning about it was. I’ve discovered I can learn more online these days.

A friend took a Hawaiian trip. When she got back, I quizzed her about things. She couldn’t remember where she went or what she saw, but she assured me, “We did everything, we saw everything!” and she invoked a lot of admiration and jealousy from our mutual friends for having gone to such an exotic place and experienced such exotic things.

The Case Against Travel

The above-named article dropped on June 24, 2023. It contains a lot of truths. I’ll include a few below:
G. K. Chesterton wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.” Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective home towns of Athens and Königsberg. But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage:
I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.
If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. At home or abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. “Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.
Further:
Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is?

Pessoa, Emerson, and Chesterton believed that travel, far from putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it. Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. Call this the traveller’s delusion.
The author argues that, “If you are going to see something you neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of anything besides locomoting.”

She proffers:
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. After all, you say to yourself, the whole point of travelling is to break out of the confines of everyday life.
She makes this caution:
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. Chesterton believed that loving what is distant in the proper fashion—namely, from a distance—enabled a more universal connection.
In Hawaii and Washington, D.C., I interacted with the natives, saw what they saw, experienced what they experienced, felt what they felt, etc. For a short time, I was one of them. I was profoundly changed by these experiences.
The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.
True Global Learning and Understanding

I’ve seen recent commentary that in order to increase global understanding and harmony, as well as combat prejudice and discrimination, we need to travel. I agree that experiencing other people and cultures can help tremendously, but as a resident, not as a tourist. Missionary service, study abroad, and service projects may help do this.

This is why the Church’s missionary effort is so powerful. Ever notice what happens to missionaries once they come home? They are imbued with a deep interest and love for the people they served among.

If they see someone who resembles the people they served among here, they usually make a beeline for them and introduce themselves. They get acquainted, reinvigorate their language skills, and establish new connections, all while making their objects feel acknowledged, welcomed, loved, valued, etc. These wonderful effects reverberate throughout the years.

Traveling in Retirement

So, how many people aspire to travel during retirement? Not me. I don’t think happiness and fulfillment are to be found “out there.” Happiness and fulfillment are found at home, with my loved ones, serving in the Church, doing the important things of life like indexing, family history, serving my family and other church members, etc.

I think Satan is trying to draw us away from our homes, loved ones, and communities in ways that don't assist other people, ourselves, or the Church.

I talked to my present husband about serving a mission once. I decided that, given our health and other circumstances, we would be best as membership and leadership support missionaries. He responded with, “We don’t need to do that elsewhere; we can do that here.” And we can.

Serving a mission is the best of all worlds, though. You are serving, you are building the Church, bringing people to Jesus Christ, and experiencing the world of the people you serve.

You will be profoundly changed by that.

Conclusion

Satan wants to direct us away from all of this important work at home by suggesting that meaning and fulfillment are found elsewhere. It isn’t. It’s found at home, where we live, among the people we love, the people we live with, and the people we live around.

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