The Return to Travel and the End of Humanity

Time did a weird thing during the pandemic. It stopped and sped up.

We mark the passing of time in novel stimuli. It gives us the illusion that we are moving forward while time is standing still. We are the masters of time, not the subjects of it; but bereft of travel or dinners out, we lost the markers of our motion through the great inky void. We entered a flat spin wherein we raced forward while standing in place.

Now the miasma of pandemic has lifted — or at least we have all decided that it has. Travel bans are ended for reasons not at all supported by the number of cases still circulating through our collective body. Case in point: we are just now allowing vaccinated travelers from Europe, even as Europe’s cases surge. Why now versus six months ago or six months from now? Likewise, people are dining indoors at full capacity behind the flimsy shield of vaccination, despite delta’s ability to break through again and again. Sure, you might not wind up in the hospital, but what is it that compels us to risk that…for a meal?

We have become accustomed to this drumbeat of novelty. Without it, we fidget. We feel the thing we dread most — insignificance. We are stagnating in a world where we eat, sleep, and wash clothes, just like humble peasants in olden days, leading quiet little lives soon to be forgotten, blown away like so much dust.

This is why we return to the skies. We have to move. We have to be pleased. Anything less than this is dissolution.

It is also a dead end. This is where our nihilistic culture has led us. We are a caricature of the basic impulses that helped us survive. Where once consumption was the difference between life and death, now it is performance art, a pantomime of instincts we no longer need.

We should have never gotten used to this. Now we can’t stop.

Transportation the largest source of greenhouse gases, and while air travel is only a small portion of it, it is perhaps the most egregious for being largely unnecessary and the tip of a much larger iceberg of elective car travel (including its most narcissistic form, which grew exponentially when air travel was impossible — vanlife). We choose to live this way.

The irony is that the more we do it, the more our demands become self-defeating. Every city has become more or less a cookie cutter copy of every other city catering to the itinerant visitors. Where can you go and not find a large ferris wheel after the Eye of London opened? Likewise, every city has an artisan market. Every city has a downtown core packed with modern dining establishments. Every city has escape rooms and dueling pianos. Every city has craft beer and wine bars. Yes, there are still unique sites, things that have survived the march of time: the Colosseum in Rome, Sacre Coeur, Machi Pichu, Petra, Torres del Paine, the Taj Mahal; but they are compulsory, items in a list waiting to be ticked off one by one. There is no joy in the bucket list, just a punitive march towards death.

There is very little new, but we do this global exchange program anyway. I go to your city. You come to mine.

The feeling starts to sneak in. This is futile. I’ve seen this before. I’ve felt this before. I am that peasant, repeating the smashing of the wetted tunic against the rock in the river, watching the tallow drift with the current, the same current I drink from.

There is another way, one more conducive to the cause of human happiness. We can’t put down the passport and the air miles long enough to imagine it. We’re too scared to admit that we aren’t making progress to invest our energies where they might do us actual good.