Travel guilt

Not the same thing: Photos from Stephan Vanfleteren and Tailfeather, respectively.

A major concern today for travelers, at least of the young, American college-kid sort that I am and have generally known, is how we reflect and fit into social and historical contexts. Having studied abroad twice and traveled through Europe a bit in that time, I've encountered a staggering amount of worry and guilt, presented as if these were equivalent to the conscientiousness and respect that we try to embody.

One issue is the awareness of inequality: there are many who can not afford to travel the way we do, or for the same reasons. We walk by the homeless in the streets of every city in the world and wonder at the disparity between ourselves and these people we are separated from—physically by only a few feet, but structurally by a grand network of support into which we fit and they do not. Many of us react merely with the shame, guilt and feelings of helplessness that come from being extremely aware of social inequality and the knowledge that there is no easy, catch-all solution to all of the world's problems. Many of us just feel more aware of how little knowledge we have about other cultures and their problems, and have a sense that the barrier between ourselves and such knowledge is insurmountable. Our experiences can not be authentic, because we are not suffering—or, at least, we are not suffering as much as they are.

But this seems to arise from a peculiar kind of self-pity, that we are so privileged that we are denied that more essential privilege of "authentic" experience. The shame that we feel doesn't merely come from a belief that we are not doing enough to help people, but also that we have no place in doing so because we haven't had the “real” experience of living in poverty or “on the streets”, or as a hobo. We may not have these experiences, but it does not follow that these are the only valid experiences from which can be derived valid opinions. If it did, then the elimination of poverty would mean the elimination of authenticity, and of the ability to have a valid opinion.

The other, related, issue is that of historicity. We look back at the travelers that went before us, and we see how our experiences are different. We wonder if the tourism trade has made various “destinations” less real than they once were, so that we can not only never recover them but are contributing to their sanitation by our presence. We wonder if couchsurfing is somehow an insult to the memory of hobos, because of how we glorify them while using a comparatively safe and convenient method of living and traveling, outside of the more conventional and expensive systems in place.

We look back at the past, when things were in many ways worse than they are now, and we look at other places, which are in many ways poorer than the places in which we were raised, and we act as if those times and places are the only ones in which a person can truly experience anything. We only insult the memory of hobos or the experience of the beggars if we merely try to be them; we come from a very different context—with problems of our own—and the best we can do in this regard is emulate them shoddily. In doing so, we also insult the memory of our parents and forebears who worked hard to get their children—us—the privilege that we so lament. We insult ourselves by disregarding our own knowledge and experiences, the validity of our selves, and that we can use our privilege and the personal freedoms that it affords to not only know ourselves better but also learn about our past and about other cultures and the poor. We have an outsider's perspective on many of these issues, but the outsider's perspective is still a perspective, and it may even prove to be a useful one.

We don't have to think of ourselves as inauthentic hobos when we couchsurf and hitchhike. We can be aware of what hobos did and also recognize that they were a product of the time and place in which they lived, and that we do not live in that same context. We are not, and can not, be hobos in the Great Depression. We should be aware of them, and whatever similarities we may find between them and ourselves, but we must also be aware that we are people too, just as they were, and we have our own context. We don't need to look at couchsurfing as a bastardized “living on the bum”: we can simply look at it as couchsurfing—a very useful way for people to help each other travel cheaply and meet people who actually live in the places they visit.

It is not enough to be aware of others' plight and of those that suffered before us; we must acknowledge our own suffering and our own privilege. We must become aware of ourselves and our own experiences before we can become aware of others' experiences, and how we can relate to them. We must, first of all, learn to be ourselves and respect ourselves.