20 August

The wonderful opera singer Elsa Dreisig, on her recent holiday, shared to the socials. The socials are full of images like this. I was watching an old episode of Man About the House the other day, those who were around in the 1970s will remember it. Everybody in the episode was trying to escape Mr Roper, who was attempting to show them his holiday snaps. It was a time when people knew and said openly that nobody wants to see pictures of you on holidays. But now it’s everywhere. Because it’s not really about sharing anything, it’s about status. Showing off, as the saying used to be. I know many affect to loving seeing those shots, but I think mostly because it gives them permission to flood everybody else’s feeds with images of themselves too, in different places. It’s a you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours thing. “Look where I am, can you beat this?” is the clear implied message. It reminds me about the key thing I think travel culture can never understand. The enormous difference between ‘experiencing’ something, and being ‘present’ to it. Travel culture thinks travelling through the world looking at and ‘experiencing’ things in some ways enriches your life and brings you closer to some sort of meaningful existence. That’s nonsense. I remember Carrie Bickmore posting the photos of the time she, husband and family toured Europe, and how fabulously happy and fun all their ‘experiencing’ looked. Later it emerged it was one of the most miserable times of her life, and her marriage dissolved shortly afterwards. SImply ‘being there’, anywhere, does nothing to you. You’re literally just occupying space. What changes your life is being genuinely *present* to somewhere. That releases an instant feeling of joy that wells up in you, a calm contentment and feeling of being at one with reality itself. And critically, you can do that anywhere. Sitting in a dirty toilet in a 711 somewhere. You don’t need to travel the world to be present. We mistake the two, destroying the world in that misunderstanding, despoiling beautiful places. Or in other words, what you’re looking for when you travel is already right here, where you are now. No amount of moving through space will give you presence to that space. No amount of fun brings you closer to reality, fun is an adolescent, empty concept. Rapists find terrifying and dominating women fun.