Comments so far are missing a major reason travel is likely enjoyable. One of my favorite theories on why time feels like it accelerates as you get older is that your brain tends to only store unique memories. Like that daily commute you do every day and the odd feeling you sometimes get at the end of it where you can’t remember driving…
Travel is a set of unique experiences that form unique memories. Part of what’s addicting and pleasurable is that it helps slow down the perception of the passage of time, among many other positives.
It’s also self reinforcing in that when you think back, you tend to disproportionately remember travel vs other experiences.
There’s clearly a lot more benefits than that, but it certainly seems like a significant factor.
That unique experience is hard to find, though, especially as one gets older, I find. Once you've been to a handful of cities, you've kind of seen them all. If you live near a major city it's even worse because chances are you've seen most of what it has to offer, and if you visit another city somewhere else in the world it's like "Oh, yeah... more museums... more theme parks... more bars and clubs... another beach... some skyscrapers... street food... people who don't speak my language... I should have stayed home." I know it's not like that for everyone, but that's essentially why I don't always like traveling and why it annoys me when people tell me I should get out more and travel.
When I travel, either I want people or I want solitude. Most of my enjoyment from traveling comes from seeing family and friends, and it really doesn't matter that much where we're situated. But if I have neither, then being in a sea of people is really worse than just being at home. In that case, I want to be alone, and I can easily get that by driving 1.5 hours into the mountains where I live.
Travel isn't a bad thing, in fact it can be a great thing. My problem is that we've made travel out to be a grandiose life achievement. In the near past and for millennia, humans spent most if not their entire lives in one place, and there's nothing wrong with that.
As an avid traveler, I disagree with your assessment. Yes, there are definitely things that are very similar in all places, particularly as western companies take over the world (much to my disappointment).
However, if you get away from the "tourist" spots, every place is unique and does offer something interesting to experience.
My wife and I were driving back to our rental in France from someplace and stopped for lunch at the only restaurant we could find in the little town in the middle of I have no idea where we were. Very little English spoken (we don't speak French, but can manage with a few words and technology) and had a very enjoyable meal and a little sightseeing in this small town.
Not saying that everyone enjoys that kind of thing, but if someone travels to Paris, for example, and has their sights only set on the popular things, Eiffel Tower, Louvre, etc. They're missing so much more to the city. Yes, certainly plan on seeing what's popular because that's why you went there, but also spend at least half the time exploring the little gems that every city offers that unique to it.
And for the love of everything, don't eat at places you can eat at home every meal just because you know it.
I'd agree - once I get outside of a major US city, and get into Tier II and Tier III cities, and then into rural america with its small towns, I find a whole wealth of experiences that I just.. cant get otherwise.
Sometimes they're vibrant little untouched spots on the map - sometimes they're little dried up outposts of humanity, with some grand buildings left as testament that people once believed this place would prosper, and that there was money here at some point.
It's something I've always wondered at - you go out to rural america, there are a ton of small towns with really grand buildings in them, clear evidence that there was capital there at one point - and now its all gone - where and why did it go? The when is obvious usually, the other two, not as much. Thats an aside however.
I'll defend eating at the familiar when tired or worn out, but I do suggest trying the local color, you never know what you'll find out there - it might be good or bad, but it will almost certainly be memorable.
I'm not against eating at familiar places for the exact reason you give. Even to experience how a McDonald's, for example, makes cultural adjustments to their menu (ie Beer on the menu).
Of course, there was that time after a long drive, we stopped at KFC in France because my wife loves their mashed potatoes. KFC in France does not have mashed potatoes and I ate undercooked chicken which kept me in bed for almost a week (we were there for 5 weeks, so luckily were able to absorb that downtime).
Yes, I think so anyhow, a significant portion of rural america, particularly in the south is racially diverse - either with a significant minority population, or majority minority.
In the South, its (depending on where) Black folks, in Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma, its Hispanic.
The fact that I see mexican/hispanic restaurants and groceries, in rural america (even in the south) tells me the world is changing.
Which, again, is another reason why I'm not exactly thrilled by most travel. So much of the world is evolving into a hodgepodge of various cultures. There's nothing wrong with this, of course. It's just that it's going to mean that, for me, going to experience cultures that already exist in my backyard really doesn't add much to my life. And maybe that's from my particular standpoint of living in Southern California, where we've got a little bit of Mexico, a little bit of Asia, a little bit of African American culture, a little Armenian... I'm sure I'm missing a few. And of course we've got our share of farmland and the ethnicity that are stereotypical with that.
So if rural America is gradually becoming that way, and thereby the rest of the world following suit, I guess the reason to travel would be to experience different cultures before they effectively come to us all (or disappear all together in some cases). But that's really more curiosity than anything else, like visiting a traveling museum exhibit that has a limited run.
If you're not actively in a sundown town, it's perfectly fine and safe to visit regardless of your ethnicity. The experience is often eye opening.
Imo there should be a cultural exchange program where you students in cities and send them to rural schools for a semester and vice versa via exchanges. It's important to the American experience to be able to understand both worlds if we are going to continue to coexist in a union.
I've long felt the same - the military used to be this, used to do this - its part of why we had such an era of tranquility politically post WWII - you had a large number people with a shared experience who came back from war, and who were willing to work together.
I've long believed in some form of mandatory national service, just to encourage this - it would also decrease the risk for military adventurism if the military was a broader cross-section of society.
There used to be something like that, and I'm not sure whether it still exists. My father's family housed an exchange student, a Black girl from another part of America, and later a girl from Norway (I think). Of course this wasn't specific to cultural exchange within America in particular, but it wasn't to the exclusion of American students.
However, I must admit I may be wrong in my interpretation of this, and now I want to ask my dad again next time I see him.
The way I interpreted their post was that yes, there are differences, but are they really that different when one takes a step back? The answer to that is going to be a deeply personal one, which is why I agree w/ both of you although my personal mentality is closer to the one they cite.
As an example, one thing I do enjoy is finding and visiting quirky little museums. The sort that might only be a couple of rooms worth of items. By nature each one is a new experience for me. But if I take a more abstract view I could say "I'm just looking at another quirky little museum".
Yes this is also my 'experience'. In my younger days I spend years backpacking on a budget with only a rough outline of where to go.
To me traveling isn't about visiting different places. It is about opening up to the unexpected. Something we don't do so easily when following an itinerary.
A bit hyperbolic, perhaps intentional, but I agree. It's compounded by the fact that I'm just not cut out for true adventure travel. Sorry, I need some modern conveniences. The result has been that over the years my travel preferences have become decidedly more milquetoast.
I think I might have somewhat similar requirements. I need a nice hotel room. Camping, tracking etc are completely off the table. I've never found that to restrict where I could visit. It does make everything more expensive though.
Be very careful, because hotels are where the tourists are, and the places where where the tourists are are the places with a repetitive international “tourist” vibe. If you only have a short time to travel then hotels are OK.
I originally learnt this while “backpacking”: backpackers travel options and staying in accomodation intended for backpackers leads to a kind of internationalised backpacking culture experience that is completely disconnected from the culture you are visiting. Many backpackers had time, but used it poorly: budget constraints ekeing out their money for a longer time with lower benefit.
Even travelling in my own country, the early AirBnB experience was meeting people from other paths in life than my own, which is wonderful if you have the ability to share.
My current style of travelling is more on the edges, disconnected from backpacker style travelling and from hotel travelling, and spending my time more randomly. Planning trips generally draws you towards tourism experiences, because the information directed at you will lead you down the path of least resistance.
Yep. If one wants to pay enough money you can get glamor versions of just about anything. Ignoring for the moment that I'm often not willing to "pay enough money" a big part of it for me is that it starts to homogenize the experience back towards that mean we're discussing. It loses some of the unique character.
Put another way, some of my travel fantasies are pretty out there, I just know I'll never do them. Even if I had the cash and was willing to spend it, at that point the experience would never match the fantasy.
Hah, yes, I get hyperbolic. But I did not mean to say that one shouldn't want or enjoy modern conveniences on their travels. When I travel, I always like to make sure my lodging is nearby a convenience store like 7-Eleven. If there's a 7-Eleven, I'm there! lol It's not always possible, but in no way am I saying that the only real travel experience is staying in a grass hut in the heart of Africa.
Bad phrasing on my part. I was referring to the part about cities all being more or less the same. I 100% agree and share the takeaway sentiment. What I was referring to with my hyperbolic comment was more an attempt to head off people thinking "Well, but that's not true! Paris has the Eiffel Tower and London has Big Ben!". Yes, they're not exactly the same but still it does get a bit blah over time.
Yeah, and that's the thing; I have nothing against visiting landmarks, but they blend together after a while and there are only so many of them.
I think the vividness of modern media also ruins things like the Eiffel Tower. It's one thing to see a photograph and aspire to one day visit Paris, but I'm pretty sure I've absorbed views of the Eiffel Tower from just about every angle in UHD drone and helicopter footage. In another era, I might be tempted to repeatedly visit it in my lifetime. As far as my brain can tell in this era, I've not only been to the Eiffel Tower but I've been higher than it. So biiiig deal.
What you are saying rings more true to me for domestic travel. Do you have this experience (or lack of it) for international travel as well? Even for countries that are more different from the one you live in?
> In the near past and for millennia, humans spent most if not their entire lives in one place, and there's nothing wrong with that.
I don't think that's true, maybe just leisure travel is cheaper in the last hundred years so its more common. There was movement to the americas, westward expansion in the us. Europe immigration movements. large wars. pilgrimages
Staying in a single location became possible for humanity only with the advent of agriculture.
Before domestication, they had to follow the game animals around on their migrations, travel to find the edible plants and fruits, etc.
Even once horse, goats, and cattle were domesticated for their meat, milk, and fur (note this is separate from agricultural cultivation), humans had to roam in really large areas, from winter grazing grounds to summer grazing grounds as still well as following the game animals around.
I think traveling is a very ingrained behavior in humanity.
> In the near past and for millennia, humans spent most if not their entire lives in one place, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Same can be said about slaves. What conclusion should I draw? Honestly, I think you should get off of Instagram if you think travel is about life achievement. If getting to know your fellow humans and expanding your understanding of why the world is the way it is is not interesting to you, stay home. But also don't be surprised if people call you a troglodyte. I agree with everything you said about the problems of modern day traveling, that it is incredibly geared towards empty experiences. However, I believe this is because people only have a few days to travel. What irks me is seeing "43 countries visited!" because, as you allude to, it is a vanity number. It takes months to fully immerse oneself in a culture or even be invited into local life. However, that's obviously out of reach for 99.99% of the population and so we have the current set of cookie cutter experiences. Of course, none of what I suggest is easy. I also classify myself as an introvert, which you don't say explicitly but is abundantly clear you are as well. Just make a new friend in the country you want to go to, just one. The emotional energy it takes upfront is paid tenfold in the experiences that come after. Oftentimes, you will discover that traveling with said friend brings them tons of joy because it gives them a reason to go do all the things in their backyard that they have never done because it is in their backyard.
> Same can be said about slaves. What conclusion should I draw?
Well damn, I guess breathing is in question since slaves can breath. /s
Honestly, I'm not sure the point you're trying to make with this.
> [Modern travel is] incredibly geared towards empty experiences. However, I believe this is because people only have a few days to travel. What irks me is seeing "43 countries visited!" because, as you allude to, it is a vanity number. It takes months to fully immerse oneself in a culture or even be invited into local life.
Maybe that's true, perhaps for many. To an extent I think it also is caused by a homogenization of global culture. In my case, it's that and the fact that once you've seen enough cities, enough forests, enough museums, enough shows, and eaten enough food... it all blends together and, after 30+ years of being on earth, as much as I cherish the existence of all of it, I don't necessarily find value in continually experiencing it all in order to cross them off the list of things to do. With the way so many of us are broadcasting our lives, we create this FOMO around travel that creates an illusion that we haven't truly lived unless we've been to all the major cities and historical ruins.
But yes, it's hard to live in the moment when you know you only have a handful of days to do what you want to do before you need to be back in the office, and the clock is ticking. Someone the other day was talking about the effect that meetings have on one's workday where, if the meeting is timed in the morning, you're less likely to get anything done before that meeting because the mind is anticipating having to switch gears for the meeting. If travel can only be done in a few days, the mind has to handle anticipating the travel and anticipating having to go back to work.
My point about slavery is that "humans have done this for a long time" is not an argument for anything. At best, we stay stuck in the past.
I think we are all saying the same thing. That, at some point, all humans get tired of the repetition. My main counter to all of this is that travel grants you an opportunity to experience things through a lens unachievable from your home. It does not matter how big your city's Chinatown (or choose your favorite ethnic center) is, it is merely a glimpse into that world. To me, travel is an incredibly long process of experiencing your life as it could have been. Almost like experiencing reincarnation while you are still alive. Obviously, your body is still the same but you go through many of the same stages of childhood when learning a new language. Frustration that no one can understand you, immense gratification of finally being able to convey your ideas, etc. In this sense,
> FOMO around travel that creates an illusion that we haven't truly lived unless we've been to all the major cities and historical ruins.
Is entirely wrong and you should just simply choose to not play. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Stop being a sheep and following the herd. Pave your own path. If you so happen to end up in one of these places, great. At the end of the day, traveling somewhere new is an amazing opportunity to grow as an individual and expand your mind.
I did not say it was a requirement but you must concede that cultural understanding is greatly expedited by actual experience. The best I can do to summarize my thoughts is this. If you can replace the verb travel with the verb go, you are missing the whole point. The point of traveling is not to go to museums in a different place. This correctly encompasses the feeling that business "travel" is not "traveling". No one cares for doing the same thing in merely a different physical location. Things get confusing when people use the word travel as a means of experiencing something new. For instance, "we traveled to Costa Rica and went ziplining. It was fun." The part about Costa Rica is irrelevant to the experience. While these uses of the word travel are grammatically correct, it lacks, in my opinion, what many proponents of travel mean as there is no single word that encompasses the emotion in English. It is a great shame that exchange students and spring breakers get clumped into the same bucket as the two could not be further apart in terms of motive and outcome. At the end of the day, traveling is a deeply personal experience and there is nothing wrong with these other forms of travel (Mexico has great beaches!) but if one finds traveling to be empty, stop treating travel as a commodity that one gains. I end with a quote from Good Will Hunting:
> So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientations, the whole works, right? But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that.
This is a more specific instance of something more general: new things are more exciting in the short term.
Someone else commented below about the hedonic treadmill.
Travel is what creates unique experiences in people because traveling is a rare thing for people in general.
When I toured we had 220-230 shows a year, everyday in a different place. I did it for 5 years.
It's hard now to even tell one year from the other.
I surely made great stories, but most of them are foggy nowadays.
Most unique experiences I have left of that time are either global events, I shared the merchandise stand with Nick Alexander the merch manager of EODM the night before he was brutally killed in the Bataclan attack, or too important to forget, like one of the crew members having a baby and rushing him to the airport so he could be there on time.
Anecdotally, I can say I have traveled for leisure (not work) every month or two for the last 5+ years, 90% of the time to a new place, and my experience aligns with @peoplefromibiza's perspective.
I think you have a point. But it sounds to me like your example was more similar to repetitive traveling for work than a unique travel experience each time. I don't know much about touring, but how different could've your daily routine really have been?
Touring is completely different from traveling for work, which I do too.
Touring is like traveling, it is in fact traveling at its best, it's like an adventure.
The only difference with traveling for leisure is that you don't stay in the same location for long, but you are away from home for a long time nonetheless.
Usually you travel around 200kms a day on average, someday it's 800km under the snow, some day it's 50kms on the coastline of beautiful Sardinia, but you might cross region borders or country borders, people speak different languages, you travel from north to south or west to east and everything changes.
East Germany and West Germany are different, German Switzerland and French Switzerland are different, Wallonia, Flanders and Brussels-area in Belgium are different.
North and South Italy are completely different.
To explain my point better I'll tell you what a musician told me.
One year we met with Bob Log III (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Log_III) a few times, because we were playing in the same venues, so we spent few nights together before and after the shows.
He told us he used to make a crazy number of shows in Europe, sth like 80 shows in 3 months.
He always travels alone, at least he did at the time, and drive his own car.
One night he was going from Innsbruck in Austria to Stockholm in Sweden where he had a show 48 hours later, stopping at the northern German border to get some sleep.
He told us it wasn't uncommon for him, he did it to pack as much shows as possible in as little time as possible, earn as much money possible, and then spend a couple of holiday weeks with his family in some European city, before going back home.
But then he said he stopped doing it.
He was only doing 30 shows in a row at max, no more than that.
Why, we asked.
He said: because as fun as it is to be always around partying with the great people that come at my shows who am I grateful to, because they are the ones allowing me to live my life as a musician, I started forgetting things.
I couldn't remember faces, dates, venues.
I kept going to the same places and not remembering people names.
So he decided to do less shows, max 30, in a bit less than two months, to make good memories that stayed.
What I wanna say is that it is absolutely non-boring, non-repetitive and definitely not something that feel like working, not at the level I did it anyway, but too much is too much, even too much fun can be too much and lose its meaning.
I kind of think what you said here actually proves my point. I didn't mean it's not adventurous or exciting, it's just that it becomes too familiar when you do it repetitively for the same reason under the same circumstances.
I've been doing occasional consulting work for the past 3 years for which I have to travel once or twice a month on most months. When I first started, every place I went to felt adventurous and unique. And now, if I'm traveling to someplace I've never visited even when I have to work on something I've never worked before, it just doesn't feel remotely unique or adventurous as it did before, especially in retrospect. I used to love talking to my friends what exciting things I've seen or people I've met, but now I don't think about it twice when I get home. My mind just kind of got used to it, it doesn't store it in the database with the unique or adventurous attributes set to true. Stuff just kind of goes in the "traveling for work" basket in the mind and gets all shuffled up, I've already forgot most names and faces of the people I've worked with as well and it hasn't even been that long. Sometimes I'll leave a meeting and 5 minutes later won't be able to remember someone's name.
But on the other hand, when I'm going somewhere and the circumstances have nothing to do with my work, even if I'm going somewhere I've already been before but the circumstances are different this time, both at that time and in retrospect it feels more unique and adventurous.
I think it's because when you do something repetitively, for the same reason and under similar circumstances, the associations in your mind kind of blend it all together.
I'm Italian, I toured regularly with an Italian band here and with some small-to-medium band from USA around Europe (the festival season in spring-summer is actually pretty great).
They were mainly from the so called "stoner" scene, such as Farflung, Fatso Jetson, Naam, White Hills etc.
I've moved a lot as an adult, and I can confirm that this is true. It's nothing to do with how old you are, and all to do with how much your life changes.
Last time I stayed in the same place/job for a few years it was a blur.
Really? When my kids were young (< 10, so a 12 year span), they were recognizably different cognitive functioning every month or so. Every month was a whole new game.
But yes, I do remember some of the early games, building block towers, as if they were yesterday.
Oh the kids themselves are different! But every day follows pretty much the exact same format, and if we try to mix it up they punish us harshly. (I kid but you get the idea).
We are soon, though I wish they could get vaxxed first (both under 5). Mostly it's just that every day is the same, and there's next to no spontaneity in life.
It's ok - we knew what we were signing up for before having kids, but deciding at 3 o'clock to spend the weekend camping is a lot less practical now. Even a quick outing requires a solid 30+ minutes of prep.
Its about how selfish one is. Sure we can cram our tiny kids into plane to Japan and do that trip we planned like there is no tomorrow. But if you know a bit about child's mind you know how stressful for them that whole experience would be.
It's all relative I suppose. It's a hell of a lot harder than it was! When I travel with adults I don't have to worry ahead of time about handling poop or bringing multiple changes of clothing or buying twice as many tickets or booking a room where it's OK if my kid is screaming for half the night because how do you get a wildly jetlagged 2 year old to sleep? They can't get vaccinated yet either so that's another source of stress too.
My experience is it is easier to go with the flow (with kids), so if the 2 year old can only adjust 1 hour of jetlag per day then you start with going to sleep at 4am and work your way down.
I was in Japan for a student exchange in 2016/17 and the amount of detail I remember from that time is astonishing. I can barely remember how I spent my day yesterday (in general I feel like I don't have a very good memory), but I can easily list all the trips we've taken during that semester and remember details that I would usually forget.
In general, I feel like most of my memories are structured around my unique (mostly travel-related) experiences. Oh 2015, that was the first time I ever left continental Europe and flew to Iceland in the middle of the semester to visit my friend. Things like that.
Unfortunately, travel has been turned into a commodity just like anything else. “Bragging rights” associated with travel have only become more desirable with the spread of social media, and other things that allow you to “travel” superficially- such as cruises.
> theories on why time feels like it accelerates as you get older
My theory is that everything takes a little longer as you get older, but in very small increments, so you don't really notice it. E.g., getting ready in the morning takes just a few seconds longer each day as you get old and slow down, but you remember it taking a set time, say 30 minutes. Then one day, you're up to 40 minutes, but it still feels like 30 to you. Aggregated across your myriad daily activities, and you're either getting the same amount of things done in a day, but your day is "shorter", or you're just running out of time altogether, because "where did the time go?" So, you perceive that time is moving faster, because you're getting less and less done in the same span.
I've noticed this some 14 years ago when doing mighty backpacking trip(s) in India. 2x 3 month trips, traveling all around that place with little plan and just return ticked, planning max few days in advance. Every day was so different.
It didn't feel like years after some time on the trip. More like I've switched whole reality, myself and everybody else. After some 2 months, life and reality back home was just a distant dream, too unreal to even consider seriously. Thank god it was before phones and wifi became so commonplace, it massively helped with that, writing an email once a week in some obscure internet cafe.
Coming back, it felt I've spent a lifetime away. Twice. Now I judge vacations on how it feels how long it lasted, the more it does the happier I am with deciding for it.
> One of my favorite theories on why time feels like it accelerates as you get older is that your brain tends to only store unique memories.
My theory is that it's less that it only stores unique memory, but it is always trying to resolve things into generalizable patterns. Kind of like a compression algorithm - but in this case not always accurate or reversible.
For me, time during the pandemic has been flying by because every day is nearly the same. Wake up work, maybe excercise in the evening, play video games, sleep.
I think time feels like passing faster because 1 month at 50 years old is a much smaller portion of your life than it is at 8 years old. It's a matter of relativity.
I feel that time goes faster as I get older but I don't enjoy travel. I don't make more memories in different places. All but few memories from the time I spent abroad evaporate very quickly and I'm left with general feeling that I lost a clearly defined chunk of my life. What remains more often are bad memories about being tired and uncomfortable.
There is a deeper reason for slowing perception of the passage of time: mindfulness. When you travel or do a unique experience you usually are fully committed to living these experiences. Practicing mindfulness has worked great for me to achieve the same results in my everyday life (granted, I have the chance to live in the countryside with a garden). From the outside I don't do much and live a very mundane life, but for me everyday is very different and time has slowed down. Like watching how birds or insects behave differently everyday, trees grow, and more generally how every microscopic bit of nature change slowly day after day to cycle through the seasons.
Travel can still be an enjoyable experience but there is nothing more meaningful I'm searching for.
I believe culture is a factor that we can't remember and enjoy daily commute. Most people consume just pop culture, that makes them to enjoy and fantasize only "unique" and spectacular aspects of life.
I recently traveled by bus not exactly by standards, in a more modest area. Before that I read some literature, which had as characters normal people, with some life situations in which normal people face.
It made me feel different that two-hour road, I saw people differently, I felt a little like in one of the stories and I enjoyed.
This reminds me of one of the most epic episodes of Money Heist where $character, shortly before dying, says something that resonated a lot with me:
> Mucha gente cree que en la vida solo hay un gran amor, lo que no saben es que se pueden vivir varias vidas. […] Hoy acaba algo pero es el día de tu siguiente vida. Tienes que vivir muchas vidas […], muchas...
I like to think that this can be applied not only to love (like here) but also to switching jobs, careers, places, … anything really that causes a big change (a diff, as you say) in life.
Also, if the 20 year old looks back 5 years, they were a hormonal teenager, still growing physically, treated as a minor and had never experienced half the things they'd experienced now. They were a completely different person in many respects then, and if they look back 15 years it's their very first memories.
If the 50 year old looks back 5 years, their life probably wasn't all that different. If they look back 15, their kids were still at home and they had a different job title but they were fundamentally the same person, and they feel they've been that way for a very long time.
That's just a statement, there is no logic behind why life would be experienced as percentages rather than in absolute time. Personally, I'm more prone to believe the unique experiences concept, because that actually has some basis for it, and also meshes with my real life. I have a few years in my early 20s which are just a blur (because I was working a crummy office job), but I have a year or two in my 30s which feel like a lifetime in themselves, and I can recall numerous specific days, because I was doing a totally new thing (road tripping around the mediterranean)
Also, travel tends to give a context to unpleasant or difficult experiences that make them tolerable. They led to something. They weren't mindless petty humiliations like one experiences in an office job (a recurring eight-hour economy-class flight to nowhere). They were scenes in a story.
There's a lot about travel that just sucks. Flying is horrible, especially now. Hotels are soulless. You're surrounded by people trying to take petty economic advantage of the fact that you're in an unfamiliar place. Things never happen quite the way they're planned, and while sometimes this produces serendipity, it's sometimes infuriating or even terrifying. Still, people are remarkably able to handle discomfort, pain, and even danger if there's a purpose to it. With travel experiences, there almost always is. Sure, you spent six hours in an airport because some reptilian airline executive saved a few thousand dollars by cancelling a flight... but you got there, and you got to see and do things most people, in human history, could only read about.
Travel itself isn't fun at all. It's the experiences that travel makes possible that are rewarding. The good recontextualizes the bad.
This is paradoxical in a number of ways. For one thing, putting too much prior effort into engineering the experience leads to high expectations and disappointment. "I saw the thing. Now what?" We often don't know in advance what will produce the true prize memories. For some people, this is infuriating, and they have coped by creating Instagram culture, where the focus becomes the mindless collection of digital images ("look at all the expensive experiences I can buy") that makes travel, far from an escape from our decadent and purposeless treadmill culture, an extension thereof.
Travel and "education" are the two forms of conspicuous consumption that are socially acceptable. Spend $200,000 on a car and people will make small penis jokes (as they should) behind your back. Spend $200,000 (or forgo earnings in an equivalent amount) to take pictures of yourself next to recognizable world monuments... and you're "worldly". Travel makes you more interesting, people say, and it sure can... but if it were always so, then why are the people who get to do it all the time, the rich, so uninteresting and so useless?
Ultimately, what distinguishes travel is not that the experiences are good or bad in different proportions than are possible in a more homely life, but that we have the cognitive machinery--an innate conception of story--that makes the negative experiences, even if they are in fact petty and pointless, tolerable in the context of what is gained by going through them. In office life, this doesn't exist. We spend so much time there, we know the unpleasant bits are not only unnecessary but utterly detrimental. Office life is never physically or cognitively demanding, but it is emotionally stressful, and furthermore it delivers absolutely nothing of value. The people who stole all the money sell a little bit of it back to you, so you can survive today and return tomorrow. So perhaps the lesson is not that travel is wonderful, but that today's working life is so atrocious that people will spend substantial proportions of what little disposable income the system has given them, not to have rewarding experiences (which are possible through, but not guaranteed by, travel) but merely to escape it.
Burning as usual is clearly not sustainable. If you think massive degrowth is the only way out then I’m afraid we’re totally fucked.
Massive emissions reductions can also be paired with CDR to have even more impact since reductions alone — basically no matter how steep at this point — are not going to get us to where we need to be.
The reason is not due to renewables, actually. In PG&E territory (which I am most familiar with) more than 2/3rds of your bill typically goes to transmission and distribution costs and 1/3 towards generation. Check out your next bill if you are curious. It’s not a huge surprise that T&D costs so much since that infrastructure keeps burning down the state and there is a lot of deferred maintenance.
It does make for a nice argument to try to decentralize more of the generation closer to where the consumption is happening (eg solar + batteries) to try to reduce our need to invest in T&D.
Electric cars will help tremendously with load shifting once we get bidirectional charging in 1-2 years. A Tesla Model 3 can fully power an average 3000 sq-ft home for 2-3 days. What will be most powerful though is helping the grid with peak shaving by giving some of that stored power back during the worst hour or two of the day.
That said I don’t disagree on some generation challenges, I’m finding it hard to find transparency on our long term plan to meet our power mix needs in the winter with pure renewables and no nuclear. Summer (where we have rolling blackouts currently) is relatively easier though since it tends to be a matter of just bridging the gap for a short while, which you can do in all sorts of ways.
> A Tesla Model 3 can fully power an average 3000 sq-ft home for 2-3 days.
An average US home is 2,500 square feet, but that aside the average US home power consumptions is about 30kWh per day, so, yes, the 82kWh battery for the newest Model 3 Long Range can power an average home for more than 2 and less than 3 average days.
That’s a big misconception. Latest generation heat pumps can work well even in very cold climates eg Lake Tahoe. The “fixes” needed to make that work aren’t that dramatic eg a bit of pre-heating of some parts with regular electric heating elements.
Heat pumps work in cold weather and should have emergency heat where it's resistance coils inside the home. Your HVAC installer should install the correct system by zone.
Your fear of people freezing to death over heat pumps are unfounded. There are backups built in that work with the insulation value of a house. New homes should be very air tight and require less heating, suited for heat pumps.
I never claimed heat pumps don't work in cold weather. The point is about non-electric redundancy, not heat pumps having resistance coils. I'm well aware of the functionality of modern heat pumps.
Even in a house with foam insulation - the highest "normally available" insulation - freezing to death is just a matter of time without heat. When considering city-wide infrastructure it's something that needs to be considered. I'm not saying it's necessarily going to happen, but you'd be dumb not to think about redundancy measures, hence my top-level comment.
This type of redundancy is why many commercial buildings have gas generators, for example.
A gas furnace would require electricity. You need electricity to ignite and exhaust most natural gas heating. There are vent-free options. Not common for those to be installed and back to having your own option for backup power. Which can be propane or gasoline.
The amount of electricity a gas furnace requires is trivial and not really relevant to this discussion. A heat pump requires many orders of magnitude more electricity. A 10kwh battery could power a gas furnace and a water heater electrically for a year.
Now this natural gas house has a 10kwh whole house battery backup too? Hope your refrigerator can also last a year off that battery pack (oh wait it's a ac compressor too!),
Heat Pump for heat, Heat Pump water heater is the future for new home builds. Buy a portable generator, a 10kwh gasoline generator is <$1,000 USD and 1/10th the price of a 10kwh batter pack. Problem solved.
The problem with relying on resistance-based emergency heat is that it means heating efficiency tanks by a factor of potentially 4 or so at the same time as heating demand is also at its highest. This is a really great recipe for collapse of the electrical grid, which of course people are going to be 100% reliant on for heating, at a time when not having heating would literally be fatal.
Yes, electrifying everything will result in more peak demand which will require upgrading many house’s main panels. It’s not an insurmountable challenge though, especially relative to dealing with the effects of 2+ degrees of warming.
You're missing my point - in the context of the article the issue is not upgrading the panels, it would be replacing the entire current electrical infrastructure. I'm not claiming it's insurmountable. The point is that these changes will increase the cost of housing, which will make people sprawl, the very same sprawl that will decrease the efficiency of the very same things we're talking about.
There's a political, economic and cultural balance to be struck here, technology changes notwithstanding.
A fully electrified home actually reduces overall system cost through 1- higher efficiency of electric appliances and heat pumps than their gas counterparts, and 2- a significantly reduced infrastructure cost to no longer having to maintain gas infrastructure, the totality of which (scouting, mining, transportation, last mile) is incredibly expensive. In fact, for new construction, it is often cheaper out the gate to go all electric and the efficiency savings in terms of lower electric+gas bills are significant and pure upside.
Moving on to electric retrofits, they are expensive but not crazy expensive. On the order of $2500-7500 per SFH to wire 220/30-50 amp circuits to the right places (HVAC, stove, water heater, clothes dryer, EV charger) and maybe upgrade the main panel - a far cry from redoing the entire wiring. It’s not an insane proposition to think we could retrofit all existing housing stock in a 15 year period if we wanted to take it seriously. We are going to need more electricians though.
Do you know what is actually really expensive? Billions or trillions of dollars in climate disaster losses and mitigation which we are seeing ramp up very quickly. If we continue burning fossil fuels even remotely like we are now, in 20 years time the losses we say today will look like peanuts in comparison.
Buildings make up a very significant amount of the CO2e emissions (depending on the location, often tied #1 with transportation) so doing nothing here is not really an option.
The efficiency increase for all electric appliances except for heat pumps is generally not worth the conversion cost. Gas infrastructure is already in place so the expense is irrelevant.
If what you were saying were true then economic forces would already have led to dominance of full electric without the need for government mandates to begin with.
That’s not really true. New high efficiency heat pump water heaters - as one example - often have a 1-2 year ROI, which is pretty dramatic. HVAC is actually often the most expensive from an ROI standpoint because of larger upfront costs.
Market forces will lead us down this path eventually but they are not instantaneous, and we don’t have much time to wait. Policy can help 1- accelerate, 2- bootstrap emerging markets (eg creating demand for more induction stoves turns that market from a niche to mainstream, with more competition, more choice, and reduced cost, all of which will serve to boost demand) and 3- finance infrastructure investments that may be beyond reach for many.
On gas infrastructure, yes it is in place but it still requires significant ongoing maintenance costs which would be eliminated if it was shut down.
Legacy code (aka the American legal system) is routinely despised by those new to the problem space. Most experienced programmers will know that the (new to them) code isn’t all flaws, despite its initial appearance - there are a myriad of embedded edge cases and branches that at first blush seem like cruft, but in reality are the result of learning from various failure modes.
As with any complex rewrite I suspect we are doomed to rediscover the rationale for the original design. Hopefully it will end up meaningfully better, and not a Digg 3.0.
This is a pretty well known effect in the Marketing/Comms/PR world though it is generally attributed to a narrative effect rather than detection of deceit.
The way the thinking goes is that humans are wired to tell stories and there are certain stories we are predisposed to. We like to root for “the little guy” and love to cheer on startups, especially those with sympathetic stories, founders, high competence, etc.
We also tend to dislike entities at the very top and in extreme positions of power (eg billionaires, governments, large evil corporations) for a variety of reasons.
At some point in your company’s growth your narrative arc flips and you become the bad guy. The best thing you can do as the company is to try your best to postpone the flip as long as possible, but it is inevitable. When it happens, you are on the downslope and “in the dog house” as far as the media and public perception is concerned and there’s just not much you can do about it. Sometimes the harder you try to explain yourself and fight against it, the worse it gets.
You’ll also notice founders of these companies are often totally caught by surprise when this flip happens. They’ve gotten so used to a sympathetic public and a certain mode of behavior to maintain good public perception - transparent, relatable, “aww shucks” style - and when it flips it can be confusing because this doesn’t work anymore. The perception of them has shifted from “that smart/competent startup person I am rooting for” to “the powerful billionaire CEO that crushes the little people with the raise of a finger” and so the behaviors that come naturally to them take on a different tone entirely from a perception perspective.
When this happens it’s probably time to batten down the hatches and shift PR strategies. The old way isn’t likely to work anymore; the straw has finally broken the camel’s back.
I’m no expert at what it takes to reverse this. My best guess is that you need to spend your time in the penalty box while drawing minimum attention to let the steam blow off faster and not accelerate the roller coaster ride down. Then when you come back after 6-12 months or so, do so with a changed communications strategy that implicitly takes into account the changed public perceptions around power dynamics. You’re not a beloved startup anymore but you can still be “one of the good ones” as far as big companies and billionaire CEOs.
One thing people don’t understand very well is that charging time is not linear - it takes a LOT longer to charge the last 1% than the first 1%. This is important during road trips.
On a typical trip from SF to LA in our Model 3 with 300 miles range, you would think you would stop once “for gas” and charge to 100% as that is the mental model coming from a gas car. However, it takes ~45-60 mins to charge to 100% and only ~10-12 mins to charge to 50%, so the much better option is to make 2 stops along the way and only charge to 50% each time.
When you look at it from that perspective, you need to take 10 mins to stretch your legs every 2-2.5 hours of driving or so, which really isn’t a big deal at all and probably good for you. Using that strategy an indefinitely long road trip in an EV really isn’t a burden at all.
> If you keep compounding growth, like growing GDP at 1-2% a year, within some few thousand years you've grown bigger than all the resources within a sphere the same number of light years in radius.
Would be super interested to see your math. What are the inputs and equation that get you to these specific outputs (a few thousand years, all resources, a few thousand light years)?
If the Pharoah Tutankhamen had invested the equivalent of $1, and earned a real rate of return of 1%, today's value of that investment would be more than $350 trillion, which is a quantity larger than Credit Suisse's estimate of "global net worth".
Travel is a set of unique experiences that form unique memories. Part of what’s addicting and pleasurable is that it helps slow down the perception of the passage of time, among many other positives.
It’s also self reinforcing in that when you think back, you tend to disproportionately remember travel vs other experiences.
There’s clearly a lot more benefits than that, but it certainly seems like a significant factor.