After reading Grant’s ‘The End of Elsewhere’, I found myself asking the question of what we search for when we travel. The suggestion that what we seek is the place untouched by ‘modernity’, nay technology, rings true. But this also calls into question the endless cycle I have been ruminating over the past few years; we (the West) ‘discover’ a place on the edges of ‘modernity’ and flock to it, in doing so, removing the one aspect we truly seek, and then loudly proclaiming it is ‘ruined’ by the very actions we take, those being visiting and desecrating such places.
Then the search begins for the next ‘place off the map’, which is promptly put on the map, and defeats the entire point. (The point notwithstanding that the location was never ‘off the map’ to begin with). This, I believe, is how ‘trends’ with countries emerge. If you’ve been anywhere near Instagram in the last year, you’ll know that the ‘place to be’ at the moment is Kyrgyzstan; horses, falcons, mountains, NO PHONES. (Though, of course, paradoxically, this is all seen on social media, so there have to be at least some phones). Before, this has been Vietnam, Thailand, Bali, Philippines, you name it; any traveller hotspot.
But will we eventually run out of places? Is there an ‘end of elsewhere’? And does this suggest that we are travelling for all the wrong reasons?
Grant talks of the ‘Elsewhere’, the intangible thing which the traveller searches for. I must also note that when referring to the traveller, I predominantly mean the ‘backpacker’. But what is it in this ‘elsewhere’ which we seek, the authentic? And by the ‘authentic’, what do we mean, a world untouched by ‘modernity’. Grant argues that post-Rosseau, that is all the traveller has been seeking.
The Western traveller, from Rousseau forward, needed to believe two things at once: that modernity was hollow, and that somewhere outside modernity, something fuller was still available. The second belief is what made the first one bearable. You could critique your own civilisation as long as you had somewhere to imagine going.
So, if the Western, modern world is hollow and lacking in meaning, the ‘real world’ can be found through travel.
With the suggestion that there is an ‘end’ to elsewhere, are we running out of places to seek the ‘authentic’? Having ‘Westernised’ much of the globe, where can the Westerner go to escape the ‘modern’? I believe the desire is to reach a point beyond the technology with which our lives are ruled, but to find this place, one looks online, on social media.
The place exists for many only because it has been captured and posted. Personal discovery no longer validates a place; ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ fuels the need to prove you were there. The waterfall was already there before the viral reel, but through the validation of a social media post, it gains social recognition. In doing so, it enters into a catch-22; it has simultaneously been ‘placed on the map’ and suffered the fate of being ‘discovered’, and therefore, is no longer untouched in the eyes of the ever-searching traveller.
The Lonely Planet paradox, the moment a place is identified as off the map, it ceases to be off the map, has played out to its logical endpoint, with no further off-map left to claim.
The traveller isn’t experiencing the authenticity; they are consuming it.
In doing so, it is another consumable product to deplete and pillage. Marketing authenticity transforms it into a collectable which feeds right back into the machine.
Perhaps I’m not really talking about travel at all. Or, at least, not only talking about travel.
The underlying question I think begging to be asked is this: If we are running towards the ‘authentic’, we are running away from the ‘Modern’. Does this not suggest that somewhere, something went wrong within the ‘modern’? Why else do we run from it?
If travel is the search for authenticity, what does that reveal about our dissatisfaction with modern life? The question should not be whether we will run out of a physical ‘elsewhere’, but why we feel the need for one. Perhaps, in searching for another place, we are searching for another way of living. The search was never purely a geographical one.
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