While talking to a friend about how what people call travel isn’t travel any more, he told me his friend counted how many steps he took on a trip from New York to Los Angeles: 800.
That’s not traveling. That’s being transported. If I take 801 steps, I’ve put more effort into traveling. And going from New York to L.A., he isn’t visiting a different culture or learning about humanity or the world. On the contrary, he’s likely viewing the continent in between as flyover country—once home to millions of people with many cultures. The diversity of those cultures has been wiped out by our culture of taking and using unsustainable resources and assimilating and homogenizing them, if not destroying them by killing their members.
My friend visits the Philippines a lot. I asked and he confirmed that the cultures of the Philippines are well on the way to being assimilated into our global homogenized culture.
Planes do to nations and the world what cars do to cities. They give individuals temporary feelings of power while wrecking the place for themselves and everyone else too.
I felt this way on a study abroad experience to Madrid as an 18-year-old. It felt like I was in a Spanish-speaking U.S. with older buildings.
I lament the loss and homogenization of culture, but an unexpected bonus of the realization is the adventure and discovery I find locally.