Aphorism #4: Travelling is Overrated
Travelling, a chocolate-covered peanut
At its core, travelling is from the same instinctual cabbage patch as gossip. It is gilded nosiness — a snooping into the exotic life of the others. This becomes obvious when you hear returned travellers regale their friends at home with stories of their far-flung cousins: "You'll never believe what they do over there". This is the germ of what travelling is; it is the peanut of the chocolate-covered peanut.
As we all know, people don't eat chocolate-covered peanuts for the peanut. And so the more substantial (though superfluous) element of the travelling phenomenon is (brace for cringy Rationalist Darwinian language) Darwinian Sexual Selection. The nosy travelling nut has become a status signal to one's peers. While long popular as ostentation (think Grand Tour) it previously had a mileage limit — the boring vacation slideshow trope and “oh they're talking about their holidays again” trope. With the advent of the social media era, in particular Instagram, these limits have been abolished. The experience isn't one of the Other bragging but of glimpsing into the Other's life. This mimetic layer of chocolate has become the main event. Any honest traveller can see that the experience has been cheapened as the chocolate has outgrown the peanut. It is harder to tell yourself it's all about the peanut when you find yourself in a line like this:
