young travelers nowadays, ok specifically most peers i know and have traveled with, they only care about those unpaid performance during their travelling to foreign lands: facebook’s check-in, taking photos – choosing a beautiful landscape and posing to make sure he or she looks cool in the photos, religiously taking photos before every new meals they are eating.
and i am annoyed by that, by the underlying belief that unless you take photos of you looking cool in the background of that amazing lands, unless you make that known on facebook to all the friends in your friendlist (most of whom acquaintances that you haven’t talked to for years), unless you do all of that, unless you get ‘like’s and reactions from people (in form of ‘comment’ – inquiry, or cheap compliments only to mask their jealousy and silent cursings to you), unless all of that happens, your traveling doesn’t exist, your enjoyment during the trip is eclipsed. and yes, indeed, the enjoyment of travelling for young people nowadays spring mostly from the online reactions to the digital recording of their travelling, not in those moments they are in the foreign land, yes how can your mind be there to appreciate the beauty of the sunset when what most of you are trying hard to capture the moment with your cameras?
if it’s not recorded, it doesn’t exist. that is the underlying unconscious belief of people today, amplify to the point of madness with the help of exponential technological development, making everything faster so that you can record and capture slices of reality and upload it in seconds.
that is not to say we must not take photos or record during our trip. just that to bear in mind that it should not always be the main purposes of traveling. (sometimes you have travelling solely for photo-shooting, wedding photos for example)… and that it should not rob us of the presence moments to actually be there in the place we travel to.
and to end this rant, I don’t see any meaning of travelling, to myself, just for me. unless it is to travel to the historical sites, places that i have read about and have forged some emotional bond to, places where things happened with people i can relate to personally, for example: the waterloo battlefield, or long-chang the place where wang yangming, deprived of the luxury of books, had to live in solitude and finally reach enlightenment… long-chang wu-dao…
in a way, i am more interested in personal pilgrimage. #read Alain de Botton “Religion for Atheists” – he may have a few passages on how religions can give us good ideas on how to get more out of our life, including how to get more out of travelling.