The Virtue of Tourism

Castles in the Sky #54

This is me waiting for the London Underground in October 2023 outfitted in my full “tourist Dad” regalia

Tourism gets a bad rap.

The first memory I have of being a tourist was accompanying my Dad on a business trip he took to Washington D.C. when I was eleven years old. Two big things happened on that trip. First, my Dad and I came back with our first male-coded inside joke, where we said, "I'm gonna punch you in the face" in a bad Italian accent. Second, I got it in my mind for the first time that I could invent a mythology.

The buildings in Washington D.C. captured my imagination in a way no architecture ever had before. How large and marble they were defied what I'd previously thought was possible. On the second tour we went on, I took a bunch of printer paper from the business room in the La Quinta we were staying at and then grabbed one of my mechanical pencils I'd brought with me. (I loved mechanical pencils so much I took them with me everywhere.)

I spent the rest of the trip making poor sketches of the buildings as part of a community made entirely of marble palaces built into a mountain. Back at the hotel I would pencil in people who looked like marble statues walking between the buildings. At the top of every paper I wrote 'cosarre' (pronounced koh-zah-ray) which I named because it sounded like "casa del rey" or house of the king in Spanish.

What I was imagining was a massive complex full of beautiful marble statue-people who lived in marble palaces. This complex was the house of some massive deity who had carved all the homes for himself, always building a bigger one, then carved all the statues and animated them to take care of things and do his bidding. He lived at the top in the biggest palace but was only there one day a year, gone the rest of the time in even bigger, more extravagant palaces. Where does he go the rest of the year? I don't know. Cosarre was the keystone of a fictional cosmology I invented for a fictional group of people in a fictional world that I hoped to write about someday when I was eleven. The idea dropped into my head almost fully formed the first time I rode a tourist bus past one of the massive, neoclassical federal buildings in Washington D.C.

I still think about Cosarre and I might even still have those sketches if I look hard enough. But that's not why I shared this story. I shared this weird, meandering, idiosyncratic story because I want to make a simple case for tourism.

One of my bedrock foundational beliefs is something I call "the stochastic pursuit of truth." I plan to write about at length it later--and haven't yet because I am looking for a better phrasing, but it's easy to understand the general idea. Everybody is pursuing some kind of truth: belonging, happiness, purpose, etc. A lot of people who are pursuing truth are doing so in a linear fashion. When you consider truths to pursue, we can divide all knowledge into things we know, things we know we don't know, and things we don't know we don't know. As we move from knowns, to known unknowns, to unknown unknowns, there is an extreme asymptotic increase.

Normally, when people are pursuing truths, especially when they are doing so intentionally, they are pretty methodical. They conduct the pursuit of truth as if it was a search, or as if they were building a case. They are usually focusing on increasing what they know and investigating what they know they don't know. There is rarely any concerted effort to minimize the unknown unknowns. Stochastic is a word used in math and physics for something seemingly random. The "stochastic pursuit of truth" is the idea that, in our pursuit of truth, we should introduce and cultivate a sense of randomness in order to aggressively decrease unknown unknowns.

Even at eleven, I was already pursuing truth. Younger than that, I remember asking a lot of questions in church and trying to develop crude heuristics to keep myself productive and happy. But I didn't go to Washington D.C. because I was pursuing a truth. I went because it was a fun trip with my Dad. We were tourists, not pilgrims.

Even though I had an idea of what I was going to see, there was so much I didn't know I didn't know. Being exposed to the buildings on that trip with my Dad exploded my imagination in a way that had never happened at home before. That first spastic session of “worldbuilding” was arguably one of my first baby steps toward my career as a writer and my desire to create fictional worlds–a desire which still dominates my goals and calendar twenty-five years later.

Someone might think to take the stochastic pursuit of truth to its extreme and just optimize for random experiences all the time to reduce the unknown unknowns as much as possible. But I don’t think it works well this way. Pursuing truth–whether that truth is happiness, purpose, wisdom, or something else–is a kind of study. And studying can be thought of as accumulated and applied familiarity. To study something is to get really familiar with it such that you can apply it. Just having random experiences all the time minimizes our ability to do that.

And this is why I think tourism is actually a good thing. Because it is a safe, organized, pleasant way to undertake the stochastic pursuit of truth. “Tourist” is practically a pejorative these days. Pretty much the only time someone declares themselves a tourist is at a customs desk. Many think that to be a tourist is to look for something inauthentic, to be cringe, to be corny, to be pretentious, of to exalt leisure above all else. But this is wrong.

The truth is that most people’s lives are full of obligations, and tourism is a way to be organized with your time. Not all of us have the luxury of dropping everything and traveling “the right way,” where we can take extended sabbaticals for weeks or months on end, or to “live like a local.” Tourism is an efficient way to travel and expose yourself to unknown unknowns.

Plus it is safe. I have plunged into foreign countries multiple times with little to no planning. More than once, I was robbed, got lost, or got scammed. I was a uniquely brash traveler, and I think traveling is much safer than most people do, but there is still risk inherent to exploring unknown unknowns. Doing so in a place that knows how to handle tourists leaves room for questions like “how will this place’s culture change my idea of who I am,” yet makes questions like “how will being in danger change my idea of who I am” less likely.

And finally, being a tourist is pleasant. Not many people get to choose where they live, but even for those who do, that choice comes with tradeoffs. There are places that do things you like better than the place where you live. I love Houston, Texas and can name a hundred good things about it. But it never snows, and there’s poor mass transit, and there are other cities where the average Italian restaurant is about the same as our best.

So take that bus tour, go to the gift shop, visit that historical site, go to the restaurant everyone raves about, take the hike all your friends did last year–in short, be a tourist. In a perfect world, we could all take extended vacations, backpacking across wildernesses and renting condos in all the capitols of Europe. But with the lives we lead in the world we live in, you can have a great time and learn a lot about yourself on a three-day road trip to the tourist trap closest to your house.

My name is Charlie Becker and I’m a writer, teacher, and bookseller. Every Friday, I send out Castles in the Sky, a newsletter where I write the weirdest that feels right. If someone emailed this to you or you found it on social media, go here to learn more.

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Rabbit Holes

Rabbit holes are diversions and digressions that I think add to the main essay above.

My Favorite Travelers on Video

Whenever I’m going to travel somewhere, one of the first things I do is look for videos from that place because it can add a lot to my trip. But the best videos of travelers are so good that you can learn from their travels before (or instead of) even going yourself. These are three of my favorite people to watch travel videos from:

#3 Drew Binsky

Drew Binsky is not the coolest guy on this list, but he might have the coolest life. I love that he is younger than me and has traveled solo to every country in the world. I really like how optimistic and even-handed he is when he visits everywhere. I found him originally when my wife and I went out to dinner and had an Eritrean waitress. I was curious when I got home and searched “Eritrea” on YouTube and found this video:

But my favorite video of his is this one, on the last jew in Afghanistan:

#2 Peter Santenello

My next favorite person to watch videos from is Peter Santenenllo. Peter does these great unedited man-on-the-street documentaries of forgotten places in the US. I don’t usually have travel plans to go to the places he visits, but he does a great job humanizing these regions and really spending time with the people there to find out about what life is like. This is the first video I saw of his and probably still one of my favorites:

#1 Anthony Bourdain

The all-time greatest is Anthony Bourdain, rest in peace. I’m sure you’ve heard of him but if not, he had several TV shows across several networks where he was funny, kind, urbane, sarcastic, and unapologetically himself. As a writer turned travel personality, he is also a big role model of mine. This is a bootleg version of the episode of his first show where he went to London.

The Death of Couchsurfing

Couchsurfing was an enormous part of my life in and after college as I lived across China. When I ran out of money one night in Hong Kong, I used free WiFi standing outside of a cafe to log onto Couchsurfing and find a bed on one of the outlying islands. I used my last bit of money to catch a ferry where I trekked across the island and up a mountain to what I can only describe as a tropical oceanside villa.

The resident was a Parisian psychiatrist. She was married to a Tiananmen protestor who’d fled China, but he and their children were visiting Europe, so the house was open. The other Couchsurfing guest was a German girl who was backpacking across Asia. The host told me I could stay for three days until the banks opened up and someone could wire me money. She found out I was from Texas and said she would throw a barbecue and if I manned the grill I could eat leftovers for the weekend.

That was just one of many magical experiences I had. In The Power of Being Weird I wrote about how much I loved Couchsurfing:

For the uninitiated, Couchsurfing was like Airbnb before Airbnb, but it was free and run off vibes and community vouching. It was incredible until a finance firm bought it up to find a way to make money from it and ruined it.

Couchsurfing is dead now. As of a couple of years ago, Couchsurfing has moved to a completely subscription-based model, but it departed from its roots over ten years ago. I’m always shocked that more people don’t know how great it was and how much it’s changed, and this personal blog post has the best history of what happened that I have found anywhere.

Bulletin Board

Bulletin Board is where I post shout-outs and meta-updates on Castles in the Sky.

Sorry, I’m late—I was chatting with friends.

Apologies for being a week behind on this newsletter. My wife (right behind my shoulder here) and I went to London for a wedding last week. We had a blast at the wedding. On our last night in London, I had the opportunity to meet up with friends I’ve made in the Write of Passage community.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week.