The Problem with the Go Before it's Too Late narrative
What an ad campaign from 20 summers ago has in common with today's TikTok trend "Wish it was so quick to travel"
Let me tell you everything that’s wrong with the Wish It Was So Quick To Travel TikTok trend.
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In the year 2005, when I was working as a tour guide in Bergen, Norway, and on the verge of starting my Erasmus student exchange, Kilroy Travels—the Northern Europe travel agency I went to to book plane tickets (yes, in person)—launched a pretty on-the-nose advertising campaign, featuring images of famous must-go destinations with one eerie element swapped out for another. Mount Rushmore was rebranded as “Mount Arnold,” as in the picture below (and if it didn’t feature Trump’s face on it, but Schwarzenegger’s it was just because well… those were the times). Uluru appared cut in half, a long highway running through. The Hong Kong Big Buddha statue now got an overhaul with an electric staircase “conveniently” leading up to it. Machu Picchu, the Pisa tower, even Antarctica got their spin. The result was a sort of Black Mirror version of travel’s impact.
Still, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the campaign didn’t seem controversial at the time, at least in my circle. I don’t remember heated discussions about it, or even discussions, period. But then, I was working in the travel industry, my days chronographed by the groups of tourists—sometimes three groups in one day—that I would guide up Mount Fløyen, to Fantoft’s Stave Church, to the Hanseatic Quarter, or to the fjords: Hardanger, Flåm, Geiranger, less frequently Ålesund, Tromsø, Lofoten Islands. I was paid by tour, which meant that more tourists was akin to guaranteed money—money that would pay for my whole University education, for all of my living expenses, for my unpaid interships, for my trips abroad, for the occasional times I’d go out to a movie, for the not at all occasional times I’d go out with friends.
Still, when I walked past the ads plastered around Torggaten in Bergen—where I lived for the summer—I contemplated the pictures with a mix of horror and pain, gripped by a nostalgia for places I had not even experienced, but possibly never might.
I sometimes recalled my one time climbing the steps of the Pisa Tower—I must have been five, six at most—during a family trip to Tuscany. I didn’t have necessarily romantic memories of it—there’s a picture of the four of us sitting in the grass outside, my mom and my dad holding my sister and I, both of them looking insanely young (because they were): a picture I don’t remember us taking. What I do remember was the sensation that, as you rose higher and higher up the tower, your body leaned further and further to the side, and even though you could tell which way was up, you’d nonetheless doubt yourself, feeling like you may be wrong—as in one of those experiment leveraging a Barany chair.
It wasn’t exactly that I wanted to go back to the Pisa tower—a much overrated site, in my opinion (as an Italian, I get to say this ;-).
But I did seemingly want to strike each and every place off my checklist, even though I didn’t have a checklist, not really. Even back then, I was the kind of traveller who doesn’t necessarily enjoy the postcard version of travel—the rush to get to see exactly the places you had in your mind to see. I enjoyed, and still prefer, the cultural immersion, the deep-diving, the learning the language, the secret codes, the knowing the adjectives that each place has selected to praise things (beauty in one place, elegance in another, coziness somewhere else).
But I felt even that was slipping away.
Capitalism—not that I would think in those terms back then, not necessarily—has a way of flattening everything it touches, of polarizing and dividing even as it pushes for the ubiquity of one specific aesthetic—for hipster bars—as covered by Kyle Chaka in this article in The Guardian—all the way to athleisure—as Jia Tolentino writes in Trick Mirror.
It’s hard not to think about it now, at the height of the summer, when the windows of the mostly deserted houses that silently await the passing of fall, winter and spring in the sleepy Galician town in which I live—pop. 3,900 souls—finally get opened.
And it’s not just the windows. It’s the campign cars, and the pilgrims, and the day buses, and the families with kids. Carnota—that’s what the town is called—has a 7-kilometers large, atlantic beach, and it beckons anyone who’s not too afraid of having to drive a few extra miles.
Last year, there was even a frightening calls to arms, coming all the way to the Galician coast from some famous TikToker with over 1,000,000 followers.
He used his channel to suggest everyone should get organized—from Valencia, Madrid, Barcelona or Andorra—so as to drive, camp and descend like a horde of actors about to shoot The Walking Dead—onto the beach, to witness what’s known locally as the Mar d’Ardora and which Jules Verne captured in his novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas as the Milky seas: a luminous phenomenon in the ocean in which large areas of seawater appear to glow diffusely and continuously, in varying shades of blue. The fact is that no beach should ever be assaulted by someone’s million followers, neither together, nor spread out throughout the summer, if that beach is to be preserved as it is—especially when it’s the sort of beach protected and sourrounded by dunes—which have formed over tens of thousands of years—and inhabited by rare species already endangered.
But just think of how the ideal summer destination is portrayed nowadays: sand so white it glows, cristalline waters, lush greenery all around, a mostly cloudless sky, and certainly no buildings, no hotels, no houses nearby, no people.
The empty summer beach is probably most people’s idea of paradise—even when we understand that for it to be as enjoyable as we hope, there has to be someone around that can serve us a drink, open our umbrella, maybe play some music (and also, make the mosquitoes somehow vanish).
The image is one of perfection and frictionlessness, which is a concept I’ve been thinking about a lot after reading this article by Kyla Scanon in which she stressed that, while the digital world is constantly optimizing itself to become more frictionless, the physical world is full of friction, bar for a few exclusive, curated places where you can pay your way out of it.
And the paying of it is really a huge part of the point.
As Rodolphe Christin has written in his Manual Against Tourism, while travel used to be a transformative experience, our market economy has turned it into one more take-away and throw-away experience.
Travellers in the past—Christin writes—used to almost tip-toe to their destination—sure that any welcome they’d get was a gift. Not so the modern-day tourist, who thinks of themselves not like a visitor but a client. And as a client, how can you not feel somewhat entitled? Entitled to a special experience, to the best view, to that moment of awe and fun and relaxation, and excitement, but all of it in the perfect dose, in the amount that’s just enough to titillate you but not send your nervous system to the roof? Wish it was so quick to travel, but also so perfect, so effortless, so frictionless.
Because there’s the thing: frictionlessness is portrayed as desirable, as Kyla Scanon underlines. And as I once heard in a coaching class: “You and I can both be travelling to the same destination and be on the same plane, but if I’m in Business Class and you’re in Economy, our experience will be different” (What went unsaid: “My experience in Business Class will be better than yours”).
And listen, I’ve never flown in Business Class.
And even though I’m sure it’s delightful, the trips I best remember are not the ones in which my room was so luxurious and the trip so spotless that nothing remarkable happened. I remember, instead, the long journey, the tediousness of being on a bus for twelve hours, that forced me to look at the landscape and be alone with my thoughts. Or the time the bus broke down, and I had to hitch-hike a ride to the next one. Or that time the ferry was on strike, and to signal their discontent, the workers had it pivoting on itself half-way through its normal route.
But aside from what sticks, what is the point of hurrying to go—what’s the point of “Go before it’s too late”—if the going doesn’t touch you, if it doesn’t move you, if it doesn’t make you reevaluate anything? What’s the point if all you feel is a sort of sameness, and that voice within you whispering that what you’re experiencing isn’t much different from what you could have experienced had you just travelled to that place you know close to home?
Working as a tour guide in Norway during those summers of the Kilroy ad campaign, I felt, above all, lucky. Extremely lucky. My job involved me having a microphone—which was something I absolutely loved—and my role as the guide granted me from the get-go that authority status that everyone nowadays tells you it’s so important to convey. My summer job also paid well—well enough to grant me total economic independence (and no debt) since I was twenty years old—and it catapulted me day after day to jaw-dropping, often hard-to-reach places that the tourists only got to see from the bus, but that I had the pleasure to spend time in again and again… it was the sort of gig that involved sleeping little, but adventuring much, and I loved how I could never know if that day I’d end up on a train, a boat, barbecueing somewhere, or simply exhausted. It made me feel proud: like I knew more, I saw more than the tourists ever would.
But there was something else. A feeling of something amiss, of selling out, of shame. Because I knew I was painting a picture, and not the whole picture, just the shades of it the tourists would like. What I was showing on my tours was a storefront—and I was selling it.
It was what the cruiseship passengers had paid for: a version of Norway that could appeal to them, carefully curated to offer everyone a bit of everything—some history, some food, some landscape, some wildlife—but not what it really was about: mostly very long, very winding roads through mostly wild, silent places that were special precisely because, technically, they offered “nothing to see” (no landmarks, no history, no monument).
As a storefront, what I showed the tourists had to be constantly glowing, shiny: a showcase of pricy items and exclusive experiences, alongside some other object marketed as a “phenomenal deal.”
As Naomi Klein has written in Doppelgänger:
(…) the surface layers of markets that middle-class people in wealthy parts of the planet engage with directly—brightly lit grocery stores and gas stations, sleek websites and dull offices—are not the whole story of capitalism; they are its storefront. All of these operations require a level of extraction from their workers, shoppers, and users, but they also sit on top of more hidden parts of the supply chain, zones of hyper-exploitation, human containment, and ecosystem poisoning that are not glitches in the system but have always been integral parts of what makes our world run. For the purposes of this map, we can call them the Shadow Lands. They are the mangled and dense understory of our supposedly frictionless global economy. Decades of wringing out every possible efficiency means that each link in the chain—the mines and industrial farms where raw materials are extracted; the factories and slaughterhouses that turn those inputs into parts and finished products; the trains and ships that carry them across continents and oceans; the warehouses that sort and store them to be ready at the click of a cursor; the trucks and cars that deliver them when the click arrives; the mountains of waste and poisoned waterways where the detritus from each stage ends up; the glimmering playgrounds where the ultrarich enjoy their spoils—carries a distinct yet numbingly familiar story of depredation.
Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (pp. 236-237). (Function). Kindle Edition.
The cruiseship acted like a microcosm of the world Naomi Klein describes here, with the middle-class tourists lounging on the upper decks as workers from the Philippines powered the motor several levels below the waterline. And with me—as the tour guide—telling people what to expect, and where to buy the best souvenir, and where to sit to take the perfect picture, because that’s what all of them wanted: to bring the perfect, frictionless picture home. To show they had been, and how special it was, and how happy they felt before this Norwegian viewpoint that, before my eyes, morphed year after year into something it had originally not been: at first it was barely a curve on the street, by the end, a shiny white platform accommodating five buses at a time.
And that, ultimately, is the effect of the “Go Before it’s too late” narrative: our collective wanting to go, our collective need for new hits of dopamine, for the trending selfie, for that sense of specialness that comes from “having been” ends up causing the very things that the Kilroy ads portrayed as nightmarish: places deprived of their essence, of their uniqueness, of their soul.
Still, they look good on the picture, don’t they?