on verra bien

“Life is what we make of it.

Travel is the traveler.

What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.”

Pessoa

This is a chapter of sorts.

Neither beginning nor end.

When Aaron suggested we start a travel blog, we approached it from two points of view.

That of the interior traveller and the exterior one. Though I’ve often sought out new physical landscapes, it is the interior one that has recently held my interest.

The idea of transcribing an experience is one that harkens back to cave paintings. It has  even been argued that the idea of sharing or at least trying to communicate a felt experience is innate and necessary to the human condition. It is a way of feeling less alone. A way of better understanding an experience and a way of substantiating that something has indeed been felt, heard and, hopefully, understood.

However, it seems that the actual act of ‘storytelling’ is in the midst of a crisis. Applications on both phones and websites have seemingly forced the general population to assume the mantle of storyteller. What was once revered is now familiar. What does it mean? The widespread accessibility of these apps now provide humans with the means of communicating sensations and opinions without ever needing to assess or even determine whether or not it is of any value.Though these apps allow their users to wield, control and even subvert conventional storytelling techniques, enabling these contemporary storytellers to record, loop, mute, freeze, slow down and speed up their lives, the question is, to what purpose? Does it all need to be shared and why is it being transformed?

 

While these apps have successfully brought about the possibility of a more vivid, immediate distribution of experience, they have, without a doubt, also brought about a definite change in the human understanding of awe and wonder. It seems that  the constant documentation of all things for the purpose of sharing, bragging or relieving has been conventionalized and, consequently, trivialized.

Apps and the internet forcibly impose on us the idea that we are never alone. The twenty-four hour clock is proudly put on display as the human population is online and active, always. No matter the time or place, someone, somewhere is actively scrolling, sliding or trolling, ever eager to comment, share, or subscribe. However, as all experiences are being shared, how is one to figure a life as unique? Apps are/were that answer as the moment itself can, and now seemingly must, be transformed, altered or filtered. The essence must be conveyed rather than captured. The truth now dissolved amongst a filter of pixelated smog.

What was trivial can now be made grand and vice versa. Gone are the explorers of times past as all beings now shine their phones onto their surroundings so that those living in darkness, can now see the light of another’s pre-visited path…

This process has been an efficient one and its effects far reaching. Constantly entertained and yet constantly bored. Our lives, in surplus, become normalized, trivialized and ultimately forgotten. But there is an answer.

Travel. Or at least it is being marketed that way.

Travel was once anti-authoritarian or at the very least ‘Beat’. Kerouac. Burroughs. Ginsberg. Carr. These new prophets showed an entire generation that “Travelling” was synonymous with the development of self.  Not only will it set you free, it will set you apart. Once accumulated, it is an exchangeable good but something that can also never be taken from you. It is experience in its truest, most honest form as worldly experience cannot be taught in schools or understood from a screen. Only is it really? It seems travel is undergoing an ongoing transformation and its very bones are being commodified, but where does that leave us?