The Permanent Vacation

From Chris Christou

You can also read this essay at A Beautiful Resistance.

Tourism, foreignness,

is a virus many tourists suspect everyone but themselves of carrying.

- Rebecca Solnit, Book of Migrations‍‍

Among those of us on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, it’s only occasionally that we get away, that we vacation. If lucky or crafty or simply hard-working, we might receive a week or two abroad or simply “off.” The time-out in which work can give way to real rest or revelry. For those who can afford it, this usually means doing so elsewhere, abroad.

Others live to tour, an increasingly popular demographic of contemporary, escape artists (e.g. digital nomads, backpackers, and jet-setters). Whether among dropouts or those with deep pockets, such escapism is proof of “upward mobility,” the road to what we might call a permanent vacation.

A common understanding among such people is that tourism is something that happens out there, in foreign lands, in destinations. It doesn’t appear to touch the places they come from. For many, tourism is a one-way street. The middle and working class tourists of so-called wealthy countries travel toward the places of the so-called poor. Rarely, if ever, does it return to their doorstep. The tourist world is a foreign country, one that modern people often feel perfectly and paradoxically at home in - in places not their own.

And yet, despite the lack of theme parks, beach bars and sightseeing buses in the hometowns or cities of tourists, tourism has long been part of tourists’ own homes.

While it’s obvious that people arrive in foreign lands as foreigners, how do we suddenly show up as tourists? Do we magically don a sightseeing suit when we step off the plane? Does a ticket abroad include a how-to guide on entitlement and bad behaviour, overseas? When we return home, how do we really know that we've stopped being tourists? Maybe the real question is, have we ever taken that disguise off?

Almost 20 years ago, South Korean-born philosopher Byung-Chul Han published Hyperculture. In it, he wondered about the fate of culture in a globalized world. What happens when the modernist melting pot finally includes everyone? Will we see the end of culture or an oversaturated version of it? In the shadow of the changes to come, he asked, “should the new human being simply be called ‘tourist’?”

Perhaps, back then, the end of culture had already arrived. The new human-tourist cyborg was already afoot, decades ago, we simply didn’t have the eyes or distance to see it clearly. In the rearview mirror of our century, culture has been eclipsed by hyperconsumption and the result is a condition that is entirely touristic, transitory, and treasured. In the absence of culture, what’s borne into the world today is homo turista.

Back in the Day

When I was a child, my neighbourhood in East Toronto was full of working-class families more or less like mine. The kids would play in the streets and the parents would converse, often taking care of their neighbours’ kids when possible. Since then, the consequences of unregulated capitalism coupled with the unchecked freedom of mobility have undermined the neighbourhood. Those who sold their houses made bank on their investments, often in part because of how they were with their neighbours, slowly creating a desirable and maybe even honourable place for families to live in (and for others to want to live in).

In retrospect, their investments appear short-sighted, their sense of place desecrated the moment they cashed in. By selling their houses and leaving the neighbourhood, they sold off or at the very least gambled on the neighbourhood and neighbourliness, on everything that made that place worth living in, to begin with. They assumed, perhaps, that the community would continue to grow as a community without them, even as the community shrank as a result of their departure.

This is to say that there’s nothing about a bunch of people living in one place together that constitutes community. If it did, each of the places we live in would embody and regenerate a common unity that binds people to it. What if community isn’t the result of people conjuring village-mindedness together, but the act of doing so together? A verb, rather than a noun. The constant process of communing, as opposed to the static existence of a community.

Little by little, as each of the bricks in the bonehouse of the neighbourhood was removed, replaced or revalued, the neighbourhood lost a little more of what being a neighbour meant there. Over time, this proliferated. The bungalows turned into mansions, the kids no longer played outside, and the local church/community centre eventually disappeared. Every square foot of land was covered over and fenced by families to keep themselves inside, protected from the other and from the possibility of community. By inadvertently emptying the sidewalks and streets of humans, the presence of the humane followed suit, compromising and collapsing that which they coveted most.

The Needs of the Neighbourhood

This was the lesson that, for those in the neighbourhood I grew up in, arrived all too late: to be a neighbour you must neighbour. To be a neighbour, you must understand the function of neighbouring, how it emerges in a place, how it’s arisen in your life or why it hasn’t. If it is to be practised, it must be learned, and so it must be taught. A skill, but not one you can hone from a book or video tutorial; one that requires the lived presence of others.

To be a neighbour, to have a neighbourhood, you must be able to practise neighbouring. You must have the capacity to commune. If you can’t neighbour, the neighbourhood you claim to inhabit remains just as temporary in your eyes as it did in those who renovated and made good on what they believed to be nothing more than an investment.

This is the testament of a touristic world: your commitment to community exists insofar as the community exists to serve you, not the other way around. If the people you live near don’t coincide with your politics or perspective or if your investment has reached maturity or if the area gentrifies, you’re free to leave. Being able to come and go is freedom – from responsibility. The neighbourhood reveals itself not as a community, then, but as a destination, with the same “potential” as any other.

If that’s the case in the place you live and you’re only coming to this understanding now, it’s because the neighbourhood was never an investment. You were perhaps only convinced that the former could survive the characterization of the latter. For a community to thrive, it demands divestment – from hypermobility, alienation, individualism and speculation. It needs people to recognize community when it’s there and the signs and symptoms of it slipping away. Its resilience requires people to stay put, with entire generations born, living and dying there. A sense of inheritance and endurance. The neighbourhood needs to be woven anew by the people, lest those threads fray from the edges to the centre, lest the people in the neighbourhood are no longer recognizable as neighbours.

Tourism Comes Full Circle

Now, what do you imagine makes this dilemma any different from those of tourist destinations? They too were once neighbourhoods, perhaps as tightly-knit and taut as mine once was. In some places, they remain as such, despite and sometimes in spite of tourism. In most places, however, the neighbourhood is schizoid, its identity constantly converted into new forms of development, its homes turned into businesses. Any love affair between people and place becomes temporary and trivial, the latter as a kind of glorified drive-through for the former.

This is what tourism does. It imagines everything as disposable or at the very least replaceable. It corrodes culture and memory until there is no human relationship left to either of those things, until we reach a point where they are known only as things.

Tourism is not simply a thing that happens there, abroad, away, once a year, to people who don’t look or speak like you. Tourism happens there because it’s already happened here, at home.

In our time, home is no longer a place, no longer a skill, and no longer something contingent on your responsibility to it. Home has become a feeling, and tourism is what makes us feel “at home” in places and among people who have been contracted into single-serving, half-animate servants. Perhaps, in some manner, not unlike ourselves.

Tourism is a way of life that we are taught, both by not being at home and by not understanding ourselves as guests in our homes. It is a state of being perpetually elsewhere. Byung-Chul Han describes it as such:

“Being a tourist does not necessarily mean being physically on the move. Already at home, the hypercultural tourist is either somewhere else or on the go. It is not that we leave our houses as tourists in order to return later as natives. The hypercultural tourist is already a tourist when at home. Still here, he is already there. He never arrives at a final destination.”

Not long after Han wrote Hyperculture, social media and capitalist hypermobility became enthroned as the vehicles for a touristic state of mind. The former creates a virtual, One-World surveillance system that masquerades as a global village for global citizens, both everywhere and nowhere at once. Homeless and yet, paradoxically, with the feeling of being at home wherever one goes. Or maybe it’s something more akin to this: that we’ve become people squarely at home in our homelessness, feeling entitled to being everywhere.

Hypermobility, on the other hand, ensures (through both the fundamentalist freedom of mobility and the exilic, slave-like landlordism of late-stage collapse) that home is not only temporary but, for many people, impossible. To live in a single place, alongside more-than-human beings for whom your life incurs deep and lasting consequences, has become a privilege relegated to landowners, whose modus vivendi is typically to ignore that consequence. For the rest, tourism becomes the trickle-down consolation prize that pushes the prevailing winds of wanderlust and exile.

Consider the apartment you live in, or perhaps the many you’ve moved in and out of. Maybe you’re used to it. The forced movement. When was the last time you spoke to your neighbour? Do you know their names? Do you have any relationship with them beyond your inevitable proximity? What about the neighbours at the last place? Do you still talk to them? I ask this because not so long ago, I had to move about ten times in five years. The reason? Rising rent. Airbnb conversions. Predatory landlords. The costs of living in a touristic world.

For urban people of the renting class, this fugitivity becomes ever more petrified in our time. Say you move into a new place. Odds are, if a year from now the owner raises the rent, you’ll probably have to move. And what incentive then do you have to build long-term friendships with neighbours who probably don’t share your love for sushi or football or romance novels? The answer is, you don’t have one (and neither do they).

And so you mind your business and just try to enjoy the time you have there. But the reality is the same for almost everyone in the building. And the city. And the country even. Few of them have lived examples of what a rooted community looks like. Fewer still have the desire to build one, not to mention the time or energy. And so we stay satiated in our little shacks of silence and solitude, smiling occasionally and maybe asking to borrow a tool once in a while.

And that’s the extent of it, multiplied by the millions. We become tourists in our own homes, strangers at best to those closest to us. This is built into the economy, the history and the anti-culture. It gets glorified as an investment opportunity, this greed and fear that disables community. While this isn’t the whole story of how we became tourists, it is the spell cast to ensure that it stays this way.

What if? What now?

Our neighbourhoods have become transitory truck stops on the superhighway to personal progress or the permanent vacation. The majority of our relationships are transactional. Few, if any of our children will live in the houses or communities we grew up in. Most of us are tourists, and whether you agree with the allegation or not, we have become people who understand our place and home as inherently temporary, as a “base,” as an investment, or as a destination. “Upward mobility” unveils itself as the capitalist code for the uprooting of the pillars that wed people to place.

Most of the people we encounter at work, on the street, in shops and virtually, simply come and go. They appear most often as fleeting apparitions of social media profile pictures, avatars of online pseudo-anonymity. They, as tourists in our lives and we, as tourists in theirs.

This willingness to float above the surface of the real, to refuse roots and intimacy while glorifying the global is both the cause and the consequence of tourism, both as an industry and as a way of life. It is what makes us orphaned children and unwitting salespeople of culture’s disappearance, both at home and abroad.

Homo turista. Not as individuals, but as participants and purveyors of what Byung-Chul Han calls “hyperculture.” Think of it as a kind of language we were all taught but struggle immensely to wrap our tongues around. This is what it sounds like: you’re either a neighbour or you’re a tourist. But what if we could bend to the prevailing winds of the days without being blown over by them? What if we recognized this cultural poverty as our own and proceeded instead from there, from the place that most refuse to acknowledge?

Not assuming that your days will outpace the tourist juggernaut that has devoured the culture.

Not deafening yourself to what is needed of you in our time.

Not closing yourself off to the world at the expense of the world.

Understanding instead that being a neighbour requires apprenticing how we’ve become foreigners in our own homes, how modern lifestyles have sabotaged a sense and skill of community, and how each of these things might hold the key to teaching us what is required of us in our times and places.

Tourism is not just an industry. It is a worldview, a way of life that amplifies an already alarming affliction of being elsewhere, everywhere and, therefore, nowhere. It is the abandonment (and subsequent absence of) home, culture, and community. Everyone is a traveller, but whether by choice or force, whether at home or away, most modern people today are tourists, even in their own homes.

The antidote ahead is simple, but arduous. It’s something that both requires others and is made easier by their presence. It means neighbouring, and if that’s not possible, then creating the conditions under which it can be. We might begin by giving these considerations a seat at the table. We might lean into each other to learn what it takes to commune, together. Little by little, we might seed solidarity, create sanctuary and compost the fantasy of a permanent vacation.

End Notes:

Han, Byung-Chul. Hyperculture: Culture and Globalization. Polity Press. March 2022. Cambridge.

---

Chris Christou

Chris Christou is a cultural ecologist, storyteller, and writer. He is the founder of Oaxaca Profundo Learning Journeys and the host of The End of Tourism Podcast. A graduate scholar of the Orphan Wisdom School, Chris writes about the crucible of culture, from food to psychedelics, exile, media and myth. www.chrischristou.net