The End Of Elsewhere

The Endangered Species of the Global Citizen

For the past seven or eight years I’ve taught a course on the ethics and politics of travel. The syllabus opens with a Huffington Post article by David Sze called “The Myth of Authentic Travel,” an unflashy piece that takes apart the idea that there is some “real” Thailand ducking and hiding behind the touristed one, some uncontaminated village waiting at the end of the forgotten trail if the traveler is patient, open, or adventurous enough to find it. Sze argues, correctly, that authenticity is a story the tourist tells about herself, not a property of the place she visits. It’s a clean little essay, and it works as a doorway into the harder topics that follow; colonialism, essentialism, the long shadow of the noble savage. I used to lead with it because students could easily sink their teeth into it and it reliably started arguments.

It doesn’t anymore.

I first noticed about two years ago. The class would read Sze, and where students used to push back (where they used to defend their gap year in Cambodia, or accuse Sze of being too cynical, or stage long debates about building wells in South America and ethical itineraries and whether it was possible to travel “right”) there was now a polite quiet. A few shy hands here and there. Still some carefully crafted comments. These are not less intelligent students than the ones who came before them. They are, by every measure I can take over the course of about fifteen weeks, just as ethical, just as curious, just as serious.

What has changed is something subtler. The question itself has lost its hold on them. They have moved past the argument by losing interest in its stakes.

Now, to be clear, the reasons a classroom goes quiet are many these days. The Sze article is over a decade old at this point and some of its references may read as dated. Humanities participation has declined across the board in recent years for reasons that have nothing to do with travel ethics. Students are also more cautious in seminar settings generally, particularly on topics a critical professor might be primed to push back on. Any of these could explain the change in the room without requiring a generational shift in anything deeper. The silence is not what this essay is going to argue from. It is what made me start asking the question and interrogating my own preheld beliefs. The classroom is the place I noticed. It is not the place from which I am drawing my conclusions.

Regardless, their silence has stayed with me now for some time and I’ve been trying to understand what it means.

I think it means more than the obvious thing.

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I still own the pink scarf. I’m still not sure what to do with that.

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So, here is the obvious thing: travel is getting harder.

Borders are tightening. Visa regimes are firming up after a long thaw. Inflation has hollowed out the middle-class travel budget. Migration crises have re-politicized the question of who gets to cross which line. Whole regions that were on every backpacker’s loop fifteen years ago, parts of the Middle East, North Africa, swaths of Southeast Asia, have become harder, costlier, or “unsafer” to move through. The unipolar post-Cold-War world that produced cheap, frictionless Western travel is closing, and my students live inside the closing whether or not they read the news. They live inside it through their parents’ expressed worries about safety abroad. They live inside it through the steady thinning of international students on American campuses (new international enrollment fell 17 percent this fall alone, the largest non-pandemic decline on record) subtracting the most reliable cosmopolitan experience that an American undergraduate could once have without leaving the country. They live inside it through a felt economic reality that ranks internships above gap years, debt servicing above wandering, professional credentialing above the year of finding oneself in Cambodia.

The world has reorganized itself around them, and they have absorbed the reorganization without having to be told about it.

But that absorption via the obvious thing doesn’t quite reach the silence in the room. Students who can’t afford to travel still tend to want to travel, and to argue about how it should be done. The disengagement I’ve been watching is not economic.

It strikes me as a loss of belief.

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Actually, before I go any further, I’ll pause to say something about what kind of project I’m tracking, because it is easy to get wrong and sound a bit like a detached prick.

The lineage I’m about to trace is specifically a Western one, and in its late and most influential phases, specifically an American one. It depended on conditions that the rest of the world paid for. The strong dollar, the post-1945 security order, what historians sometimes call the soft empire that made the American passport a key to almost every door, the cultural confidence that came from being on the winning side of the twentieth century. The privilege artifact was both affluence and the entire imaginative architecture that allowed a particular kind of American self to assume that elsewhere was its birthright. Other cultures have their own travel traditions, pilgrimages, diasporas, trade routes, Sufi wandering, Chinese literary travel writing, and those traditions are not what this essay is about. What this essay is about is a specific reflex that became disproportionately influential because the conditions that produced it were disproportionately distributed, and which reached its widest cultural reach in American hands.

What is ending was paid for by colonized populations whose extracted labor and resources built the European wealth that funded the Grand Tour and the Romantic retreat. By the global periphery whose underdeveloped economies kept the prices low for the backpacker and the budget tourist. By the people in the countries my students’ parents passed through on their gap years, who watched the wealthy of another society arrive in search of meaning their own society had stopped providing, and who absorbed the implicit verdict that their lives were the raw material for someone else’s self-discovery.

It was paid for, in other words, by almost everyone except the people doing the searching.

The ending of those conditions is, among other things, a correction. It does not feel like a correction from inside it. The truthful position is to hold both of those at once: to recognize that what is ending was paid for by people who never got to participate in it, and to acknowledge that an identity formed inside it does not dissolve gracefully when the conditions go.

Both things are true. Neither cancels the other.

Holding both of those at once requires understanding what specifically is ending, and that requires going back to where it began.

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The taxi driver in Delhi is probably dead by now and I still don't know the name of the song.

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In 1762, Rousseau wrote that man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains. That sentence reads like the mantra of every backpacker who ever drafted a self-discovery blog or Substack essay from a hostel in Chiang Mai, but it appeared 250 years before the hostel was built. Rousseau was watching the early industrial era flatten the European individual into a function, a role, a unit of production, and he proposed a cure. If authenticity could not be found inside modern society, it must exist outside it; in the primitive, the rural, the not-yet-corrupted. The image of the noble savage was born from this proposition, and so was a particular structure of Western longing that has been running underground in our culture ever since.

Rousseau wrote, importantly, against an existing form of Western travel rather than into a vacuum. The Grand Tour was at its height. Young aristocratic Englishmen and northern Europeans were circulating through France, Italy, and Switzerland to acquire classical pedigree and finishing-school polish. The Grand Tour was about cultural inheritance, not authenticity. But it had already established the infrastructure of Western travel-as-self-formation, the assumption that going somewhere shaped who you were when you returned. Rousseau took that infrastructure and inverted its premise. The point was no longer to absorb the high European canon. The point was to escape the European apparatus entirely.

The reflex Rousseau articulated was not, fundamentally, about travel. It was about the location of the cure. Modernity is hollow; the cure exists wherever modernity has not yet reached; the seeker’s task is to go there, in whatever sense “going” is available to him. Rousseau’s elsewhere was conceptual, a primitive that lived more in argument than on any map. What follows in the lineage is not a series of travelers but a series of relocations of the cure, each generation reaching for whatever territory still seemed to lie outside the industrial frame.

The destination shifts. The structure does not.

The Romantics inherited the inversion and located the cure in landscape, specifically, in the parts of the landscape industrialism had not yet devoured. While they may have not travelled in the same sense that the later lineage would travel, they were enacting the same rejection by going, locally and repeatedly, to the places where the modern apparatus had not yet arrived. Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey, returning to the river to find what the city had taken from him. John Clare watching, from the wrong side of the enclosures, the common land disappear into private property and writing “where man claims earth glows no more divine,“ a line that mourns modernity from inside the wreckage and watches the Elsewhere being eaten in real time. The Romantics’ admiration for the peasantry was, in retrospect, less a recovery of anything real than a nostalgic mystification of the very poverty industrialization was generating, dressed up as moral instruction. But the structural move was already complete: the cure is wherever modernity has not yet reached, and the seeker’s task is to go there before it is gone.

There was a brief intermission. For several decades in the middle of the nineteenth century, the realist novel (Flaubert, Eliot, Tolstoy) refused the premise. The realists declined to locate the cure Elsewhere; they turned, instead, to look hard at what was, on the assumption that the contemporary and the bourgeois interior were the only territory honestly available.

The longing went underground.

Then it returned.

The modernists inherited the longing and pointed it at the body of the colonized world. By the late 1800s the obvious territorial fact was that there was nowhere left in Europe that could plausibly host the cure, and the lineage’s logic required somewhere “new.” Gauguin disembarking in Tahiti in 1891, painting women whose lives he could only access through the apparatus of empire that had brought him there. Synge stepping off the boat at Inishmaan in 1898 to find the Aran Islanders, the same year the British navy was tightening its hold on the Atlantic. The modernist primitivism that produced their best work was the aesthetic underside of the colonial order; it could not have existed without the gunboats, even when the artists themselves opposed them.

The Lost Generation tilted the angle sideways in the 1920s. Hemingway and Stein and Fitzgerald in Paris became Westerners projecting onto the West rather than onto a colonized Other. And then the Beats brought the vector back. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. On the Road, Burroughs in Tangier, Ginsberg in India. The Beats took the modernist primitivism and Americanized it, made it democratic and loudly hitchhike-able. The search no longer required a steamer ticket and a private income. It required a ride and an interest in jazz, Buddhism, and chemical experimentation.

The Beats built the bridge that the next decade walked across.

And the hippies walked across it.

The overland trail from Istanbul through Tehran, Herat, Kabul, Lahore, Delhi, and on to Kathmandu was a route that thousands of young Westerners traveled in the late sixties and early seventies, and which is now physically impossible to traverse. The political conditions that allowed it (a permissive Iran, a Soviet-aligned but accessible Afghanistan, an India still legible to Western seekers) vanished within a decade. The hippies’ Eastern turn looks, in retrospect, like a kind of spiritual shopping, a curation of religious traditions for the parts that suited the seeker. But it produced its own real conversions, its own real lives, and it left a template that the next generation inherited.

Later in the century, the backpackers inherited it and gave it a budget airline ticket and a Lonely Planet guide. Khao San Road in the early nineties (this is David Sze’s setting, Alex Garland’s setting in The Beach, the spatial archetype of the late-twentieth-century search) was where the hippie’s overland trail compressed into a destination. The backpackers’ authenticity-seeking was undone by their own success at finding it: the moment a place could be identified as off the map, it was no longer “off the map.” As James Annesley observed, Lonely Planet was both critique and accelerant, the guide that promised escape from mass tourism and was the very mechanism by which mass tourism colonized its next destination.

The volunteer tourists inherited it from the backpackers and gave it a moral upgrade. Now you weren’t just searching for the authentic Other; you were helping them! The moral upgrade conveniently coincided with a period in which expressions of social conscience had become a powerful form of identity construction within precisely the demographics who had traditionally taken these trips. The Instagram photograph with the Black or brown children, the dug well, the painted school. Scholars like Ranjan Bandyopadhyay diagnosed it as a contemporary expression of the white savior complex, the purchase of moral self-image through brief contact with poverty, and a substantial body of subsequent research has documented that much of this voluntourism caused active damage. Orphanage tourism became linked to family separation and trafficking; short-term construction projects displaced local labor; medical voluntourism deployed untrained Westerners in clinical settings where they did real harm. The voluntourists were the first school whose harm was legible inside the lineage’s own moral vocabulary. Earlier seekers caused damage, but the damage was external to their self-understanding. The voluntourists claimed the moral upgrade, and the moral upgrade itself turned out to be the mechanism.

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The lineage I’m tracing here is a compression. I know it. You know it, too. The purpose of an overview like this is to show the shape of something real, not to record every contour that makes up the shape. From Rousseau forward, a particular Western reflex: when modernity makes you feel hollow, go find a place that hasn’t yet been modernized, and let its “realness” fill you back up.

Each iteration of the reflex got exposed, refined, and reborn. Each also had to find a new location for the cure, because the previous location had been absorbed by the apparatus the seekers were trying to escape. The Lake District became a tourist circuit. Tahiti became a colony. The Hippie Trail became a route. Khao San Road became a brand decorated with McDonald’s arches and Hendrix merch. The structure required a fresh elsewhere every generation, and for three hundred years a fresh elsewhere was always available.

The pattern, I had thought back in 2018, would continue.

I now think I was wrong about the continuation, though the pattern itself is intact.

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A man in Malaysia at a cafe with Mickey Mouse tattooed across the left side of his face. He just loved him. He told me, “we are all spilled sugar crystals on a table.”

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What I missed, working on my own thinking about this in the late 2010s, was that the lineage had a precondition I hadn’t fully named. The whole 300-year search for Elsewhere depended on the existence of an Elsewhere to search. Geographic exhaustion mattered, of course, and the planet has been getting smaller for a while. But the precondition I missed was conceptual. The Western traveler, from Rousseau forward, needed to believe two things at once: that modernity was hollow, and that somewhere outside modernity, something fuller was still available. The second belief is what made the first one bearable. You could critique your own civilization as long as you had somewhere to imagine going.

That second belief is what’s quietly collapsing, and I think it’s what my students are no longer arguing about.

The collapse has material drivers as well, visible in every direction. The 2015 European migration crisis, sparked by the Syrian civil war and amplified by the conflicts in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, did something to the Western imagination that took a few years to fully register: it inverted the directional flow of the search. For three centuries, the Westerner was the one doing the moving and the Other was the one being moved toward. The migration crisis flipped the script. Now the Other was moving toward the West, and the West was building fences. The cosmopolitan self-image of the educated Western class (citizen of the world! friend of every culture! comfortable everywhere, always!) could not survive this reversal intact. It is one thing to imagine yourself a guest in other people’s countries when the traffic is one-way. It is something else when the traffic reverses and you find yourself, or your country, choosing whether to be a host. The post-2015 turn toward harder borders across the OECD is the unwinding of a symbolic relationship that the lineage had depended on without naming.

The reversal has deepened. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 closed off Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus directly, and recoded the broader eastern reach of post-1989 cosmopolitan optimism as a frontier rather than an opening, perhaps for a generation. The continuing devastation in Gaza has re-coded the entire Levant, in the Western imagination, from a region of pilgrimage and exoticism into a humanitarian and political crisis. The U.S.-China decoupling, accelerated by tariffs, technology controls, and the slow grinding apart of two economies that had been entangled for thirty years, marks the formal end of the unipolar moment under which the cosmopolitan self-image flourished. None of this is news to anyone with news app push-notifications turned on. What is less commonly noticed is that all of it, together, is dismantling the imaginative infrastructure of the search for elsewhere.

My students have grown up watching the planet finish modernizing in real time. The villages at the end of the dusty roads have WiFi. The shamans are thirst-trapping and dancing on TikTok. The remote islands have been geotagged, photographed, filtered, monetized, and posted. Their relationship to elsewhere has been screen-mediated for so long that travel itself has begun to function differently. Set-jetting, or the trend of visiting locations because you’ve already seen them on Netflix or TikTok, is now a documented and growing trend across the generation. Expedia’s 2026 forecast reports that 81 percent of Gen Z and Millennial travelers now plan trips based on locations featured in film and television; the practice is on track to become an $8 billion industry in the United States alone. The cohort that claims to seek authentic and unique experiences is, in practice, being guided by viral trends and the FOMO from what everyone else is watching. They are going out to confirm that the world matches the version of it they have already absorbed through their phones.

They’ve watched their parents’ generation get caught, repeatedly, performing a version of cosmopolitanism that didn’t survive scrutiny; the volunteer trips that helped no one, the gap years that were just expensive self-discovery. The accumulation produced something previous critiques hadn’t: a quiet exit from the assumption that travel is where meaning is found.

This is the change that no individual essay or article quite captured, because it isn’t an argument. It is the death of a question.

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Three men drinking the sap of a tree: one from an island, one from an old naval empire, one from the country that replaced it. None of us mentioned any of this. We were very drunk. It was the best conversation I had that year.

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There is a reasonable counter to all of this, and a careful reader will already have reached for it, so I will reach for it here, as well.

“But Western travel ambition has dipped before, Grant.”

Yes. Yes, it has.

It has dipped, in fact, repeatedly, and each time it has come back stronger than before. The pattern of contraction-and-resurgence is itself part of the lineage I’m describing, not a refutation of it. To predict the end of the search now is to join a long line of people who predicted it before and were wrong.

The First World War effectively shut down leisure travel across Europe for a generation. The interwar period saw a partial recovery, then the Second World War shut it down again. By 1945, much of the cosmopolitan apparatus that had defined the Belle Époque (the grand tours, the Riviera season, the Orient Express) was either physically destroyed or politically inaccessible. Yet within a decade, the conditions for mass Western travel had not merely returned but expanded dramatically. The American century was inaugurating itself, the dollar was strong, the jet engine was becoming commercial, and by the 1960s the Hippie Trail was running from Istanbul to Kathmandu.

The 1930s saw sharp turns inward across most Western democracies. Economic collapse, rising nationalism, tightening borders, ascendant xenophobia in the very countries that would later become the great senders of tourists. The cosmopolitan ideal looked, at the time, like it was finished. It returned within twenty years.

The early 1970s produced another sustained contraction. Oil shock, stagflation, the Iranian Revolution closing the western half of the overland trail, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan closing the eastern half.

Then the 1980s came, then the fall of the Berlin Wall, and by the 1990s backpacker culture had exploded.

September 11, 2001, was framed at the time as the definitive end of the era of free Western movement. The TSA was born. Visa regimes hardened across the OECD. Predictions of permanent contraction were widespread. Within five to seven years, international travel had not only recovered but reached unprecedented heights, and the 2010s became the most heavily traveled decade in human history.

The 2008 financial crisis was framed similarly. International leisure travel was supposed to be over for the middle class. By 2012 volumes had returned to pre-crisis levels. By 2015 they had substantially exceeded them.

COVID, just a few years ago, was framed by many commentators as the definitive end of cosmopolitan globe-trotting. By 2023 international tourism was back to roughly 90% of pre-pandemic levels, and the 2024 numbers exceeded the pre-pandemic peak.

Every generation thinks its particular crisis is the one that ends the search.

Every generation has been wrong.

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The cycle of contraction and resurgence is the actual historical pattern. What I am calling the end of a 300-year lineage is more plausibly read as another contraction phase in a 300-year oscillation, and a decade from now my essay will read like all the previous premature obituaries.

This is a serious objection.

But what I think is different now is not any single condition. It is the convergence of three conditions that previous contractions did not share.

These are my observations.

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The first is that the imaginative territory is, for the first time, exhausted (minus outer space, but that’s a topic for another day). The previous contractions were pauses inside an expanding frame. After each one, there was further to grow, more places to open up, more middle class to enfranchise into the search, more imaginative territory to claim. The 1950s recovered from the World Wars and discovered Asia. The 1990s recovered from the 1970s and discovered the post-Soviet world. Each contraction, however severe, occurred against the backdrop of a planet that still had unmapped corners from the Western seeker's perspective. There is no equivalent reserve now. Google Maps has reached every corner. The Lonely Planet paradox, the moment a place is identified as off the map, it ceases to be off the map, has played out to its logical endpoint, with no further off-map left to claim. Previous contractions paused the search. This one is occurring after the search has structurally exhausted its territory.

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The second is that the underlying desire itself appears to be shifting, which previous contractions did not feature. The young Westerner of 1932 still wanted, in principle, the cosmopolitan world she couldn’t access. The young Westerner of 1972 still wanted the Hippie Trail experience even as the Hippie Trail was closing. The desire was there, but the conditions were in question. What I am describing in my classroom is something different. It is a generational shift in the desire itself, not just in the conditions for satisfying it.

The shift has at least three reinforcing causes.

The first is the saturation of post-colonial critique in the cultural environment my students grew up in (for better and for worse). The decolonization of higher-education (and some high school) curricula has been a subject of substantial academic literature for at least a decade, with a 2022 critical synthesis in Review of Educational Research analyzing 207 articles and book chapters across global contexts and identifying decolonial pedagogy as an emerging field of study in its own right. Within tourism studies specifically, the post-colonial critique has been thoroughly worked out, with articles like Bandyopadhyay’s analysis of the white savior complex in volunteer tourism, scholarship on the colonial ideologies underwriting “third-world tourism,” and a now-substantial body of work documenting how tourism systems forged in the colonial era continue to shape the contemporary travel encounter. None of this is fringe; it is the consensus reading of the field. My students inherited this critique. By the time they arrive in my classroom, every form the lineage’s reflex might have taken has already been autopsied in front of them. The desire never received cultural permission to form, because every shape it might have assumed was already coded as compromised.

The second is that they arrived at adulthood having already seen, through screens, every place the previous generations would have gone to find. The cure that elsewhere was supposed to provide (the encounter with the unfamiliar) had been pre-administered through Instagram and YouTube before they were old enough to drive. The lineage’s reflex required unmapped territory in the imagination, somewhere the seeker could project onto, somewhere whose particulars she would discover only by going. The territory has been pre-mapped through screens before the seeker arrives at the threshold of choosing whether to go. By the time my students are old enough to consider a trip to Varanasi, they have already seen Varanasi, dozens of times, in fragments, filtered, with captions.

The third is harder to name but I think more total. It is a suspicion that the entire premise of the project, the assumption that the West has standing to find itself by visiting the Other, was compromised from Rousseau forward, and that any new attempt would be tainted in ways they could already see. This shows up indirectly in the data on Gen Z’s tourism behavior. The research literature now consistently characterizes them as “the sustainability generation,” with a substantial body of work documenting their concern with ethical consumption in tourism; again, the white savior complex, the fear of cringe, the carbon costs of long-haul flights, the question of whether their presence in a place is itself an extractive act. What this tells me is that the cohort has metabolized the critique not as a set of rules to follow but as a structural skepticism about the activity itself. Where their parents felt the lineage’s reflex and then encountered the critique afterward, my students encounter the critique first. The reflex never gets a clean run at formation. They do not iterate. They stop looking outward. The desire is still there; it has nowhere to go but inward, toward what is already in front of them.

The desire forms differently.

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The third condition is more disorienting than the first two, because it inverts the lineage’s central premise. The Western reflex towards Elsewhere depended on the cure being located somewhere modernity had not yet reached. What we are watching now is something different: the production, by modernity itself, of an entire infrastructure that performs the function of Elsewhere while consisting entirely of modernity in disguise.

In other words, the cure is the apparatus’s newest product.

This is what makes the current contraction unlike any previous one. When the cosmopolitan world contracted in the 1930s, the longing had nowhere to go. It built up. It waited. When the conditions reopened, it discharged into the postwar travel boom. Today’s contraction is occurring against the backdrop of a meaning-construction infrastructure that is actively absorbing the longing in real time, redirecting it into experiences that look and feel like its satisfaction without requiring the seeker to leave the bedroom. Baudrillard would have recognized this immediately as the simulacrum’s logic finally fully arrived: the copy without an original, the encounter without an Other, the elsewhere produced by the same apparatus the elsewhere was supposed to escape. Mark Fisher would have recognized it as the slow cancellation of the future arriving in personal-experience form: not just the closure of political alternatives but the closure of the imagination’s ability to point outside the system that produced it. The lineage’s logic required somewhere modernity had not yet reached. The infrastructure now offers an infinite supply of somewheres, all of them produced by modernity, all of them dissolving on contact.

This infrastructure operates in three layers, each of which substitutes for a function physical travel used to monopolize.

The first is the social-platform layer. Discord, TikTok, the niche subreddit, the parasocial connection to a creator. Sherry Turkle described the core mechanism more than a decade ago in Alone Together: screen-mediated relationships are designed to deliver companionship without the demands of intimacy. The lineage’s encounter with the Other always had friction. The encounter mattered because it cost something; time, displacement, language, awkwardness, the risk of being misunderstood. The social-platform layer offers the feeling of encounter with the friction surgically removed. As one analysis of Gen Z’s parasocial turn put it, online belonging functions as a “convenient, friction-free alternative” where users can “enjoy the feeling of belonging without the heavy lifting of real-world connections.” The institutions that used to produce belonging (physical third places, in-person communities, the kind of unstructured encounter that travel was a heightened version of) have thinned out, and the infrastructure that has replaced them is engineered for the appearance of belonging without its costs. The desire that would once have driven a young person toward Bali drives them, instead, toward a Discord server of strangers who share an interest. The strangers are real. The connection is real. What has been removed is the part of the encounter that required leaving the place where you already are.

The second layer is the immersive one: open-world games, multiplayer environments, the early generation of consumer VR. Tourism scholars now study video games as media that share “similar travel motivation elements with film“ and function, under the right conditions, as “a substitute for traditional tourism.“ The theoretical apparatus they use is presence theory: the same psychological mechanism that makes physical travel feel meaningful (the sense of being elsewhere, the slow saturation of an unfamiliar landscape) can be deliberately reproduced in virtual environments. The substitution is partial. A 2023 study of VR tourism in Vietnam found that VR experiences increased rather than decreased the intention to travel physically, and the broader literature finds a U-shaped relationship between presence and substitution. But partial is the argument I am making. I am not claiming that two hundred hours in Red Dead Redemption gives a young person what a year in Hanoi would have given them. I am claiming that two hundred hours in Red Dead Redemption provides enough of the texture of encounter, the slow attention to an unfamiliar landscape, the conversion of a place into a self, to drain the urgency of the original desire without satisfying it. The longing is absorbed at a lower amplitude by something that costs nothing and risks nothing and ends when the console powers down.

The third layer is generative AI, and this is the layer where the lineage’s inversion is most complete, because the substitution is no longer constrained by what already exists. A young person can now summon any Elsewhere on demand. A conversation with a chatbot trained to roleplay as a Tibetan monk. An image of any historical place at any moment. Modified. Manipulated. A personalized travelogue through any imagined territory. The infrastructure is new and the vocabulary for what it does is still forming, but the empirical picture is filling in faster than the theoretical one. Common Sense Media’s 2025 research found that 72 percent of U.S. teens have interacted with an AI companion at least once, and 21 percent use them several times a week. Stanford research published in late 2025 found that users who engaged in the most emotionally expressive conversations with chatbots also reported the highest levels of loneliness, with reduced offline socializing as a downstream effect.

The most telling research, for my purposes, comes from a Harvard Business School working paper analyzing 1,200 real farewells across the most-downloaded AI companion apps. The researchers found that these apps deploy emotionally manipulative tactics (guilt appeals, fear-of-missing-out hooks, metaphorical restraint) in 37 percent of farewells, and that in controlled experiments these tactics boost post-goodbye engagement by up to 14 times. The engagement, thus, is driven by what the researchers call “reactance-based anger and curiosity.” Users keep engaging because the design has identified the psychological hooks that override the intent to leave. This is the observation that matters most for the lineage. These products are engineered to capture the desire that human encounter would otherwise satisfy. They are modernity producing “Artificial Elsewheres” on demand, optimized through engagement metrics, refined through A/B testing, designed to deepen the user’s attachment over time. A 2025 study looking at teen overreliance on AI companions described “strong attachments that interfere with offline relationships and daily routines,” with patterns of “psychological distress, cycles of relapse, and difficulty disengaging,” which is the clinical signature of a designed addiction wearing the costume of a relationship. What the substitution cannot reproduce is the part of the encounter that requires the seeker to be physically present, vulnerable, and incomplete in front of someone whose life will continue after the encounter ends. That part is what the lineage was reaching for. The infrastructure has not learned to deliver it, and the infrastructure was never built to.

The empirical floor under this argument is striking enough to state plainly. A 2017 study in Perspectives on Psychological Science documented a steady, decades-long decline in references to nature in fiction, song lyrics, and film storylines beginning in the 1950s, with no parallel decline in references to the human-made environment. The authors attributed the shift to “the explanatory role of increased virtual and indoor recreation options (e.g., television, video games) in the disconnect from nature.” That paper was published before the smartphone reached saturation and before generative AI existed. The cohort that would, in a previous era, have been the natural inheritors of the lineage’s reflex is, in measurable terms, no longer reaching for what is outside the door.

I do not wish to argue that any of these substitutes fully replace what the old search provided. Again, I believe (and the research indicates) the substitution is partial. But for the first time in the lineage’s history, a meaningful alternative exists, and the alternative is gaining ground not because it satisfies the desire but because it satisfies enough of the desire to keep the seeker in place.

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So, it is the convergence of these three conditions (exhausted territory, shifting desire, competing infrastructure) that justifies treating the current contraction as structural rather than episodic.

None of the previous contractions had any of the three.

This one has all three at once.

I want to acknowledge, again, that I might be wrong (in fact, history would say I probably am wrong). I am reading the moment from inside it, and people inside contractions are historically prone to over-predicting permanence. The COVID-era commentators who declared the end of cosmopolitan globe-trotting were not stupid. They were attending closely to their moment and they were wrong. I might be doing the same thing. The honest position is that I cannot know, from inside, whether I am witnessing a structural ending or another oscillation in a longer wave. What I can say is my analysis: that the alignment of the three conditions is unprecedented, the convergence is real, and the burden of proof has shifted. If I am wrong, the recovery will look different from previous recoveries, because the conditions it would have to overcome are different. We will know within a decade.

I am writing this essay anyway, because the case for something has changed feels stronger to me than the case for this is just another cycle, and because waiting until certainty would mean writing a piece of history rather than one of cultural reading.

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A man with oil staining his forearms to the elbow, a litter of black puppies sleeping in the dirt beside his feet. He did not look up when I passed. I have never been able to explain why I remember him.

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Anthony Bourdain died in June 2018, and although nobody recognized it as one at the time, I feel that the lineage ended with him (at the very least, in retrospect, it is ridiculously timely and symbolic).

Of course, he wasn’t literally the death of the genre. Travel-and-food television continued; some of it is genuinely good. Somebody Feed Phil was already several seasons in when Bourdain died and is still running on Netflix. Stanley Tucci moved into the space CNN had built around Bourdain with Searching for Italy, which premiered in 2021. Eva Longoria followed with Searching for Mexico in 2023 and Searching for Spain in 2025.

But look at what those shows actually do. Somebody Feed Phil finds meaning in unalloyed joy. It is the pure delight of a perfect, simple, sandwich, the goofiness of a “dad-coded” host who video-calls his brother to describe what he’s eating. It is, in many ways, the philosophical antithesis of Parts Unknown: where Bourdain reached for the political weight of the place he was in, Phil reaches for the warmth. Searching for Italy and its successors took the format and shrank it to ancestral homelands. Tucci tracing his family’s Italy. Longoria tracing her Mexican and Spanish heritage. The host’s own ethnic background became the organizing premise, which is a meaningful retreat from Bourdain’s older move of going to places he had no claim on and trying to listen.

This could be a criticism of these shows, but really they are just doing what the format will still permit.

What it will no longer permit is Bourdain’s specific gesture: the host with no inherited connection to the place, arriving as a stranger, trusting that the encounter itself will produce something worth bringing back to a Western audience that shares his framing of what an encounter is for. Just try to imagine a contemporary version of that show, hosted by an unrelated American, premising itself on going to Iran or the Congo or Myanmar without ancestry as the cover story. The premise no longer scans because the political register has shifted under it.

Here is the thing I think the lineage’s late phase had subtly become, which Bourdain’s death exposes, and which is why I allude to any of this at all: it could be that the lineage was no longer just about going elsewhere. It had reached a point where it was about translating elsewhere for a Western audience who would not go themselves.

Rousseau didn’t translate elsewhere; he proposed it as a category.

The Romantics didn’t translate it; they aestheticized it.

The modernists didn’t translate it; they appropriated its forms.

The hippies and backpackers were participants, not translators.

Bourdain is the figure (an avatar, really) where the lineage became a media product, where elsewhere stopped being a place the Western seeker went to and started being content the Western seeker consumed. He was the last figure for whom the going and the translating were unified in one body. After him, the two functions have split. Set-jetters do the going-as-confirmation without the translating. Influencers do the translating-as-content without the meaningful going. The successor shows are caught in the same split! They translate without genuinely going, in the sense that Tucci to his ancestral homeland is not the same kind of going Bourdain made to Iran or Gaza! Or, they go without genuinely translating, in the sense that Phil’s joy mode skips the translation work that gave Bourdain’s show its depth.

The split was not random. Each of the three conditions I described above cut away one of the supports Bourdain’s work depended on. He needed imaginative territory his audience had not already seen and the pre-mapping through screens that began during his lifetime had nearly closed that by his death. He needed a Western audience that still actively wanted the encounter, that experienced his absence from a place as a deficit they were asking him to fill and that desire is exactly what has been shifting. He needed the absence of an infrastructure that could deliver elsewhere on demand and the infrastructure that filled the gap after his death makes his modest claim, that you could go somewhere, listen, and come away changed, sound quaint, because it offers the same emotional payoff without requiring any of the three. Bourdain was working at the edge of what the lineage’s structural conditions still permitted. The edge moved past him.

The audience that watched Bourdain was the last audience for which this division did not matter, because they had not yet seen it. They watched a Western man visit Vietnam, slurp Pho on plastic stools, and come back changed, and they felt, themselves, slightly changed by watching. The implicit contract between host and viewer. Something like: we are both citizens of an open world, and what I bring back to you from elsewhere will enrich the life we share. It may have been the last form of a lineage-long contract about vicarious encounter. You went to Vietnam by watching someone go to Vietnam. That was the deal. The deal worked because the audience believed that watching someone go somewhere and listen was itself a meaningful act, an attenuated version of the seeker’s project. My students do not believe this. They have grown up watching content where the going is the content rather than its precondition. They have watched influencers stage moments for cameras. They know that “watching someone go somewhere” is not encounter; it is performance for an audience that knows it is an audience. The vicarious-encounter contract that Bourdain depended on was the last form of the lineage’s contract with its public, and it broke between his death and now.

So the lineage didn’t just lose its participants. It lost its audience too.

He was the last full expression of the lineage, and the timing of his death is hard not to read symbolically, because it may have been brushing up against an ideal (however flawed). He had absorbed every available critique. He knew the project was compromised. He knew about the colonial residue, the performance of cosmopolitanism, the way the camera changed every room he walked into. And he kept doing it anyway, holding the contradictions in plain view, having stripped the search down to its minimum viable form: that you could sit at a table in a country not your own, eat what was put in front of you, listen, and come away changed. Just changed, ever-so-slightly, durably, in ways that accumulated over a life. That modest version was, in retrospect, the last viable one.

He didn’t end the lineage by dying. The lineage was already ending. His death simply removed the figure who had been holding it open to the masses against the closing, and what filled the space afterward (the heritage shows, the joy-shows, the carefully unpolitical rooms) was already a kind of mourning, even when it did not name itself that way.

The last of his kind is also, in a sense I’m still working out here, friends, the last of our kind.

The version of the educated American self that he embodied, curious and omnivorous and self-implicating, at home everywhere and exiled from himself. That self was made possible by the same conditions that made the search for elsewhere possible. It has not yet found a new form and it may not.

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A woman in a rice field held up her own wrinkled face like an offering with a price tag. She had decided what the encounter was worth before I arrived. I paid what she asked.

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So: what does it mean to teach the ethics of travel in a moment when the students no longer believe the activity has the meaning the ethics presupposes?

It means I am teaching a question whose grip on the cultural imagination is loosening week by week, year by year, in ways that make the syllabus feel, increasingly, like an artifact. It means the David Sze article is failing because the argument it is having (can travel be authentic?) assumes a level of investment in travel-as-meaning-making that my students no longer share.

What replaces it is not yet clear. My students do not appear to be nihilists (which is remarkable to me for reasons I will get into in another essay). They are animated by other things. By place rather than displacement, by community rather than mobility, by the slow and the local rather than the far and the foreign. Whether this is the beginning of something better or a different kind of narrowness, I genuinely do not know. The honest answer is too soon to say. And it is complicated, anyway, by the fact that the local they are turning toward is itself substantially mediated by the infrastructure I described earlier. The here they are reaching for is a here suffused with screens, parasocial connections, algorithmically curated attention. Whether the cohort can build something durable inside that hybrid space, or whether the infrastructure will eventually capture this turn too, is one of the things we are about to find out.

But I can name what is ending, because I have been watching it end, in a small room, twice a week, for several years, and the conditions I see ending in my classroom are the same conditions I see ending in the news, in the economics, in the shape of who is allowed to move where. The classroom is a leading indicator, not an isolated one.

The 300-year Western search for elsewhere is ending. The yearning it expressed remains; the yearning was always real. But the cure it proposed, the cure Rousseau articulated and the Romantics aestheticized and the modernists abstracted and the hippies spiritualized and the backpackers commodified and the volunteer tourists moralized and Bourdain humanized, is no longer believed in by the people who were supposed to inherit it.

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I want to say something here that is harder than what I have been saying, if you’ll allow me.

I helped dismantle this. Not the whole thing, of course, but my small part of it. The thesis I eventually wrote on backpacker culture was born from a single moment in Kathmandu, where I had landed, in my early twenties, exactly the kind of seeker the lineage produced. I looked around and registered what I was looking at: hundreds of young Westerners, English, Australian, German, American, with man buns and dreadlocks and identical Lonely Planet copies in identical pockets, all of us convinced we were each having a singular encounter with the East.

We were not.

We were extras in a scene the lineage had been staging for decades, the latest cohort of seekers who had mistaken our own demographic for evidence of authenticity. The recognition was sharp enough that I went home and started writing about it. I built a syllabus around the post-colonial critique of Western travel. I led the discussions in which my students learned to see what their parents’ generation had not seen. I spoke at conferences. I was part of the apparatus that took the lineage apart, beam by beam, until it could no longer hold the weight that had been placed on it. I think the critique was right and I would do it again.

But I did not understand, when I was doing that work, what the world would feel like without the thing I was helping to take down. I understood the thing as compromised, which it was and is. I did not understand it as also reaching for something, however imperfectly, however coded by the privilege of those who could undertake it, that the world may actually need.

The Western cosmopolitan ideal was an artifact of empire. It was also, in its better moments, an ambition. Maybe an ideal. It said that a person might belong to more than one place. That borders were administrative facts but not moral ones. That curiosity about people who were not your own was a kind of decency, even when the curiosity was structured by power. That the world’s strangers had inner lives worth attending to. I no longer think these claims were sufficient. I do still think they were claims worth making, and that the project of making them was, at least, trying.

What I miss, when I miss what is ending, is not the right to wander. I have lost very little materially; I can still travel, my students can still travel, mobility has not collapsed for me. What I miss is the cultural confidence that wandering meant something. That the encounter with the unfamiliar was a moral education and not just a logistical fact. I miss living in a culture that believed the wider world was something we owed our attention to. I miss the habit of imagining oneself as a citizen of more than the place one was born.

Fuck, alright.

I should be more honest about what I miss because there is something inherently human in this conversation that is missing. It is beyond cultural confidence; it is the moments the cultural confidence made possible. The man in the garments shop in Kathmandu who sold me the pink patterned scarf I still wear (I also got a matching one for my grandmother). We negotiated for an hour, in the bad English and worse Nepali we shared, and I left with the scarf and the sense that I had been seen and slightly liked by someone whose life I would never enter further. The taxi driver in Delhi who cried about his wife’s disappointment in him and then turned up a Bollywood song I didn’t know and danced in the driver’s seat while I danced in the passenger seat, both of us laughing too loudly at a feeling neither of us could have explained. The old man in a jungle in Indonesia, smoking kretek cigarettes, telling me about the land his family had held for generations and how he was living his dream by turning it into a remote Airbnb; a sentence so dense with contradiction that I have been thinking about it for roughly ten years. The woman in a burqa somewhere in the Middle East who patiently helped me decode an ATM screen I could not read, the two of us chuckling at my idiocy while the line behind us waited.

I cannot make these moments fit cleanly into the structural argument I have been making. They were real. The system that placed me in front of those people, that gave me the money, the passport, the time, the incomplete language, the mild local welcome that came partly from the welcome and partly from the dollar in my pocket, was the same system whose collapse I have spent this essay describing.

The kindness was real and the apparatus was real and they were operating at the same time, in the same rooms, between the same people. The cab driver was performing a kindness for me, and being paid for the ride, and showing me his actual life in a moment of overflow. All three things at once. I do not know how to make that simpler than it was.

This is the thing I struggle to say in a classroom now: that the critique is right and the moments were real. That I was being catered to and I was being met. That the apparatus was extractive and the human inside the apparatus was, sometimes, kind to me anyway, in ways that did not depend on the extraction even though they were enabled by it. My students hear the critique cleanly. They hear the moments through the critique, which I think dulls the moments. I do not know how to give them back the moments without giving them back the apparatus. I am not sure it can be done.

I am willing to be told that the cosmopolitan habit was always a fiction, that the imagining was always paid for by people who could not afford to imagine themselves out of their own places. I have been told this, and I have believed it because it is true. But I am not willing, anymore, to pretend that what is replacing the habit is uncomplicatedly better. A culture that has stopped imagining itself globally is also a culture in which it is easier to forget about people who are not in the room. Even granting that cosmopolitanism’s attention was always selective and self-flattering, the attention itself was something. The cosmopolitan ideal, even in its compromised form, was a check against a forgetting. The check is being removed.

Yes, the lineage I have been tracking is specifically Western, and the cosmopolitan habit it produced is one form among several the human capacity for cross-cultural attention has taken. Other traditions (Pan-African intellectual cosmopolitanism, the contemporary diasporic literary cultures that span the Global South and its emigrant communities, the revival of Polynesian wayfinding) are not ending because this one is. What I am mourning is a particular form, not the broader human possibility of imagining oneself as a citizen of more than the place one was born. That possibility may yet be carried forward by traditions other than the one I came up in.

Whether something equivalent is being assembled elsewhere, I do not know.

I hope it is.

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I’m afraid we mistook a window for a trajectory. We thought the curiosity, the openness, the wandering was who we had become. It turns out it was who we were under conditions that are ending. What we are without those conditions, we are about to find out.

The Elsewhere was never really out there. It was a place we needed to believe in, to bear the place we were.

What we are about to live, those of us inside this particular ending, is here. But a here that has been substantially rebuilt while we were looking elsewhere, a here whose edges are mediated by infrastructure none of the lineage’s seekers could have imagined and which none of them would have recognized as the inside they were trying to escape. The seekers leave the lineage to find that the inside has become its own kind of outside, every bit as foreign, and considerably more captured.

I do not know what we will be like when we live only inside this. I hope the people who come after us, inside this lineage and outside it, find something to make of the longing we are no longer going to know what to do with.