Most travel is just kitsch consumption with a passport

You feel the pull before you even book the flight. The algorithm has already clocked your intention, and now your screen is a moodboard of other people’s holidays. A rooftop bar in Lisbon, a brutalist monument in Belgrade, a particular croissant in Paris. The same feed, the same photos, the same trip. A different backdrop for the same you.

This is the great flattening of travel. An industry built on curated novelty has ended up selling the same four cafés, the same vintage-industrial decor, the same flat white from city to city. It’s a globalised aesthetic for a generation of consumers who have been trained to mistake a transaction for an experience. You are not visiting a place; you are acquiring a cultural product. It is kitsch consumption with a passport.

The checklist is the engine of this phenomenon. See the ten famous things, eat the three famous dishes, take the one famous photo. Job done. You ‘did’ Rome. But you felt nothing beyond the vague pressure of the queue and the fleeting satisfaction of the selfie. You engaged with the city as a theme park, a set of attractions to be consumed and forgotten.

Then come the mocked rituals. The ‘authentic’ cooking class that takes place in a purpose-built kitchen, far from any real home. The traditional dance performed on a schedule for an audience that holds up a screen between themselves and the moment. These are cultural echoes, hollowed out and sold back to you as the real thing. They are reassuringly exotic, but never truly challenging. They confirm your expectations instead of dismantling them.

There is, of course, an alternative. It requires more effort, a different kind of attention. It is slow, threaded travel. This is not about the duration of your stay — a week can be slower than a month — but the depth of your engagement. It is the practice of reading the present of a place as the compressed archive of its past.

To do this, you must look beyond the curated and the obvious. A city is not a list of sights; it is a system. The way a street curves, the name of a square, the material of a wall, the rhythm of a local commute — these are all data points. They are threads leading back into the tangle of history, politics, economics, and culture that shaped the place you are standing in.

Why does the grand boulevard suddenly become a warren of medieval streets? What trade route or defensive wall dictated that shape centuries ago? Why do the locals in this part of town talk, eat, or vote differently from the ones across the river? That is the story. The famous cathedral is merely the front cover of the book.

This approach resists the urge to consume. Instead, it demands that you connect. It means reading a book about your destination before you go, not just a blog post. It means walking without a map, getting lost in a residential neighbourhood, and observing the mundane texture of daily life. It means sitting in a park and just watching. It is an act of intellectual and emotional presence.

When you travel this way, the place reveals itself in layers. You start to see threads connecting the Roman ruins under the car park to the Renaissance art in the gallery and the political graffiti on the shuttered storefront. You are no longer a tourist moving across a surface; you are a detective moving through a story.

Otherwise you didn