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Comment by zimablue | Hacker News Reader

Deep travelling is also nonsense, this kind of modern travel is largely just status fencing by upper middle class people who can't gain status through thoughts or substantive actions. Which is all fine, where it gets disgusting is tendency to somehow conflate it with virtue. "He's a really interesting person he spent 2 years in Holland". "Everyone should travel.. if you don't it betrays some closed mindedness".

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That definitely happens, but there's a lot to be gained of visiting places for some time (couple of months).

For one thing, you can copy local businesses and spread awareness in your country for something that the markets didn't even know was missing. I've seen this happen first hand!

But in general, you learn a lot. You learn how much society really shapes an individual. It's different when you experience that first hand, rather than reading a Wikipedia article about a certain culture, or tradition, or something like that.

I disagree with this comment. I'm way down from middle class and I just got back from a very long trip in a developing country. The experience has changed me from head to toes in ways I wouldn't have conceived. I am so happy that I had was able to change who I was and to deviate from the life that I would have lived if I hadn't gone.

Not everyone who travels does it for "status" (in fact I would say that people who do that are a vocal minority)

I did the same thing — I had $5k to my name and quit my job and traveled through Central America for 3 months. A completely life changing experience, and I met my eventual wife who was taking Spanish classes down there and happened to live near my home town.

I don’t think anybody stays at $5 a night hostels in Guatemala for status.

I agree with this. I lived abroad (several abroads) for years at a time, but you don't need however many thousand miles to go meet a new society that has unique rules and different values than yours, just go spend a month at your parent's retirement home and don't be obnoxious to the locals. (Or move to the "bad" neighborhood, take a job as a teacher or police officer in the remote countryside, etc). Middle-class people exist in what is largely a pocket of society that they mistakenly think is how their country is because all the media is about them.

It's a shame that any travel experiences you may have had have given you that impression. My (relatively limited) experience of travel is that it has genuinely opened my eyes to the fact that the vast majority of the world lives a very different life to my own, and those differences are something I have enjoyed learning about. Reading a magazine or seeing it on television doesn't give you the same impact.

Not everybody wants to learn about such things. That's fine, but don't hate on the people who do.

> status fencing by upper middle class people who can't gain status through thoughts or substantive actions

You deserve a bit of a flame for one of the most pompous and vacuous statements I've ever read on HN. What is status? What constitutes substantive? I'll bet my definitions are different to yours!

You've taken my comment about the status we give to travelling, and assumed that it's down to some personal problem with travelling. I love travelling, but still find the status we give it disgusting and can recognize privilege laundering. It doesn't really matter what we think is a substantive action, there's no reasonable definition that includes travelling for the sake of it.

living abroad and traveling are quite different things. I agree that traveling, also "deep traveling", is mostly bullshit. It's tourism, it's consumption.

But living abroad, and especially learning another language and another culture, is something that is really illuminating on so many ways... and you don't have to be rich for that. In fact, most of poor immigrants do just that. The rich one, they call themselves expats.

I read "deep traveling" as "living abroad" - mainly because that's what I have done for a large part of my adult life. Though in the context of this article it is just trying to differentiate their service.

I'm not saying travelling is terrible, or teaches you nothing I'm saying that if someone goes to a foreign country for a long time and it's not as a byproduct (as in they have a career NOT related to travelling, picking a career specifically to travel doesn't count) of their work, then what it statistically indicates about them is that (privilege + propensity to try and socially signal) is greater than some number, but a lot of people seem to take it purely as "virtue".

As someone who went backpacking for three months when I was recently bankrupt and only had a few thousand dollars I had saved over three years because I was afraid to spend money on anything but food, I can assure you that it does not require any particular economic privilege, only a severe case of not giving a fuck about your future.

It worked out for me because I met my wife who was also traveling and came back and lucked into a good job, but that was by no means guaranteed when I left.

Of all the people I met at hostels in guatemala, there was only one that I would say was really privileged, and a lot of people who simply prioritized travel over everything else in their lives.

again, I won't conflate the two. traveling is way of more ephemeral than living abroad.

but then of course, there are people that are living abroad and it's like they are at home, like British pensioners in Spain. And it's also fine, I guess...

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