Cocooning in the land of a million lakes
In one respect, Ontario is very
similar to Finland: when you head north, you enter a land of thousands
of lakes where people have their summer cottages which they visit in
the weekend, leading to much traffic back and forth Friday and Sunday
nights.
As a city boy with a concrete heart, I have never really been able to understand the purpose of owning a summer cottage in some backwoods. The whole phenomenon is a bit like that small headline once in Onion, "Study: owning a boat mainly a hassle" (actual wording may have been different, but that was the basic idea). When you already own a perfectly good home in the city, I can't see the point of leaving it to go to some worse place away from everything so that you can essentially live like a Soviet citizen. Sure, you can spend money to make your cottage to be as comfortable and well-equipped as your primary residence and take all kinds of goodies with you there. But wouldn't spending that money to buy yourself a better primary residence or improving your existing home and its furniture provide you several more net hedons of pleasure?
Of course you can spend your money as you wish, far be it from me to tell other people what they can do with their money. I am just a bit puzzled, as I often am.
Some other aspects of tourism also mystify me. I can understand taking a trip to a place that is better than a place than where you regularly live. Heck, I used to do that myself with my annual trips to Canada to be with my future wife. But if that place really is better than where you currently live, why not move there permanently? (Heck, I did that too.) Of course, I can also understand going to see your friends and relatives who live in another town. But going to some place that is no better than the area where you currently live, just to see it, what's the point? If you took the money and effort that you have to spend in travelling and used that to improve your life right where you live, you would probably gain many more net hedons of pleasure. Even if you travel in the first class of a luxurious airline, I doubt that the experience comes even close to the comfort, space and entertainment that is routinely available in the average living room. Especially if you first spent the cost of the ticket to order some good stuff in for yourself.
I can understand even less someone going deeper into debt to finance a trip to "get away from it all" and relax when they work hard in some stressful job to keep their debts at bay. This practice, which I understand to be surprisingly common, has a certain O. Henry quality in it. Were I asked, I would perhaps advice a somewhat different approach.
In our modern world, ever since the invention of telecommunication and mass transport of products, the differences between geographical areas within the same nation will rapidly vanish anyways, so that every place will converge to be essentially the same. I hasten to point out that I am not complaining in some hippy-dippy "different places will lose their soul and are no longer unique, and this is, like, man, a loss" fashion, since this convergence is exactly what should happen, if we assume that people get to improve their lives under the efficient free market.
If any place does something better than the other places, why wouldn't those other places copy that? Why don't their residents deserve to have those good things available where they live? For example, if some area offers some kind of delightful special cuisine, isn't it much better to bring that cousine to people in other areas in a form of, say, a specialized restaurant chain, than to make all those people travel to that area whenever they hanker for that cuisine? Unless we assume that some magic radiation that makes that cuisine possible in the first place seeps from the ground only in certain geographical areas, this is what should happen in the efficient free market.
And of course, this has already happened: every single city in North America has essentially the exact same stores and the same products and services available in them. Brand names may slightly differ, but this is only a superficial difference. Anything good that one area innovates, the other areas will quickly copy. Excluding certain well-known downtowns, the average person probably couldn't even tell which city he is in if he were chloroformed and dropped into a random one so that all revealing street signs and such were covered.
Most places are rather boring and better enjoyed from pictures. I have to admit that there are some places I would like to visit, though. For example, I should once travel to Manhattan, the citiest city of them all, such a great city that James Kunstler once aptly wrote in one of his books that New York City is currently the best small town in America. That is somewhat counterintuitive, but probably so freaking true. But anyway, here's my end prediction: in the future, there will be significantly less tourism than now, not more, for the reasons I sketched above. Especially with the price of oil rising so much and all that other stuff.
As a city boy with a concrete heart, I have never really been able to understand the purpose of owning a summer cottage in some backwoods. The whole phenomenon is a bit like that small headline once in Onion, "Study: owning a boat mainly a hassle" (actual wording may have been different, but that was the basic idea). When you already own a perfectly good home in the city, I can't see the point of leaving it to go to some worse place away from everything so that you can essentially live like a Soviet citizen. Sure, you can spend money to make your cottage to be as comfortable and well-equipped as your primary residence and take all kinds of goodies with you there. But wouldn't spending that money to buy yourself a better primary residence or improving your existing home and its furniture provide you several more net hedons of pleasure?
Of course you can spend your money as you wish, far be it from me to tell other people what they can do with their money. I am just a bit puzzled, as I often am.
Some other aspects of tourism also mystify me. I can understand taking a trip to a place that is better than a place than where you regularly live. Heck, I used to do that myself with my annual trips to Canada to be with my future wife. But if that place really is better than where you currently live, why not move there permanently? (Heck, I did that too.) Of course, I can also understand going to see your friends and relatives who live in another town. But going to some place that is no better than the area where you currently live, just to see it, what's the point? If you took the money and effort that you have to spend in travelling and used that to improve your life right where you live, you would probably gain many more net hedons of pleasure. Even if you travel in the first class of a luxurious airline, I doubt that the experience comes even close to the comfort, space and entertainment that is routinely available in the average living room. Especially if you first spent the cost of the ticket to order some good stuff in for yourself.
I can understand even less someone going deeper into debt to finance a trip to "get away from it all" and relax when they work hard in some stressful job to keep their debts at bay. This practice, which I understand to be surprisingly common, has a certain O. Henry quality in it. Were I asked, I would perhaps advice a somewhat different approach.
In our modern world, ever since the invention of telecommunication and mass transport of products, the differences between geographical areas within the same nation will rapidly vanish anyways, so that every place will converge to be essentially the same. I hasten to point out that I am not complaining in some hippy-dippy "different places will lose their soul and are no longer unique, and this is, like, man, a loss" fashion, since this convergence is exactly what should happen, if we assume that people get to improve their lives under the efficient free market.
If any place does something better than the other places, why wouldn't those other places copy that? Why don't their residents deserve to have those good things available where they live? For example, if some area offers some kind of delightful special cuisine, isn't it much better to bring that cousine to people in other areas in a form of, say, a specialized restaurant chain, than to make all those people travel to that area whenever they hanker for that cuisine? Unless we assume that some magic radiation that makes that cuisine possible in the first place seeps from the ground only in certain geographical areas, this is what should happen in the efficient free market.
And of course, this has already happened: every single city in North America has essentially the exact same stores and the same products and services available in them. Brand names may slightly differ, but this is only a superficial difference. Anything good that one area innovates, the other areas will quickly copy. Excluding certain well-known downtowns, the average person probably couldn't even tell which city he is in if he were chloroformed and dropped into a random one so that all revealing street signs and such were covered.
Most places are rather boring and better enjoyed from pictures. I have to admit that there are some places I would like to visit, though. For example, I should once travel to Manhattan, the citiest city of them all, such a great city that James Kunstler once aptly wrote in one of his books that New York City is currently the best small town in America. That is somewhat counterintuitive, but probably so freaking true. But anyway, here's my end prediction: in the future, there will be significantly less tourism than now, not more, for the reasons I sketched above. Especially with the price of oil rising so much and all that other stuff.
Your destination does not necessarily have to be "better", just different. A change of environment is stimulating to the human brain. No matter how great your home is, it gets boring after a while.
And there is no substitute for physically visiting interesting places. Watching a documentary or reading an article about the Taipei 101 is probably quite dull compared to actually visiting it.
That said, I do think that for most people, tourism is quite expensive compared to other forms of entertainment.
Posted by Anonymous | 11:59 AM
One reason for visiting a place worse than your current location is that then you learn to apreciate your hometown more.
Posted by Anonymous | 1:19 PM
If you had any hobbies besides reading & TV, especially some physical ones, the idea of travelling might be a lot more enticing to you. I can totally understand people paying top hard-earned dollar for surfing holidays in Maui or heliskiing holidays on Alaska. Nothing you can see or read can come anywhere close the pleasure derivable from physical things (that's my pet theory, the best pleasures are always related to the body). It might not be living frugally, but I've never heard anyone regret larger-than-life trips.
Posted by Anonymous | 1:19 PM
Sometimes only parts of your destination are better than home. My family vacations in Galveston or Corpus Christi for the beach and seafood. We're just careful to stay away when the hurricanes are trashing the place.
Posted by Anonymous | 1:24 PM
You yourself often travel to see other parts of Toronto. Are they any better than your own neighborhood, or just different? Other people just travel further, probably because they are not as tight with money as you are.
Posted by Anonymous | 3:11 AM