No More Blank Spaces on the Map: Is Adventure Writing Dying?

Is there any room and romance left for adventure in our seemingly cramped, claustrophobic modern world?

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash

[T]he sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong…how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own head.

-Primo Levi

In October 2023, I posed the question “Is adventure a thing of the past?” While I confidently answer in the negative when it comes to that question, I am more ambivalent regarding an overlapping question: whether adventure writing will soon be a thing of the past. If adventure writing is on the decline, can it be salvaged? Where are the grand adventurers and storytellers of today?

Now, I don’t mean adventure in the fictional sense. Humans are incredible at inventing entire universes full of marvelous and fantastical adventures all from the comfort of their bedroom or a coffeehouse. I do not doubt a surplus of fantasy worlds will be constructed soon enough to contend with the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. That isn’t the adventure writing I have in mind.

Neither am I speaking of travel writing necessarily. Many modern travel writers are typically in the service of providing the latest updates on some small corner of the world for the would-be tourist seeking to have their own travel adventure and not so much interested in hearing about, say, the wonderful epiphanies of someone else’s adventures in Southeast Asia. This isn’t to imply that travel writers can’t momentarily wax poetically about their deeply personal experiences, but most readers are coming to them for the latest insights into the safety, conveniences, and cultural aspects that they can then incorporate into their own itineraries while on vacation. More often than not, most readers want to know where the best luxury hotels and restaurants are and not as much about how seeing India radically changed your views on the cosmos.

I’m talking more along the lines of something like Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, or Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods—the nonfiction reality based adventures or what is referred to as “true-travel” that have taken place or are still taking place on this planet, right here, right now. There are exceptional adventures I still occasionally see like the journalist Paul Salopek who’s been walking for a decade for his 24,000-mile “Out of Eden Walk” sponsored by National Geographic and another man from Denmark who recently traveled to all the world’s countries without flying and yet…few people seem to have heard anything about these adventurers. That’s perplexing to me—one would think epic stories like these would be making a few more headlines than they have. Then again, we live in a culture that produces a labyrinth of sensational media stories daily that seem to bury such travelers’ tales in our newsfeeds.

To be fair, adventure magazines like National Geographic, Outside, Backpacker, and Blue Ridge Outdoors still occasionally publish this type of writing but are often more focused on the industry, the gear, and the festivals adjacent to adventures. However, their content is increasingly more oriented in service of adventure rather than being about or on adventure. You are more likely to come across a post on ‘8 steps for managing your hair in the backcountry’ or ‘10 trails with beer kiosks at the trailhead’ than a piece about someone’s latest adventure and the deeper meaning it brings to them and society.

Perhaps adventure writing is dying. If so, why might that be the case? Is it because the world is all but filled up and there just aren’t any more grand adventures left to report on? Is it because we are jealous creatures, envious of others fulfilling their wanderlust, and would rather wish not to hear of another’s epic quests? Maybe we’d rather not read about it, but see it for ourselves. Or is it because we simply can’t relate to someone’s unique adventures?

Is this concern for adventure writing dying justified and is it even anything new? Many writers have captured the anxiety that adventure is no longer a worthy subject matter for centuries. Even in the early 18th century, the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift captured the sentiment well in Gulliver’s Travels,

“The Captain was very well satisfied with this plain Relation I had given him; and said, he hoped when we return to England, I would oblige the World by putting it in Paper, and making it publick. My Answer was, that I thought we were already over-stocked with Books of Travels: That nothing could now pass which was not extraordinary; wherein I doubted, some Authors less consulted Truth than their own Vanity or Interest, or the Diversion of strange Plants, Trees, Birds, and other Animals; or the barbarous Customs and Idolatry of savage People, with which most Writers abound. However, I thanked him for his good Opinion, and promised to take the Matter into my Thoughts.”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger in The Lost World similarly laments,

“I’m afraid the day for this sort of thing is rather past…The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there’s no room for romance anywhere.”

The same was true for the adventurous aspirations of Joseph Conrad’s Charles Marlow in Heart of Darkness, where his idolized blank spaces on the map,

“…had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness.”

So, the sentiment of adventure being a thing of the past isn’t new, and perhaps nowadays someone expounding about their epic summit of Everest or solo trek around the world may strike readers as little more than an exercise in egotism—mere bragging points and status-seeking.

To add, things have changed quite a bit since Swift’s time and things appear to have only gotten worse for the would-be adventurer trying to stake their claim in parts unknown. The world of today feels oppressively claustrophobic and mightily filled to the brim with far too many of us frequenting all the conceivable tourist destinations and adventure tours as I’ve examined here and here. 

A few years ago, I came across an article in Forbes, “Why No One Cares About Your Travels” which argued that,

“It turns out; it isn’t (primarily) about jealousy; the problem is about context. Your adventures are unrelatable. Most people are simply more interested in talking about familiar things than they are curious about the new things that you want to introduce to the conversation. Yes, there is a social cost associated with leaving the herd and having unique experiences.”

Many anthropologists have observed that commonalities are central to social bonding and group cohesion. So, it makes sense that talking about something rare and unfamiliar is going to be difficult to reciprocate in any conversation. However, if the psychological research on extraordinary experiences is correct that our exceptional adventures are thrilling for us but unrelatable to our listeners at best and mind-numbingly boring at worst, does it follow that no one is going to want to hear or read about your adventures either? Might that help support the hypothesis that adventure writing is dying?

Well, not no one, per se, just those that are already traveling. As the piece continues,

“If you want to be able to share your adventures with people that appreciate hearing about them, you need to find friends that enjoy participating in the same type of experiences. That is why travelers tend to find each other and group together. They see tales of faraway places as aspirational instead of alien or uninteresting. They are capable of relating and can see themselves realistically emulating the experience. It is a human trait to be more interested in things you can relate to, more than things that inspire.”

But this gets to the paradox that I have worked to address in my forthcoming book which poses the question of how we encourage more of us to adopt adventure and travel into our lives if there is so much holding us back from taking the initial plunge. I don’t merely want to speak to the choir of people who are already having adventures and reaping the benefits. I am concerned about the rest of us who may remain fearful of adventure or are perhaps convinced that travel and adventure are frivolous activities with little reward. Thus, I worry far too many of us do not see the value travel and adventure hold for us.

On the contrary, I feel deeply that travel and adventure are existential concerns and that the benefits of wandering should not be underestimated. I want the experience of being adventurous to be less extraordinary and for us to eventually get to a world where it is a far more common reality for all of us to participate in and benefit from. As I write in my forthcoming book,

“It should not be a rare or incredible thing to find someone who’s hiked the Appalachian Trail, backpacked Europe for half a year, attempted a summit of Everest, lived abroad for a year, or took part in whatever other adventures one can imagine. The small numbers of adventurers reflect not so much a lack of opportunity or means, but more a lack of value for adventure in our society and culture. Everyone ought to be encouraged to have had at least one of these kinds of experiences in their lives and hopefully even more than that. This sentiment is perfectly captured from one of Primo Levi’s more famous quotes, ‘...the sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong…how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own head.’”

I remain unsure as to whether or not adventure writing is dying, why it might be the case, and if there is any hope of reviving it. So I leave this as an open question, to you dear reader, is adventure writing dying?

For consideration:

• Is adventure writing dying? Why or why not?

• What nonfiction adventure writing have you found lately that inspires you?

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB