The Purgatory of Modern Travel: When is Travel Not Worth It?

Modern travel can be quite maddening. So why do so many of us willingly put ourselves through this gauntlet of misery to reach our destinations?

Photo by Li Lin on Unsplash

Travel and adventure are often riddled with mishaps, miscalculations, and bouts of misery. No journey exists without something going wrong. In some cases, the things that go wrong are what define an adventure and make for an amusing story to tell others later. But in these moments of extreme stress and frustration, we usually aren’t laughing, unless it’s the manic type of laughing where we’ve completely pulled our hair out and lost our senses. How long until we throw our hands up and say enough is enough, this isn’t worth it?

I’ve never actually abandoned a trip, but recently I desperately wanted to. I kept a record of all my grievances to tally up to see just how many irksome moments I encountered while attempting to get to Mexico for our friend’s destination wedding. In the grand scheme of things, I understand this was not an extraordinary dilemma by any measure and I’ve experienced plenty of similar setbacks to know it will likely happen again and again.

Nevertheless, this formula is becoming more common for the modern traveler where we are careened into airplanes like sardines: a delay leads to missed flights to being stuck overnight in drab hotels squandering our precious money and time on lousy but extremely expensive food. And yet, we continue to do it. Why do so many of us willingly put ourselves through this gauntlet of misery to reach our destinations? For American travelers, flights are really are only quick and easy option, and in our case, we wouldn’t dare miss our friend’s destination wedding and so the answer isn’t that perplexing but I suppose my question can be refined to: how did modern travel become such an anxious and forsaken purgatory? And can anything even be done about it?

Here are some of the grievances I noted while stuck in my latest travel purgatory: 

Our flight was originally delayed by one hour which prevented us from making our connecting flight. We were in the back of the plane once we landed, as we always are with no direction from flight attendants to administer a helpful call for other passengers to let those with connecting flights out first nor sympathy from anyone else to let us pass. We waited our turns like the chivalrous and unconfrontational Midwesterners we are. We finally escaped the plane and with luggage in tow, my wife and I attempted to sprint across the entire airport because of course our terminal was at the opposite end of the airport as it always seems to be! And if you’ve been to the Atlanta airport, you know how big this place is. We made it just in time…that is, to watch our flight close the gate and taxi away as the expressionless ticket agents tell us “Sorry, there’s nothing we can do for you.” Okay, we’ll wait for the next flight this evening…as if we had some choice in the matter. 

We spent the next five hours in the airport, dawdling around, twiddling thumbs, and spending too much money on crap food under migraine-inducing white light ($62.50 on bar food to be precise). Oh, and the only other flight for the day to our destination is already booked and we’ll be on standby hoping someone else had the misfortune of having their flight delayed so we could steal their seats. Alas, we’re still playing musical chairs at this stage in life. If we don’t make this flight then we’ll be staying the night in Atlanta and will need to get up early once again before even the meager breakfast options in the hotel open. No plastic-packaged cinnamon roll for me this time.

I angrily shuffle over to the bar thinking a bourbon will somehow make me relax a little. As I tried not to let my rage bubble up, I sipped my mediocre glass of bourbon trying to think happy thoughts like “no one else cares about my problems, why should I?” That only lasted about three minutes until another expressionless face behind the bar slid me my bill…$16.50 for this toxic injection! Another eye roll and I was instantly back in purgatory with the onset of a migraine rapidly rising in my head from this terrible place—a purgatory indeed where you’ve momentarily lost all sense of agency and your life depends exclusively on an apathetic system with the only job of delivering you to a place like a UPS package in semi-functioning condition.

My wife Hilary appeared in my reoccurring stupor of annoyance to deliver more wonderful news. Delta wasn’t going to be paying for our hotel reimbursement after all (even after we were reassured by another Delta representative we would) because somehow the original flight delay wasn’t their fault due to the weather. Oh, of course, let the weather be our scapegoat. More money wasted. You know what? I should just burn the rest of my money right here and let them cart me off as a terrorist, I thought. At least I’d be out of this airport and could get some much-needed sleep perhaps.

After what should have been a one-hour flight followed by a 2.5-hour connecting flight turned into a 30-hour journey from an all-expenses trip provided by our dwindling bank account: through the airport back and forth shuttles from the drab hotel to finally getting on our early morning flight to a taxi, a ferry, and finally yet another taxi. In times like this, I envy those who do not wander and wonder if I’m actually the sucker, being lured by the false hope of the romantic adventures and smooth relaxing trips I keep conjuring up in my head.

We finally made it to Isla Mujeres and were now expected to put on our happy faces and pretend like I hadn’t lost 3,000 brain cells in the last 30 hours. And again, as much as I realize this isn’t the worst that could happen to someone traveling, I am still left wondering why this is the new normal of travel. How did we get here?

When I am sent spiraling down a series of unfortunate and tedious events like this, I’m sometimes left begging for home. Am I the intrepid traveler I imagine myself to be? Or just another whiny person who can’t get through some minor inconveniences? When is travel not worth it though? How is everyone okay walking this gauntlet of misery time and time again? As an anthropologist, I know deep down we’re apes, so how the hell do so many of us keep it together? Don’t we all have our breaking points? Is this style of modern travel even deserving of being labeled travel?

So many great adventurers tell tales of being lost on islands for years, scorched by the desert heat, or being bedridden with malaria and other deadly diseases on years-long excursions into the unknown. Could I endure that? I can’t even seem to stand having a flight canceled, let alone being lost in the jungle full of poisonous and dangerous critters lurking about to nip at my heels in the dark. But there does seem to be something distinct between these traditional adventures and travels I’ve read so much about and the modern purgatory of airport travel that seems the stuff of an existential philosopher’s nightmare—a complete merry-go-round of absurdity with no way of getting off the ride. Your agency is momentarily stolen from you today and you simply must endure at the hands of apathetic souls and a seemingly mindless techno-wonderland of unaccountability.

Traveling can be great, but it can often disappoint. At worst it can show you a world that is unkind or at least cares nothing for your problems. When things aren’t going your way everyone’s face seems apathetic to your plights. An expressionless face can even seem to be taunting you. It enrages you, depresses you, and makes you wonder what the point is of putting yourself through this gauntlet of misery. 

At what point along our severely compromised trip would I push a magical button to return instantaneously back home and gleefully abandon this trip? Some trips feel like traps and the sunk cost fallacy reigns supreme whereby we keep pushing on hoping that eventually things will get better only to be angered time and time again by yet another setback. 

I know that I get perturbed easily, much to my wife’s frustration. But, despite what she and many others think, I do try very hard to keep things contained and I do think I’ve gotten a little better at anticipating the misery that will be coming each time I travel—for I know I will have to endure many more gauntlets if I want to keep traveling. And I do.

That said, I can’t help by harp on the fact that the process of getting to our destinations these days isn’t all that glamorous or fun to me as should be more than apparent by now. As I lamented in a previous critique of modern travel,

“Modern transportation technology has given rise to something unique in our time: the ability for us to arrive without traveling. With planes, trains, and automobiles, we have the extraordinary capacity to obliterate space and skip everything between points A and B. “Destination weddings” have become popular in recent years and entire transportation industries promise to deliver us as efficiently as possible to wherever we need to go on the planet. We may say the unconscious motto of the day is, “It’s all about the destination, not the journey…Traveling and attempting to have adventures in a modern context is not easy. Time, money, and many of life’s uncertainties inhibit our wanderlust. And when we do find the time and means to explore, our mechanized system of transportation can demoralize us and make us feel as though we are little more than Amazon boxes needing to be whisked quickly across the globe to our destinations—to arrive without traveling.”

Although I realize how great it is to be able to hop on an air machine and get to just about anywhere on the globe in a matter of hours, I still contend that we are little more than parcels to the airline industry and we’ve sucked a lot of fun out of traveling in the modern world—that is my argument. And yes, I know I romanticize the travels of the past, but I genuinely believe there was something much more adventurous and enjoyable about charting paths through the jungle or over mountain passes even if it meant risking life and limb.

Despite how insane it may sound to many modern readers, there is a part of me who’d gladly exchange the tediousness and absurdity of modern airport travel purgatory for a much slower means of transportation if the structure of our society would allow for it. I’d walk just about everywhere if I could. Hell, even a horse and a small knapsack and all the risks it would entail traveling in such a rugged manner would somehow be far more enjoyable in my mind.

Alas, we made it to Mexico and something rather magical happened once we dropped our luggage off at our cozy little Airbnb and walked across the street for food and drinks. The minute a drink of mezcal with a side of grasshoppers was placed in front of me, I smiled, and all the stress and anxiety of the previous 30 hours or so evaporated. I was instantly in a stupor of glee and relaxation...perhaps amnesia was quickly overcoming me. All of it was in the past now and from this vantage point, what we had endured wasn’t so bad. Indeed, it was trivial. We’d escaped purgatory to find ourselves in paradise and we ended up having a marvelous time with our friends.

Had I been able to push the magic button to return home, I would have missed out on this epiphany—one I’ve had time and again and yet keep forgetting. We endure the gauntlet of misery because we know what awaits us on the other side. The destination can be all we’re aiming for. As much as I wish the “traveling” part of modern travel was more exciting and less tedious, at least there are still plenty of wonderful destinations to quickly lift us up and make us forget our travel purgatories…that is until we set our sights back home and must endure it once more.

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Cheers!

-JSB