Tourist

By -
Noun: Someone who deliberately travels far from home in order to complain about how things are not exactly like they are in the place they left.

Comments

  1. Anonymous2:27 AM

    In all honesty, in my travels I was often disappointed that too many of the things from home were present in foreign lands (I avoided those like the plague).

    I was always the guy that went out to taste the regional cuisine in dodgy venues, I was the guy that paid my taxi driver a good buck to give me the inside-view tour (I would also keep a good driver on retainer), and I always recognized that I was a foreigner in their land.

    I guess that there is quite a difference between a tourist and a traveler... a traveler treats each person and each day as it comes without presupposition or expectation, no matter where he is. He enjoys the possibility of experiencing something completely foreign and unknown to him. He relinquishes himself to the strange world that surrounds him rather than seek solace in the sameness of his own world.

    I certainly have a great deal to learn from life, but life (in my opinion) is not to seek the seclusion of your own beliefs and culture, it is the "reckless abandon" to experience a life different from your own. Only then do you see the common threads that bind us all.

    I am not talking about politics, economics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc; I am talking about just being an everyday, ordinary human. Surprisingly, many people find it difficult to do that.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Central Planning Works!

By -
Declares LewRockwell.com:

"All of this means that while the government has been artificially propping up the economy and 'stimulating' it through artificial means, peoples’ perceptions of economic life have been transformed into that which was intended by the central planners: the economic crush is over, our government cured all the problems, things are great again, go back to your old ways. Rinse and repeat."
Read more

Fair's fair!

By -
Reader rob smeared me as "weird and out of touch" for noting how intolerant progressives and progressive institutions are today. No, he complains, they are only being "fair"! So let me share three items of interest.

At one large organization where a friend works, two black cafeteria cooks were asked to prepare a special meal in honor of African-American history month. No doubt, they thought back to their own childhood and prepared on meal of ribs, collard greens, and cornbread. A much higher status member of the organization came to the cafeteria and was sorely offended by their "stereotyping." She got them fired. So this highly privileged woman got two much less privileged, minority workers, who were probably supporting families on their low wages, thrown out of work because they had offended her progressive ideology by implying that African-American people ever ate African-American cuisine. Hey, fair's fair!

At another large organization where a fr…
Read more

Well, So What?

By -
Various readers have at times dismissed the idea that the pervasive and incessant use of smartphones is really something radically new in human history. David Samuels at Wired knows they are wrong:

"The machines and systems that the techno-monopolists have built are changing us faster than they or we understand. The scale of this change is so vast and systemic that we simple humans can’t do the math—perhaps in part because of the way that incessant smartphone use has affected our ability to pay attention to anything longer than 140 or 280 characters."
Read more