How travel limits our minds | Julian Baggini

How travel limits our minds | Comment is free | The Guardian

• planes simply transport you from one anonymous, homogenous edgeland to another, between airports virtually identical in their black and yellow signage and multinational franchises. It's the difference between travel ? a movement between places in which the journey is part of the experience ? and transit, the utilitarian linking of here and there, in which the destination becomes all that matters and the transfer simply something to put up with.
• Consumer culture has made us too accustomed to getting only what we want, no more and no less. Experiences are atomised into their component parts, the extraneous excised in an attempt to maximise the impact of the parts we prefer, with no thought to how their context changes them. But if you only ever get what you know you already want, serendipity is denied and the richness of experience is reduced to the button-pushing delivery of crude hits of fun, excitement, novelty or reassurance, often consumed in the private bubble of home or headphone.
• It might be objected that "slow travel" is just an indulgence of the time and cash-rich. But you actually gain holiday time when travelling is an integral part of the experience, because you lose none to mere transit
• "If we find poetry in the service station and motel, if we are drawn to the airport or train carriage, it is perhaps because, in spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts, in spite of their garish colours and harsh lighting, we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.?  : ? Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel