Not traveling is happiness too: the kind of tourism nobody promotes
While some show off flights on Instagram, others admit that traveling stresses them out. Travel is not mandatory for happiness. Find out why.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
The tyranny of travel: why you're not unhappier staying home
Traveling is not a requirement for happiness. It is an industry that has hijacked leisure and turned it into a social duty, and those who show off airports on social media don't always sleep well. The question that opens this debate — can you be happy without liking to travel? — has an uncomfortable answer: yes, and many people are, even if the tourism industry refuses to admit it.
The showing off of flights and the reality of the paycheck
There's a recognizable pattern on social media: the same person who complains about getting up early to catch a work flight posts a photo of the plane on Instagram minutes later with an air of privilege. The contrast seems grotesque when the very work story reveals that this frequent traveler earns just over 20,000 euros for an endless split shift. Happiness, then, lies not in the alucinación but in the image projected. The real salary hidden behind so many airport photos has a figure, and it's not what you'd imagine when you see the boarding pass.
For some, traveling is not a luxury but a wound
It's not all showing off. There's a profile of people who travel out of necessity: those who have been uprooted from their homeland and live a kind of perpetual displacement. For them, movement is a way of connecting with the world, not a status aspiration. At the opposite extreme, someone living in a village with nothing nearby sees travel as a window; someone living in a big city, on the other hand, already has all the cultural offerings around the corner and would cut back tourism to once or twice a year.
The travel industry will do everything it can to convince you that a passport is the key to happiness. But everyday evidence suggests that enjoying home, a stable routine, and skipping airports can be, for many, a more reliable source of well-being. Let everyone do the math: homegrown happiness doesn't appear on Instagram, but it doesn't need trinc either.
Traveling is not a requirement for happiness. It is an industry that has hijacked leisure and turned it into a social duty, and those who show off airports on social media don't always sleep well. The question that opens this debate — can you be happy without liking to travel? — has an uncomfortable answer: yes, and many people are, even if the tourism industry refuses to admit it.
The showing off of flights and the reality of the paycheck
There's a recognizable pattern on social media: the same person who complains about getting up early to catch a work flight posts a photo of the plane on Instagram minutes later with an air of privilege. The contrast seems grotesque when the very work story reveals that this frequent traveler earns just over 20,000 euros for an endless split shift. Happiness, then, lies not in the alucinación but in the image projected. The real salary hidden behind so many airport photos has a figure, and it's not what you'd imagine when you see the boarding pass.
For some, traveling is not a luxury but a wound
It's not all showing off. There's a profile of people who travel out of necessity: those who have been uprooted from their homeland and live a kind of perpetual displacement. For them, movement is a way of connecting with the world, not a status aspiration. At the opposite extreme, someone living in a village with nothing nearby sees travel as a window; someone living in a big city, on the other hand, already has all the cultural offerings around the corner and would cut back tourism to once or twice a year.
The travel industry will do everything it can to convince you that a passport is the key to happiness. But everyday evidence suggests that enjoying home, a stable routine, and skipping airports can be, for many, a more reliable source of well-being. Let everyone do the math: homegrown happiness doesn't appear on Instagram, but it doesn't need trinc either.
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Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (10 replies).
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