We were influencers once, and young

Or were we something else? Were our brains better?

Believe it or not, I had never heard of this place before I took this picture. I was shocked.

Recently, at a dinner with friends, the topic of travel came up. I used to love traveling so much that I got a troll hobo tattooed on my arm. I loved to carry a small bag and sleep under bridges, like a troll. I hitchhiked my way across Mexico, saw Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, and spent long nights discussing books in cafes in Prague. It was an adventure.

But I don’t like to travel as much now. My friends had both had disappointing trips to Lisbon, where they sat in cafes that looked like long-time hangouts for old men suddenly populated by selfie-snapping influencers. There were lines everywhere, and the streets were packed with tourists.

In my younger, obnoxious days, I sneered at tourists. I drew a dubious distinction between a ‘tourist’ and a traveler. Tourists trod the beaten path on short breaks from their workaday lives. Travelers lived their lives on the road, immersed. We travelers had no lives to go back to, this was our life. We also stank. And we were broke. These were points of pride.

I sauntered around in black leather pants and a gray work shirt, feeling invincible and invisible. I’ve never felt so free.

I often wonder, when I gaze back in nostalgia, if I wasn’t simply just the influencer of my day. Am I just getting old now? Are people doing what they’ve always done, and I’m just cranky? No. Like a corrupt police department, I’ve investigated myself and found no wrongdoing. Allow me to explain.

In my youth, anonymity was the charm of travel. Before the internet, when I stepped off a bus in a new country, I wandered to a cafe and ate alone. I found a place to stay, alone. When I lay my head down at night, I knew I was in a country I did not know a single person, and nobody on the planet knew where I was. I had no GPS, no email, no itinerary, no insta.

Sometimes I traveled with friends I met on the road. That was always fun, to get to know other weirdos who had fallen out of step, like me, with the entire world. The conversations we had, the sights we saw, everything we did were like poems written in the sand. The waves of time would soon wash them away without a trace. They weren’t for sharing. They weren’t fodder for likes. Brand was a bad word, an artificial practice where corporations tried to make us see them as people. Now, people want to be seen as corporations. Every thought, every moment is commodified, for sale for a like or a click.

There was magic in the hunt for an interesting thought. A scribble in a guestbook, a snatch of overheard dialogue on the street, a late-night debate in the back of a bus to a tiny town in Mexico, half-formed musings from a hammock in a palapa in Tulum when it was only a beach with a few stray dogs — Listening to Jane’s Addiction on my walkman, sitting in a tiny boat, filled with women who held chickens, on a lake in Guatemala, after a nasty hike that almost killed me. I did this alone and unknown.

The downside of being a traveler, and why I stopped, was the commitment to a life that never built on itself. I felt like my life was a book that I could only read without a bookmark. Every time I moved, I put it down. When I picked it up again, I had to start from the beginning. Every new country, each new town, was back to page one: Who are you? Where have you traveled? Where can I make a little money?

Once I got those questions answered, I shut the book, pulled up stakes, and moved on. It began anew. Life became shallow in that way.

But I still reflect now on the wonder of seeing something for the first time, without having seen a picture first: Mayan ruins, Petra, jungle rivers, ancient chapels carved into fairy chimneys in Turkey, a skinny dog limping down a street in Havanna.

So, yeah, I don’t think it’s the same. I think my brain was different. I think my values were different. The whole thing. Whatever traveling is now, that was something else. I don’t think I would do it now if I could. That is where I see that I’ve aged. But I do regret that nobody can do it now, that nobody even knows what was lost in our transition from people to brands. We’re all tourists now, in perpetuity, taking our world with us wherever we go.

---

This rumination was provoked by this wonderful interview. Learning from Maryanne Wolf how our brains have re-wired since we stopped reading like we used to, I wondered what other experiences have changed due to digital media. All of them, I think, travel being one. Give it a listen, if you have time.

FREE LIFE COACH ADVICE: Embrace anonymity, cultivate obscurity. Find yourself in the silence between clicks. Is it even possible? Perhaps not. To paraphrase Rumi:

Out beyond ideas of personal branding
and self-promotion, there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

Sitting beside you on the subway of life,

Standing clear of the closing doors,

I remain,

Sean Sakamoto