Last year I spent 15 days in the air. Properly in the air – metal tubes, recycled oxygen, itchy blankets and that strange limbo where you watch a large plane crawl over a tiny map – and more than 30 per cent of my year was spent away from home. In these moments, time zones merge together and your body gives up trying to belong anywhere. For me, it’s an enormous professional privilege, though admittedly, I have a personal kinship with Vreeland’s refusal to stand still. Maybe all this is a contrarian view from that icky place of privilege, but something I’ve learnt is that when you move that much, you start to notice patterns. And the most striking is not necessarily how different places are, but how similar they have become. What it teaches you, however, is how you have to put in the work to experience true novelty. The eye may have to travel, and my job is to document, but increasingly my view has started to feel like it was being escorted, my gaze gentrified.

For better or worse, everywhere now arrives pre-interpreted. Before you land, you know what the breakfast looks like, where the best coffee can be found and where the light falls for the perfect selfie. Social media has turned travel into a form of visual confirmation: we’re told to go not to see, but to recognise. The irony is, for those who live in these destinations, globalisation, immigration (and indeed, colonisation) have brought a replication of the wider world to their doorstep. Not always a terrible thing, though often a convenience largely driven by capital, tourism and Western demand, meaning cultural exchange now often moves in one dominant direction. Whereas, for travellers, the sameness offers the comfort of familiarity, a sort of home-exported abroad, even as it subtly erodes the very difference travel once promised. There are English pubs in the Arctic Circle. Milan has an oddly large amount of poke bowl stores. Stuttgart has matcha shops that look suspiciously like the ones in Copenhagen, which look suspiciously like the ones in London, which attempt to emulate the trendiest ones in Tokyo. Once a niche, the regional Brazilian dish açaí has become a trendy global mainstream phenomenon of frozen bowls that look the same whether you’re ordering one in Spreitenbach, Shenzhen or Sydney. Of course, global cultural institutions have also not escaped the great flattening. Every museum now has an Instagram moment – a reflective surface, a photo wall or an immersive photogenic experience. And gallery gift stores, which once offered unique, thoughtful gifts, seem to be curated by the same company. In this sense, art is no longer something you discover, something that expands your thinking or something confrontational, it becomes a landmark of your travels you position yourself beside and stick on your fridge.

Surprise in today’s essence of travel can be found in the things no algorithm warns you about. Few TikToks, for example, explain that German trains often run late, or that there is traffic on the autobahn, that bartenders in Stockholm don’t simply enjoy having a chat as they might in Melbourne. Influencers won’t mention that the rowdiest Emirates business class flight you can take, outside of the World Cup, is Manchester to Dubai – at least, according to a staff member I once asked who ran the airline’s famous A380 sky bar. Similarly, nothing will prepare you for the number of Americans who arrive in Iceland by cruise ship. In fact, a hotel concierge once told me there are so many Americans now coming to Iceland (around 600,000 annually), it actively shapes the curation of Reykjavík’s Hafnarhús art museum. They disembark in the thousands and descend on hotel foyers in matching gorpcore, ask local roasters if they serve filtered coffee, to then climb on buses towards waterfalls they have researched on their phones. Alas, it’s not their fault. They have been promised Iceland, and Iceland – now a brand as much as a place – dutifully appears as it does on the feed.

Here lies the tension of modern travel: we want meaning, but we follow maps drawn by engagement metrics – like travel brochures on steroids. But what’s often missing is context: the algorithm is remarkably efficient at telling you where to go and shockingly bad at telling you why, rewarding the repeatable and recognisable places that look good in under 10 seconds. Which is why the world now feels full of places that are aesthetically pleasing and spiritually vacant.

The reason why Vreeland’s quote sticks with me is that all those decades ago, travel was not about accumulation. Ticking off destinations wasn’t as much of a priority for Vreeland as sharpening her perception of the world around her. The eye has to travel because the sameness of cultural stagnation fogs our gaze. But what happens when travel itself becomes stagnant? When the same scenes, habits, rituals and tastes appear like carbon copies of each other? When you are in transit as much as I am, you begin to crave the lesser televised (or Instagramified) moments: a place to people-watch for hours, a bar with no discernible theme, a meal that isn’t trying to be anything its not or a destination you found on Google Maps just from thumbing around on street view that may or may not even be a vibe. It can take work to be surprised. This is the part of travel we don’t like to admit: that seeking originality now involves deliberate, self-imposed friction. You have to venture beyond the algorithm, beyond the places already optimised for your arrival. You have to be willing to be bored, slightly disappointed and ready to be uncomfortable. TikTok doesn’t send you to places where nothing photographs well, but those are often the places where the sparks alight in your brain, and you notice things you wouldn’t otherwise – something that feels real that you can take home with you as a unique memento. 

This isn’t an argument for staying home. It’s an argument for travelling better, to places not so optimised for your comfort and front-facing camera; for reclaiming a view separate from the feed, seeking context and remembering that the point of movement is not consumption, but recalibration. When you move through the world often enough, you realise that the most valuable thing travel gives you is contrast, cultural context and a reminder that the world is larger, stranger and less obedient than your phone would suggest. Today’s eye has to travel because otherwise our view on the world becomes a spoon-fed monoculture, one 9:16-ratioed vista at a time.