Travel disappoints the photo that made us go, because the exotic doesn't live in the place but in the way we look at it: as early as 1972, the water towers photographed by Bernd and Hilla Becher proved as much. The crowd, meanwhile, steals no landscape; it robs us of a silence we'd hoped to keep for ourselves.
What exactly is the exotic?
So the exotic doesn't live in the place: it lives in the gaze that falls on it.
Forget palm trees and temples: The School of Life boils the word exotic down to a far more modest idea. A destination becomes exotic the moment we suspect it holds something important to teach us, about the world or about ourselves. Every place, the theory goes, carries its own character, revealing some facet of human nature: choosing one is less about ticking off a map than about asking what we're really trying to understand about ourselves.
The proof that the exotic has nothing to do with the scenery, The School of Life finds in the husband-and-wife duo Bernd and Hilla Becher, who as early as 1972 photographed water towers considered utterly unremarkable in Germany and the United States. The reverse proves equally true in the souk (market) of Casablanca's medina (old town), where, surrounded by pistachios, candied lemons and harissa, the stallholder sees nothing exceptional in his day. So the exotic doesn't live in the place: it lives in the gaze that falls on it.
Why does the crowd really get under our skin?
Hating the crowd has become second nature to the seasoned traveller. And yet what rarely bothers us is other people's presence in itself. The School of Life offers another explanation: what unsettles us is the absence of a shared, dignified reverence for the place we're visiting. We'd like everyone to fall silent, bow their heads, feel exactly what we feel, as though the site existed for our eyes alone. The crowd doesn't rob you of a landscape; it robs you of the collective silence you'd hoped to keep for yourself.
This imagined solitude runs up against another reality: the tourism industry itself keeps visitors at arm's length from the locals. It opens up countries while reducing the people who live there to functional silhouettes: the pool attendant, the taxi driver, the woman on reception. The crowd you try not to look at may, in the end, be nothing more than a mirror of a distance already built in long before you arrived.
The perfect hotel, the dreaded airport: does the promise hold?
The promise is repeated everywhere: spending more is bound to make you happier. Marble in the bathroom, carefully chosen bedside lamps: everything seems to suggest that happiness is negotiated at the price of the room rate. Yet The School of Life observes that this industry is selling an equation that doesn't add up: however beautifully appointed, the perfect hotel leaves the question of happiness exactly where it stood before you walked in.
Faced with that arithmetic, budget-travel guides answer with detail rather than philosophy: one tips-packed ebook sorts its advice category by category: flights, transport, accommodation, meals, while openly declaring its affiliate links. Spending less is no more consoling than spending more; it simply isn't the same question. As for the airport we storm through muttering under our breath, The School of Life sees it as almost a destination in its own right, one that pre-departure panic merely stops us from noticing.
What if the real change of scenery were coming home?
We machine-gun it with photos rather than actually look at it: too busy framing the perfect shot, we forget to live it, and since we assume it's safely tucked away in the phone, we never open it again. The School of Life notes as much: the very desire to travel is born, almost always, from one or two mentally retouched images that we absorb quickly before wanting to move on to the next one. The journey begins, already, with a misunderstanding with our own memory.
Family holidays reshuffle the roles: the child discovers parents suddenly clumsy on unfamiliar ground, and the breakfast buffet becomes a celebration no museum can rival. One last twist remains, suggested by The School of Life: come home as a stranger, imagining you've just stepped off a long-haul flight into your own street, the one you've never really looked at. Real change of scenery may never have left the neighbourhood.
In the end, travel owes us nothing: not the promised exotic, not the hoped-for silence, not the perfect room that fixes everything. Instead, suitcase barely set down, it hands us back a question more useful than any booking: what did we truly look at over there, that we never look at here? The surest way to keep that gaze alive isn't to book the next flight out, but to turn it, as early as tomorrow, on our own street, our own souk, our corner café, that stretch of everyday life we assumed was too familiar to deserve a second glance.
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