It isn’t uncommon to stumble upon the trope of gaining wisdom and an all-around heightened perspective as a product of traveling far and away for some time. One of the most copy-and-pasted quotes people virtue signal with on their Facebook profiles is from Mark Twain, who says “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” See? It covers all the bases. It’s poetic, it rolls off the tongue nicely, it wreaks of a curiosity-driven mind, and implicitly challenges you to travel to test the merits of authenticity. It feels self-explanatory. Yet my experience in aviation working closely alongside fellow flight attendants and commercial pilots, all of whom travel as an essential condition of our earning a living, tells me otherwise. Not that travel is the haven for ignorance, but that there is certainly far more nuance to the experience. This is evidenced by how differently we, as colleagues, register information and form identities around the lifestyle.
Firstly, the political spectrum across the airlines fall into these radicals: Flight attendants are liberal-leaning and pilots are conservative-leaning, not only in the conventional racial and socioeconomic demographics but also along gender identity and sexual orientation. Across major American airlines, commercial pilots are also overwhelmingly heterosexual white males. On the flip side, the population of us commercial flight attendants, although mostly heterosexual white women, are the largest employment demographic of individuals who identify along the spectrum of the LGBTQ members of society in the worldand is far more racially diverse than the population of commercial pilots. The minority among commercial flight attendants is the inverse, the heterosexual males are fewest and furthest between. Obviously, pilots make a ton more money than flight attendants since their jobs require far more hours of expensive training and the risk/reward ratio to their performance is far higher, which also makes it an incredibly prestigious position to hold. It isn’t like the flight attendant’s job is risk-free either, but the standard day doesn’t require perfection in performance to complete the shift.
I bring these stereotypes up because one’s identity or personal experience is often used as a reactionary justification for particular positions on social topics– in this case, the value of travel. It isn’t uncommon to hear someone preface their opinion with something along the lines of, “As a working class first generation latin woman and military veteran mother of three I think travel is all about ___.” What is implied is that a person’s identity is a comprehensive confirmer of reality, that their identity itself is a high quality product of ideological or even strategic legitimacy. Claiming membership to a marginalized group is subtly deployed as a tagline to an intrinsic truth which is meant to be accepted without question. Inversely, historically privileged points of view are more often than not dissolved, as if marginalized groups aren’t vulnerable to the same inconsistencies heir to privileged ones. All of us occupying the sacred space of humanity in movement are guilty of being immersed in our own subjective uniqueness. However undercooked we prefer to order our side-dishes of truth when we register information, there is authentic alignment to be found in the art of seeing beyond your own social dispositions.
When someone tells you they travel for a living it is embedded with the default setting of exploration, that the modus operandi is laced with the spirit of wonder and discovery. And for many of us that’s exactly what it is. Every flight is an adventure, subtly different for every person on the aircraft, and every pilot and flight attendant is some degree of a tour guide. But going on an adventure isn’t exactly glued to the accumulation of wisdom and not every tour guide has their heart of hearts in the journey. The aviation industry, like any industry that offers more benefits than people know what to do with, is also home to its own sinister subculture for agents of ignorance. As much as travel is a liberator it also provides a haven for the worst people imaginable, the likable sociopaths and convenient narcissists, the dregs of the society who are well-traveled and well-spoken and well-connected. The true pollution of the skies. These are folks who live life on the run, who stay in the skies or in foreign destinations specifically to avoid the circumstances at home. They’ve allowed the travel lifestyle itself to become their personality.
Veiled by benefits—the benefit of $0 flights on any airline in particular—they get to avoid confrontations and conflict altogether by simply always being someplace else. Ducking lovers they are unfaithful to, evading the responsibilities of parenthood, endlessly postponing unfinished conversations, promoting the powerful illusion of lavish lifestyles and worldly insight in order to appear more interesting than they truly are, all unaddressed due to the the guise of being too busy flying or being too jet lagged to address reality when they aren’t flying. Some of them take it even further in how they implement the use of fake names, fake backstories, and otherwise completely fabricated personalities suitable for them on the go in foreign cities. It affords them a barrier of mystique that is easy to weaponize into a charming character template to roleplay as. And who could deny its usefulness in most social situations? On the surface, a consequence-free lifestyle with comfortable access to tropical getaways and drastically magnified social circles that transcend state lines does pitch as a huge asset. And perhaps it is in the right person’s hands… but it’s not a life welling with wisdom.
No one so distracted has the time to expand in wisdom. They’re too busy to notice the subtlety and depth of higher truths granted by greater exposure to the world and its people. Too busy cataloging the price of everything to appreciate the value in anything they have. Too fixated on where they’ve been and where they’re going next to ever waste time being where they are, being in the moment. So otherwise plagued by the myths of their own magnificence, they are hubris personified. The unwise, but totally active. Thankfully, they are also few and far between.
I mean this in the least poetic way possible: Just because you travel a lot doesn’t mean you’ve actually gone anywhere. It’s the difference between witnessing the world and engaging with the world. Between getting wet and feeling the water. It suffices to say that it is nothing short of a cosmic banality for you to notice other people’s shoes but be unable to imagine yourself walking in them, to feel their truth as they feel it. Humans are explorers at heart after all. We’ve evolved to walk, run, swim, and even engineered ways to sail and fly. But when there’s no place else to go, our souls must continue the great search.
But hey, I get it. Not everybody travels to gain wisdom anyways. Some of us have enough shit going on that we just need a break from where we are and there’s no shame in that. Nothing wrong with noticing other people’s shoes if you just like shoes. But don’t say you’re wiser because of it. Before any steps are even physically taken, before tickets are purchased or any doors are actually opened, the ability to step outside of yourself is where travel actually begins.
