We Had Reasons: A Website Introduction

 

Part I: I explain in a general way what is going on in my life, and why I have a website.

 

I haven’t been home in more than a year. I don’t own a house, so I ought to say I haven’t had a home in more than a year. I’m 32 years old. Everything I own is stored in the back of an old pickup truck in a warehouse in Maine, or with me now, in my bag, on the other side of the world. I have a girlfriend. She isn’t really my girlfriend but she won’t let me call her my wife unless we are in a dangerous or compromising position that requires tactful escape. We are not married. I love her most truly. We have done too many things together to recount even to myself. We lived in New York City, way up town, in San Francisco on a hill too steep to bike, on a sailboat off an island in Portland Maine, and when we met, we were just two kids sharing a bed between classes in Portland Oregon. Now we are traveling, not living anywhere, sleeping in so many places, always together.

 

 

 

I don’t really know why we are out here. We had reasons. We talked about seeing what was going on in the world, understanding how people live, traveling now in this time in our lives, because we aren’t old or young, and we have no children. But really there are no good reasons, or there is no real need of a reason. We started traveling and now we are out here, we have surrendered to the way of it. We don’t feign control for the simple reason that trying to strictly plan where we go and what we do, and when, in any precise way, causes more anxiety and disappointment than necessary. We don’t know how long this part of life will last, or where we will end up. We have some ideas about what we want from life, to build a house, to spend time with our families, to start a family of our own, but the details are intentionally fuzzy, we might be out here moving around for a few years, or maybe we will fly back to our truck full of objects tomorrow, maybe we will expatriate and build a house in some foreign land that we come to love, maybe we will buy a boat and sail it around South America. “Maybe” is one of the parts of traveling that makes me happy just to talk about.

 

This webpage is an infant, its hair still wet, so I daren’t prophesy in too much detail what it will become, or speak too finely of what it is. My hope is that at a minimum it is a place where we keep and share images and ideas. Although we have traveled throughout our lives we haven’t spent much time involved in the travel industry proper. We have always traveled without prior arrangement, no tours, no packaged deals, no resorts, and likewise I don’t expect this webpage to become a source for travel industry related content, like travel hacks or top 10 lists. While this site evolves we will attempt to keep the content simple, to communicate the type of travelstyle and lifestyle that we admire and want to live ourselves: intentional, humble, and authentically adventurous. We are going to write stories about our lives, about the lives of the people we encounter, and about the state of our world as we experience it. We are mid-way through life’s journey and yet full of hope. We would like to find and reflect from our world evidence that fatalism is premature, that although humanity has made some very poor choices, extinction is not necessary, for us, or for the other creatures we rely on and share this planet with. It is of course not just a question of existence. We are also interested in questioning what kind of world we want to live in, and how we ought to live, peering with our cameras, our words, and our minds.

 

 

Part II: This is the part where I criticize the community I am joining and then wonder how I am going to make money without selling my soul to an outdoor shoe company.

 

I have tried to do my research before starting this website, I read through the most popular travel blogs, I made spreadsheets of the most used menu headings, I spent money on internet time (it’s not free out here) to scan through photography portfolio pages, I typed best-travel-adventure-photography-stories into Google in every possible permutation. The experience has made me feel contradicted; do we really want to participate in this community? Much of the travel industry is uninteresting to me, being consumer focused and mainly aimed at well paid urbanites that want to save money on airfare using CC hacks, or to find out how to best see Paris, London, Mexico, Africa in a short vacation (what does this list say about the western view of global geography? City, city, country, continent.) . I guess this might be said of any mature industry; in the end the consumerism is inescapable and distasteful in its transparent attempts to engage you financially. I’m not an anti-capitalist I just don’t like invasive advertising and manipulative marketing.

It is difficult to see space for success in the travel-adventure industry outside of these popular modes. It is difficult not to feel fatalistic about participation at all, to feel that success requires devolution into flat-consumerism. How else can we make money from our efforts? After all we are citizens of the global economy and need income, purpose, and a sense of participation.

 

There is also the issue of content. There is great adventure writing out there but the most popular venues seem to be mostly populated by videos and link-alongs with very little real writing. I can’t blame this on individual sites; it seems more a consequence of the environment. The people who run successful travel industry websites and blogs design their sites to suit their consumers, like niche predators the sites have evolved to be most effective in their environment, or in this case their market. Travel websites are a projection of consumer wants, give the people what they pay for (or what they tend to click on most). There is another way of seeing this: marketing has become so effective the strongest of its mechanisms, which pry on our materialism, sex drive and vanity, have created a space where it doesn’t matter what we, the consumers, the readers, want, or has stimulated us in such a way that we want contradicting things. We start by searching for a well-crafted story of high adventure, but soon there is a flashing button that says 10 best extreme travel adventures in the world and there is a picture of a nice looking lady in a small bathing suit, so you kind of want to click there too, but that just leads to a few videos and brief hyperbolized blurbs. There is no one to blame here, maybe its all of our fault for having vicious appetite’s, but whatever the cause, the result is the same: a space where content is not paramount.

 

All of this comes as unsubstantiated critique, I haven’t given any real examples, and I’m not sure I want to be drawn that deep into the criticism part of this argument. Initially I planned to drag some examples into the light and point out their flaws. But to what end? Instead I will simply say that most of the travel industry makes their money in ways I find distasteful. I am wary of product support and weary of advertising. I guess if we are going to have any financial gain from this website we may need to find a different, and possibly less accessible path.

 

 

Part III: I am having trouble with the conclusion. What am I trying to say?  

 

Although much of the adventure-travel-stories-photography space is vacuous there are also enough examples of amazing humans to make the pursuit attractive. There are actual professional photographers who have devoted their lives to the craft, and maybe, depending on definitions, there are some real adventurers. I keep coming across these portfolio pages with incredible, improbable images from all over the world. Images that leave me feeling that I need to stop my vagabonding-without-a-next-week-plan and get an expedition upgrade: new cameras, sun glasses that cost money, a helicopter for arctic landing shots, full snow suit, underwater camera with strobes and two hand holds, a sponsor. I’m inspired. I’m jealous. I’m intimidated. I’m in.

 

Part of what is happening in this space is very attractive to me, incredible images, thoughtful storytelling, hard earned and bold adventure, and part of it is complete shit, thinly veiled consumerism, fetishization of travel lifestyles and travel vlogging. Can we do one without falling victim to the other? Do they exist independently? Good questions, best answered in the act. There is no conclusion here, we have chosen to participate, here it is.

 

 

Post script: Here I put some stuff I couldn’t erase even though I should have. It’s so hard to kill your kittens (metaphorical sentence-kittens, not real ones).

 

A lingering question: does the Internet need more words, more images, more travel-adventure-story-picture websites? It is already a vast wasteland of unseen efforts. If the whole Internet were a city the neglected slums, the unfinished construction sites and the outdated development projects would stretch to a smoking horizon beyond the small and thriving center. Should we even try?

 

A little voice whispers: if we are going to make it anywhere in life we have to leave the existential questions asked and not answered, shed the doubt and blaze on.