You sit there in the glow of the desk lamp and you look at the screen and you want to tell the world that you are a person with a body that feels things. You want to say that you get sick on boats and you hate the sound of a crowded market and you want to see the trees at dawn without sixty other people in bright shirts.

But the site does not care about your body and it does not care about your soul. It gives you a box for your name and a box for your card number and then it gives you a list of things to buy. You can choose the gold room or the silver room and you can add a bottle of wine for eighty dollars and you can pay for a ride from the airport.

This is not making a trip for you and this is just you doing the work for the company so they do not have to pay a person to talk to you. They call it a wizard because they want you to think there is magic but the only trick is how they hide the things you actually need to have a good time.

The Splinter of Choice

Nina spent three hours last night looking at a site for a trip to the coast and she felt the same way I felt when I had to pull a splinter out of my thumb this morning. It is a slow and sharp pain that comes from trying to fix a big problem with a tool that is too small for the job.

She wanted to go to the reef but she saw the picture of the big boat with the loud music and the open bar and she knew her stomach would turn before the boat even left the dock. She looked for a button that said she wanted a small boat or a quiet morning or just a way to talk to someone who knew the water. There was no button for that.

There was only a dropdown menu for champagne and a checkbox for a late checkout. The site was built to sell the things that make the most money and the things that are easy to put in a box and ship to a thousand people at once. If they cannot scale it they will not show it to you.

A Menu vs. A Conversation

We have all learned to accept this fake version of choice because it is fast and it feels like we are in charge. You click a few circles and you see the price change and you think you are building a life. But you are just picking from a menu of things they already bought and paid for months ago.

Real travel is not a menu and it is a conversation. It is the way the air smells after it rains in the jungle and the way a specific driver knows the road that does not have the potholes and the way a hotel owner remembers that you like a room far away from the stairs. These are the things that make a trip stay in your mind for ten years but you cannot put them in a line of code.

Software is built to remove the human element because humans are messy and humans take time and humans want things that do not fit into a database.

“A contract with no blank lines is a trap for the man who signs it.”

– Ahmed R. J., Union Negotiator

I spoke to Ahmed R. J. who has spent his life as a union negotiator and he knows more about the way people hide the truth than anyone I know. Ahmed says a contract with no blank lines is a trap and he is right about the travel sites too. The lack of a blank box where you can type your actual heart is a sign that they do not want to hear it.

They want you to stay on the path they paved for you because that path is where they keep all the profit. If you want to go off that path you become a problem for their system. You become a cost instead of a click. They want you to think you are special but they treat you like a unit of heat that moves from one hotel to the next.

The Spirit of the Monday Market

The gap between picking an add-on and being known by another person is the gap between a customer and a human being. When you go to a place like Latin America you are going to a part of the world that runs on talk and touch and time. You cannot map the spirit of a place like Belize or the mountains of the south onto a grid of choices.

A computer does not know that the Monday market is now a place for tourists to buy plastic junk and it does not know that the little village ten miles away has a woman who has been weaving the same pattern for forty years. It only knows that the market has a pin on the map and a contract with the bus company.

If you want the woman with the weaving you have to find someone who has been there and who has sat in her kitchen and who knows how to get there when the road is muddy.

This is why the tools we use are failing us even as they get faster and shinier. They are making it easier to buy a trip but they are making it harder to have an experience. You spend your whole week at work following rules and filling out forms and then you go on a vacation where you have to do the same thing.

But friction is where the life is. Friction is the conversation with the guide who tells you about his grandfather and friction is the change in plans because the birds are nesting in a different bay this year. You cannot template the wild and you cannot put a price on the way a person looks at you when they realize you are actually interested in their world.

Most of the big sites are just layers of paint on top of a giant machine that was built in the nineties to track plane seats. They do not know who you are and they do not want to know. It is a mirror that shows you what you want to see but it has no depth. It is a flat surface that stops you from seeing what is actually on the other side.

The Relief of the Real

There is a sense of relief when you stop trying to fit your life into a dropdown menu. It is like when I finally got that splinter out and the throb stopped and the skin could start to heal. You look for the people who do not have a wizard on their home page because they are too busy talking to people on the phone or over an email. They are the ones who know that a trip is a living thing.

In the Caribbean and across the south there are thousands of tiny details that a bot will never see. There are tides that change and there are festivals that happen because the sun hit the church a certain way. You want to be the person who is eating fish on a beach with a man who caught it two hours ago. That man does not have a website and he does not have an API.

If you keep clicking the buttons that the software gives you then you will keep getting the life that the software wants for you. You will stay in the lane and you will see the things they want you to see and you will pay the price they want you to pay. But if you step back and you look at the screen for what it is you can see the edges of the cage.

The next time you sit down to plan a trip try to find the place where the form ends. Look for the white space where there are no buttons and no menus and no dropdowns. That is where the real trip begins and that is where you will find the person you were hoping to become when you first started looking.

Stop being a user and start being a human and find the people who know the difference. Your body and your soul will thank you when you are standing on that quiet beach and the only sound you hear is the water and the only thing you feel is the sun and there is not a single champagne bottle or catamaran party in sight.

It is a big world and it is too big for a tiny box on a website. You should go see it for yourself and you should do it on your own terms and you should never let a wizard tell you what is possible. Turn off the screen and talk to a person and let the real world in through the cracks of the machine. The splinter is out and the air is clear and the road is waiting for you to walk it.