​IN DEFENCE OF LAZINESS

Like every rose has its thorn, the brood’s summer holidays have a hook. They arrive with the macabre shadow of the ominous vacation-trip.
 
Yes, I realise I blaspheme when I speak out against travel. I’m fully aware how sacrosanct that commodity is (one Pablo Neruda even goes so far as to condemn those who do not travel to a slow death.) And yet, I continue with my tirade. I attribute my travel reluctance to the twin reasons of impersonation and whim.
 
Let's first consider Impersonation. It’s clear that the ‘travel’ which Messrs Neruda & company endorse is drastically different from the ‘travel’ of the routine mortal. Neruda advertises journeys that are supposed to be about rest, recreation, and the broadening of perspective. In contrast, what the typical vacation-trip seeks is titillation and excitement. It seeks to cater to, what Huxley calls, ‘an almost insatiable appetite for distraction.’ But that’s just half the story.
 
Let’s hence move on to the second reason. Personal whim. In other words, plain laziness. And though this may seem like too feeble a foe for the mighty ‘travel’- the quintessential David to a Goliath – I fancy I may have stumbled upon an apposite slingshot. Friends, I invoke before you the futurist Nick Bostrom. Now Bostrom, while expounding upon why the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence has so far failed, expalins that there’s a very small time window within which civilisations can make an interstellar journey to an alien planet. This window comprises of the years between their discovery of radio waves and their being able to plug themselves into a virtual reality (one that’s at least as good as the real thing; a Matrix, if you will.) Because once you’re able to simulate a perfect reality, there’s no reason why you’d want to endure pain and death in a real world. And that obviously leaves very little incentive for long and boring interstellar travel.
 
Now, let’s shrink the Bostrom model. Let’s replace interstellar travel with journeys to distant lands. Also, let’s swap virtual reality with the available visuals and literature about those lands(enhanced, of course, by a fecund imagination and a capacity for extrapolation). Finally, let the travails of a long and cumbersome interstellar journey be substituted with baggage claim queues, tiresome visa applications, reservation woes, and pressurised cabins that won’t endure cigarette smoke. And there! We have the proverbial straw with which the sublimely lazy will strike the travelling camel’s back.
 
Strike, I said; not break. For there are few arguments that triumph over the domestic imperative. So even as one writes this, he needs to answer the wife on the dry-cleaning status of the blue jacket that she’s packing for the trip.