Earlier this year I unexpectedly found myself in Thailand on a luxury hotel chain press trip. It was a sharp (though not unwelcome) departure from the way I usually travel. As I watched an American woman stick a fork in and send back an omelette no less than five times, I made a passing comment about American tourists to one of my fellow journalists. Unfortunately, she was also American, and told me that everyone should cut them some slack because the people in the rest of the world wouldn’t be able to survive without the money her compatriots spend while on holiday. It did not seem to occur to her that this power dynamic, and the mindset behind it, is why half the planet now resembles a giant strip mall.Almost every time I encounter an American abroad, I am torn between two opposing thoughts: wishing they would travel more so they might understand their way of life is an anomaly that’s destroying the rest of the world, and wishing they would stay in their godforsaken air-con unit of a country and spare the rest of us from having to interact with them. In my ten-plus years of interrailing, backpacking, sofa-surfing, petsitting, remote working, press-tripping, and holidaying across Earth, I’ve done enough boots-on-the-ground research to say this: Contrary to what you may have been led to believe by “wanderlust aesthetic” Instagram accounts, some of the worst people you’ll ever meet are those you come across while following the road less traveled. And it’s not just Americans.Before I go any further, let me clarify for those of you who are already getting angry that it is obviously OK to go traveling. It can even be good—for example when I, the world’s only good and perfect tourist, do it. The point is that stamps in your passport don’t make you a better person, that frequent flyer miles and photos of you in front of waterfalls are not a substitute for a personality (sorry to 80 percent of the men on Hinge), and that, rather than being curious and open-minded, a lot of people who pride themselves on how many countries they have “checked off” have zero curiosity about the countries they are visiting. Others have a little too much curiosity, jet-setting from one ancestral healing practice to which they have no ancestral ties to another, until they finally find one they can repackage and sell to other spiritually bereft Westerners. Basically, what I’m saying is that while it is possible to travel like the late, great Anthony Bourdain, a lot of people are doing it in a way that is actually closer to Christopher Columbus if he had a smartphone.Long-term travel was once the reserve of hippies with bad hygiene practices, students on their gap year, and wealthy bohemians, but the rise of remote working has birthed a new modern-day travel monster: the digital nomad. Almost always working in tech or helming a pyramid scheme, this demographic is driven to travel entirely by a desire to do exactly what they would at home but for cheaper, with better weather, and higher prospects of casual sex with anti-vax somatic healers. I once shared a living space with one such man in Mexico, who I could only surmise had been sent as a test from God to teach me something about my own endurance abilities. He spent every day working on his Burning Man-inspired luxury “festival fashion” startup at the local expat-owned co-working space (none of these words are in the Bible, etc), returning in the evenings to cook himself a big bowl of foul-smelling protein slop and tell me about how the best bet for America’s future was a presidential ticket featuring Mark Cuban and Tulsi Gabbard. His approach to “experiencing” Mexico was by no means unique. Where once free spirits journeyed to foreign lands in order to spend months taking heroin and writing era-defining literature, the modern travel landscape consists mostly of aspirational entrepreneurs who have little interest in their surroundings beyond whether the WiFi connection is strong enough for Claude to optimize their intermittent fasting plan.In my time in the wanderlust mines, I have met a white Canadian who referred to jazz and blues as “N-word music”—with a hard R—when asked what kind of music he liked; a British couple in Marrakech annoyed that people were trying to sell them things in the bazaar; a Belgian coder / life coach who framed her silence on social justice issues as “choosing to ignore low vibrational topics”; Canadian techbros on $150k salaries arguing with Mexican waiters over a $2 tip; an American offended by the sight of a Hindu swastika on a temple in Thailand; an Arab man who said feminism was bullshit for weak, lazy women because his own mummy did everything in the house and never once complained (oh I bet); Swedish reggae lovers who’d come to Jamaica and were annoyed that the country had moved on from Bob Marley to dancehall; a Dutch boy who “joked” about spiking my drink; and too many kinds of fascist neo-hippie to name. I won’t even begin to list the things I’ve seen Israelis do and say.The worst offenders in this crowded field of dickheads are those who also perceive themselves to be “spiritual” while actively spending their days leaving the world a worse place than they found it, while training AI models to use even more of the earth’s dwindling fresh water resources. Due to the fact that many of these people are coincidentally also highly sensitive empaths, they unfortunately cannot engage with politics or any of the negative impacts of their lifestyle, which is why they must instead release their trauma through ecstatic dance and being rude to service staff who make less money in a year than they spend on nootropic supplements.Perhaps the problem is that travel has been culturally depoliticized and turned into an aesthetic while remaining inherently politicalPerhaps the problem is that travel has been culturally depoliticized and turned into an aesthetic while remaining inherently political. Who gets to travel, who gets to share their narrative, who has the freedom to explore the world until they “find themselves,” and who has to feed their family by serving the self-actualization of foreigners are all subjects that are easier to ignore when making free-spirit content. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t travel, but that you should try and bring some self-awareness to it, which means paying up instead of arguing when the local taxi driver charges you tourist fares because you are a tourist.Despite ostensibly traveling for the purpose of new and exciting experiences, a huge proportion of tourists—from lobster-hued Brits tucking into full English breakfasts at Irish pubs in Malaga, to the Australian reiki healer eating avocado toast on gluten-free bread in a millennial-branded coffee shop in Bali—now expects everywhere on Earth to function the same way it does back home, leading to exasperated temper tantrums when the market in Guatemala doesn’t accept Apple Pay. Over time, this has the flattening effect of turning the whole world into an architectural rendering of what constitutes a “good life” under ouroboros-capitalism, and destroying all the things that made somewhere worth visiting in the first place.At the tail end of my recent trip, I spent an afternoon wandering through the streets of one of Thailand’s beautiful islands. The main strip was overlooked by a backdrop of lush forest and mountainside, which had been hacked into to make space for a lurid drag of sports bars, strip clubs, weed shops, and other places for tourists to get hammered for cheap somewhere exotic without experiencing any kind of culture shock. As I walked past another construction site, I was reminded of the scene in First Reformed where the protagonist, haunted by the weight of human environmental destruction, asks “Will God forgive us for what we’ve done to this world?” The more I travel, and the more people I meet who define themselves by doing so in the most self-serving way possible, the more unsure I become that he will.Follow Niloufar Haidari on Instagram @niluthedamajaThe post The Worst People On Earth Are the Ones You Meet Traveling appeared first on VICE.