When Your Friend Comes Back From Traveling, And Is Actually A Major Douche Bag
By Althea Mehta
We all hear this bullshit about friends that go traveling to Asia for a month and come back changed people. But fucking Dan* won’t stop going on about how no one has really “experienced life” until they’ve been living in the ditches of Laos or whatever he did for fun.
He starts using the full version of his name. Daniel is now more serious as he has seen the realities of life as a Westerner in poverty-stricken Asia. He dresses in bohemian loose trousers making sure that no employer in their right mind would hire him. Anyway, as he’s told us repeatedly he’s not about “that cooperate life, bro” as he uploads his travel shots onto Instagram. He doesn’t believe in exploitation, he says, as he plugs in his iPhone.
Well here’s the terrible news for you, Daniel, no one gives a shit if you think the food of Thailand is so much better than the Thai place we’re eating at.
No one cares if you made cool friends from all over the world who are all probably in your bohemian loose trousered club. No one cares that travelling “liberated” you, as you come back to your hometown to live in your parents’ basement. No one cares about how “travelling makes you richer than material goods” as you profess your emotional attachment to a bracelet you got from a street seller.
We get it Daniel, you had an amazing time exploring the white sandy beaches of Malaysia, and discovering all these cool things you’d never seen before. It sounds incredible and your Instagram shots are totally #travelporn worthy. We honestly do get it. But you’re kind of pissing us off.
Travelling is supposed to make you explore and challenge yourself, but it does not make your better than anyone else. It does not give you the right to look down upon the things you loved before you went travelling. Humble yourself. You can be well traveled without talking about it every two seconds or entering a reference to make sure people didn’t forget that you’ve seen places.
When someone is talking about this great architectural building yesterday, don’t butt in and talk about how there were so many great temples in Vietnam. How nothing compares to those temples that you saw for five fucking minutes before you went off to see all the other touristy things. I’m sure you must have had such deep insight of “how the locals really live” in your two days there before you rushed off to the next country.
Spare me your bullshit, because you’re no different from the rest of us struggling 20-something losers. You’re still poor like us; you’re still trying to find out who you are like us. You just escaped for a little while and didn’t learn much from travelling except of how to be a gigantic ass.
So damn Daniel, don’t get back at it again with the boring travelling stories. We’re not interested.