this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
574 points (98.6% liked)
me_irl
7756 readers
169 users here now
All posts need to have the same title: me_irl it is allowed to use an emoji instead of the underscore _
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Consume
Sure, anyone can eat pizza and watch movies. That's not white, particularly.
Work
Sure, some people are driven by being the best in their field of work. Not poor people generally, usually well-off white-collar professionals. That's not necessarily white, but it's getting closer.
Hyperindividualist escapism
Again, not exclusively white at it's base, but romanticized dropping out of society is heavily white in literature, but also it requires severing nearly all the relationships that sustain you, which is a very white thing, as most non-white people actually have their survival and safety nets intimately tied with their communities.
The privilege of empire. The digital nomad culture is almost 75% white.
This ultimately cinched it for me. Who gets to travel the world forever? That's a European Grand Tour for the wealthiest white people, and the poor white people all fantasize about being wealthy white people, mostly because the wealthy white people produce culture that glorifies their own exploits so everyone else just sort of assumes it's what they should aspire to.
If you don't see it, that's fine.
The "hyperindividualist escape" is one thing.
But conceding, and even condemning, the desire to have all the food(s) you enjoy, to become good at something, and to enjoy both the natural and man-made beauty of this planet as "white" activities is giving whiteness too much credit. The natural world is beautiful and has been populated by even more beatiful things despite whiteness. So hell yeah, I'd love to spend a lifetime getting to experience it firsthand, while eating my favorite foods and becoming good at something.
Whiteness drained and is still draining the life and riches out non-white people and places. Why the hell would you grant them an exclusive claim on any types of non-destructive fun too?
"Who gets to travel the world forever?" Yeah, and "who gets to vote and have land?" "Who gets to learn at university?" Don't just cede good shit to whiteness.
You've convinced me. Although I don't think a nomadic lifestyle should be the privilege of only one class or of one group of people - there have been lots of nomadic cultures and they are just as valid as settled cultures.
Sure, but those cultures didn't generally travel the world forever. They just weren't tied to their land via agriculture so they roamed with the climate and the ecosystem dynamics. It's not like nomadic cultures went continent hopping
Isn't "continent hopping" exactly how humans ended up in the Americas to begin with?
No. Human migration is not "traveling the world forever" in this context. There's a huge difference between going to Argentina this summer for a few months and then popping over the Colombia for a weekend before heading to France for a jazz festival and staying another couple of weeks before heading to Cologne for the weekend and then the real fun going to Zimbabwe and doing some safari, and spending centuries and multiple generations migrating following climate and the hunt.
True, but I still think that travel should be more accessible, not less.