I have little interest in traveling these days, for a variety of reasons. One is that I have extensively lived abroad and witnessed the marvels of multiculturalism this way already. Granted, I have hardly left the Western world, but I have seen quite a bit of it. Otherwise, I have spent a few months in total in Asia, i.e. Singapore and China. I could imagine traveling to Taiwan and Japan, but that would probably already be the total extent of my traveling-related bucket list. However, I had made a note to look into going on a (literal) pilgrimage, i.e. walking dozens or hundreds of miles, in relative isolation.

There are a number of very well-known pilgrimages. Arguably the most popular one is the Camino de Santiago, which is a collective term used for a number of pilgrimages that end at the alleged burial site of the apostle James the Great. Of course, there are others as well. As a starting point, I looked into the various routes and also into accommodations as I surely would not have liked to sleep in the wilderness. However, the initial research dampened my enthusiasm quite significantly. As I quickly learned, there is a thriving cottage industry nowadays, catering to the modern pilgrim. You can book, for a princely sum, essentially packaged tours. These are group travel offers where you pick start and end date, accommodations of various levels of comfort, and route segments based on difficulty. Out of curiosity, I even requested a catalogue of one of the larger companies organizing pilgrimages, primarily in order to get an understanding of their level of professionalism. I received a glossy catalogue with around 100 pages, showing grinning boomers in every other picture. Quite frankly, at this point the idea of a pilgrimage in today’s world started to look like a total joke to me. It was basically sold as a spiritual alternative to going onto a week-long cruise.

A few years ago there was a viral image showing hundreds of people queuing up at the top of Mt. Everest. These people did not get there themselves but simply paid a lot of money to local guides. Climbing Mt. Everest has become a mass-tourism event, just like pilgrimages. Of course, I do not want to claim that a pilgrimage is as difficult as climbing the tallest mountain on Earth, even with extensive paid help. However, both have in common that the tourism industry apparently succeeded turning personal struggle and physical challenge into a conveniently packaged good. You only have to show up and pay the asking price. The rest is basically taken care of for you.

In the context of this research, I also recalled that I occasionally heard of acquaintances going on a pilgrimage, often even relatively young women who did not come across as being particularly religious. Well, this is also easily explained. Today’s young women document their “pilgrimage experience” on TikTok and make sure to keep all their friends and followers up-to-date with images and “stories”. This leads to another problem: Not only has mass tourism taken over pilgrimages, modern technology also robs you of the intended experience. Pilgrimages are spiritual at their core. There is the aspect of the “connection to God”, if you are religious, but this is just one angle. You may as well use extended solitude as a means for understanding how vast the planet is, how little you can ever see of it, and of how limited your lifetime is. In addition, you may learn something about yourself by being left alone with your own thoughts for days or even a few weeks.

Looking more into the aspect of mass tourism, I learned that in the 1980s only a few hundred to a few thousand people a year went on the Camino de Santiago. Today, however, there are half a million pilgrim-tourists telling themselves that the are engaging in a spiritual exercise by never leaving the comfort of a larger group. If I was a cynic, I would ask what the value in a modern pilgrimage is when it can easily be done by even untrained women, no matter their age. Here, I am thinking of a female acquaintance of mine who surprised me by telling that she did the Camino de Santiago recently. This woman was slim, but did not exercise at all. She did not mention anything about any physical challenges she had to overcome. Well, she also did not seem to have gotten anything from this experience, apart from empty bragging rights. She talked about it like she would have talked about any other vacation.

I grew up in a religious family. Pilgrimages were a topic that sometimes came up. A female friend of my mother even went on a pilgrimage in her 30s. She did the Camino de Santiago. This was sometime in the 1980s, and I recall that this was a big topic of conversation for quite a while. Upon her return, this woman spoke of the physical challenges, of “getting in touch with herself”, and also the spiritual aspects of walking for an entire day without seeing another human being, apart from the interactions in the places she rested, so-called albergues. There may have been an element of exaggeration. However, it is believable that she really spent days and weeks mainly by herself and with God. Today’s pilgrims, however, are constantly on the smartphone and get herded along the pilgrimage by a tour guide. However, this element was present, albeit to a lesser element also in the 1980s and 1990s. Lourdes in France, for instance, is a very popular destination and that pilgrimage is probably comparable to a shopping trip in difficulty. Online sentiments reflect that modern pilgrimages are a joke, albeit the people posting this may be unaware of it:

My personal conclusion is that it is not possible to do a genuine pilgrimage in today’s world, primarily due to mass tourism. Of course you could say that you did the Camino de Santiago or some other pilgrimage but you really would not have done that. Instead, you would only have pretended to do a pilgrimage. The spiritual elements of a pilgrimage, perhaps without the aspect of reaching a specific site of religious significance, can be experienced otherwise. The spiritual is all around you in nature. In the area I live, for instance, I need to drive only for a few minutes, in basically any direction I want, and I could spend easily two to three hours in nature, encountering only few signs of human civilization.

I once came across a normie-IQ comparison of a pilgrimage and tourism, the kind of comparison that is intended to make normies feel smug for how smart and sophisticated you are. The major takeaway was that a pilgrimage is spiritual whereas tourism is recreational. The former supposedly brings you closer to God, the latter moves you further away. All of this was patent nonsense. You will not feel much of an achievement if you get dragged up Mt. Everest as one of hundred of people on any given day, just as you will not get close to God if you join the never-ending stream of tourists who pretend to be pilgrims.

If you wanted an experience comparable to a pilgrimage, your best choice is arguably to go on an extended hike. There are plenty of routes that are hundreds of kilometers long. One issue is that you would need to plan such a trip better. There is also the aspect of wildlife. You would not encounter wolves or a bear on a mass-tourism pilgrimage but you may encounter such animals in the wilderness. Even a wild boar could pose a serious hazard. My approach is to enjoy solitude in nature. I like to go on spontaneous hikes and disappear for a few hours. Sometimes, I just look for a spot in nature nearby, away from any hiking trail there may be, that is out of sight of any road or human settlements. Then I sit down and just do nothing at all. Sometimes I meditate in nature but I am also content with just looking across meadows or marveling at trees. Arguably, this is a much more spiritual experience than I could get on a normie pilgrimage on which I would encounter many groups of pompous boomers and chattering women who enjoy their weeks of solitude together, probably hoping to get railed by some local Chad in the next hostel in order to make their pilgrimage even more spiritual.