There’s a great novel that came out in 1949, “The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles.
It’s about a married couple, Port and Kit Moresby, two wealthy but rather dissatisfied, aimless Americans traveling through the Tunisian Sahara, seeking experiences, adventure and hopefully, a chance of “finding themselves.”
But instead of finding all that, all they find is more of the same-ol-same-ol: the indifferent desert, one small run-down town after another, roach-y hotels, and little meaningful interaction with the locals. It all sounds very glamorous and exotic from afar, but close up, meh, not so much.
It seems they left America to escape the disconnected emptiness of their own existence, of their relationship, but all they found was more emptiness and disconnect. Which the vast, empty desert amplifies, both physically and metaphorically. Without revealing the ending, suffice to say, it wasn’t a happy one.
You could say the book is a great warning for anyone deciding to embark on a similar path. Your average digital nomad, traveling abroad, looking for something different and story-worthy.
Yes, there might be a 12th-Century cathedral view outside your window, but the everyday reality of Airbnb’s, remote working in cafes all day and evenings hanging out in bars with fellow expat you hardly know, without putting down any roots or having deep relationships with those around you, gets very old fast. Exotic locations are fine and dandy, but they’re transient. If they weren’t transient, they wouldn’t be exotic. That’s the paradox.
The tragedy of The Sheltering Sky isn’t that the Moresbys were necessarily bad people, but that instead of finding meaning the old-fashioned way, through relationships, duty, hard work, sacrifice, they were trying to manufacture it abroad. They thought by putting themselves in sufficiently exotic circumstances, a meaningful narrative would simply emerge. The desert disagreed.
Of course, it’s not just the Moresbys who do this, we all do. We’re always trying to take short cuts to fulfilment with our little divertissements.
Organizations do it too. They think a good advertising campaign, PR plugs, internal psyche-up sessions, corporate retreats, expensive offices or flashy rebrands will transform them. Sure, all of that has its place. But what makes a company worth remembering is never the campaign. It’s the people. It was always the people.
