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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3333 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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We've talked about Anthony Bourdain here a few times.

Here's this travel writer's account of following in his footsteps and after Bourdain finally meets with her and validates her, she has a bit of an identity crisis when she realizes he's a sad loser.

Firstly, being a travel journalist is not as glamorous as it looks, having tossed her cookies after eating token cooked goat brain and local fruit

The fast life always slows down, but not how you’d expect. After enough time, you just get used to the pace, then it doesn’t seem so fast.

The next day, I spent the entire afternoon curled up at the base of the porcelain throne, praying for salvation from the unwashed melon. I was going to stop doing drugs, I told myself. Nothing was worth the panic of a comedown. Then again, I’d said that several times before.

I began to realize that going to different countries wasn’t a solution to a life. I had stopped being able to outrun my problems. Eventually, life on the road just becomes regular life. Whereas most people escape for adventure, when you’re a travel writer, you start craving an escape to stability. But people keep telling you that you have a dream job.

With my head over the toilet, I came up with a plan to kill myself. It wasn’t about the fruit. It was about the fact that I was living out my dreams and I couldn’t feel anything. Life was meaningless and I saw only one way out. I was going to get a gun. I wasn’t going to leave a note.

But also, at some point she comes across an episode where Bourdain interviews Iggy Pop, the godfather of punk and his personal idol, and finds that an older and more mellow Iggy had come there from the gym, orders one drink, has the shrimp. Talks about how love and relationships are what sustain him now. It seems to crush Bourdain, who realizes the guy who invented live fast die young was just putting on an act, not leaving an instruction manual to be taken seriously.

Bourdain, who grappled with drug addiction and depression, kills himself at 61 during a bout of unrequited love.

I can't help but make the connection that the punk ethos and the travel-slutting ethos of taking the highs and the peaks and dodging the responsibilities and commitments, they might be a sign of enlightenment, or making the best of a cold uncaring world where nothing means anything, but probably it's an appealing outlet to the mentally ill and we should be skeptical of attempting to romanticize this kind of transience.

Quote our local @coffee_enjoyer back in 2024:

Here is the liberal-individualist boomer par excellence. He tours the world and waxes poetic on the quaint social life, yet considers himself above their primitive family and social ties. He sits down with large families to eat, he attends their communal festivals, and he transmits this all to the solitary Americans in their living room. He is the rootless cosmopolitan, an omni-tourist, an enjoyer of spectacle over substance. Seeing all these wonders of the world, he’s yet unable to internalize their moral significance and necessity. He is self-worshipping; he cooked himself an identity in Kitchen Confidential and was too blinded by pride to ever revise it. Bourdain wanted to be the cool Western individualist loner, enjoyer of all but adherent to none. He attended every place’s ritual meal — each one a eucharist, essential, consuming God — but only as the aloof tourist, the narrator. It was this pride and absence of self-reflection (one’s real needs and obligations) which is the deepest reason. He let his heart be captured by an exotic woman to fulfill his own self-image, the idol he worshipped, which led to his demise.

I am mostly unable to convince people in the progressive sphere that Bourdain's mental illness had anything to do with his lifestyle. Even Claude refuses to admit it. And adding the detail and sober account from this travel writer is met with the similar rejection. Mental illness just happens to people and living like a transient and dropping out of society and rejecting connection is just like, a totally valid way to live and says nothing about the mental state of the people living it, don'tchaknow? I just don't buy it, I guess.

I enjoyed travel slutting (and by this I mean extended tourism) and while I never identified with punk, for awhile I did the psychedelic Timothy Leary adjacent thing of trying to take drugs with numbers in their name and break out of default living, but ... it's kind of hard. And neither of these things are all that fulfilling at length. I'm not sure what's going through the heads of people who say they could just happily tour Europe or drop acid for forever. The fact that Bourdain is not a fringe figure but like a progressive hero meant to be celebrated and emulated is wild.

Say what you will about the lame conformity of marrying your sweetheart and having 2.3 kids and buying the house with a white picket fence and your thrills are drinking a beer, smoking a brisket and giving your wife a creampie every Saturday, but after seeing friends die so young or losing their minds or never really being able to hold a marriage together, to say nothing of the grim meathook reality I've seen traveling the third world, that lame conformist life looks more like a precious gift and I feel sorry for people who get conned into rejecting it.

Great post. I have my own thoughts about the specific catalyst that prompted Bourdain to kill himself. Pleased to see that @coffee_enjoyer seconded it in the linked post (before I changed my handle).

I've met some of these people who are addicted to "wanderlust", and they often seem rather unstable and unreliable. They remind me of a Reddit thread I once read about underrated red flags, and one comment said if a person often says "I used to have this friend..." (Good example, even if I felt a little personally attacked by it.) Or one of de la Rochefoucald's maxims (I'm paraphrasing): we get excited by making new friends because we feel we aren't sufficiently admired by our existing ones, and hope that our new friend will admire us as much as we feel we deserve. Living your life on the road is advantageous for dysfunctional people, as all the people you meet will only know you long enough to learn about your good qualities: you don't plan on sticking around long enough for them to find out that you're bad with money, short-tempered or have a bad relationship with your family. As Chuck Palahniuk would say, they're single-serving friends.

People who struggle with long-term intimate relationships instead opt for short flings and holiday romances, but it's a vicious circle, because the longer you spend behaving this way, the less practice you're getting at the skills you'll need for actual relationships. By the time you decide you're getting too old for this shit and want to form a real relationship and settle down with someone, you may find yourself wholly at a loss for how to comport yourself in this context. Habitual womanisers know exactly what to say to get a woman into bed within a few hours of meeting her, but don't have a clue how to express their affection for her in the context of an actual romance. This is equally true of platonic relationships: I bet Anthony Bourdain would seem effortlessly charming the first time you met him, but I imagine people who'd known him for years might say he was a bit of a shitty friend.

It's not unlike how socially awkward people find social situations stressful and emotionally taxing, so instead they retreat into video games and social media – but the longer they spend in those spaces instead of in the real world, the more stressful and emotionally taxing they find social situations in real life, causing them to retreat...

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