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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10162 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.

Even though Bourdain was the reluctant champion of wannabe vagabonds everywhere, I don't think this travel writer's Come to Jesus moment makes him a loser. It's no secret that he struggled mentally and his lifestyle offered a soothing escape, but after becoming close with a few bohemians over the years I think their brains are just wired different. There's less overthinking and more acting on impulse and desire. They are well traveled, and often end up spending large chunks of time in other places. They take on projects related to food or crafting much easier than I do, and they spend more time with people or pursuing their interests like thrifiting, gardening, or random stuff around the city. It seems to me that they are just following their natural inclinations.

It is of course, a double-edged sword. They aren't as financially stable, and with the risks they take and the analysis they forgo, they make mistakes, get burned, and suffer the consequences. But they are always experiencing and learning. They seem more grounded in lifestyle and conversation than your typical type-a desk-sitter. I'm currently trying to take some of their mentality into my own thinking so that I can expand my life experience.

It may be attractive to limit Bourdain to a mentally-ill escapist, and reduce his followers to misguided idealists who run from their problems and look down on the well-adjusted, but as always, the picture is much more nuanced than that. I'm starting to notice that a lot of online discourse is just p-hacking. Ideas are getting tortured down into their simplest form so that they can be packaged neatly and shipped to their loyal customers.

I'm disappointed, if not surprised, that it took 15 hours for this comment to appear. The blatant attempt at pathologising anyone who doesn't live a straight-and-narrow life is frustrating and I think inaccurate. There has always been a place in society for transients; in premodern times they would have been your merchants and traders and nomads, and the notion that nobody's psychology could be suited for that and it has to be motivated by some kind of deep spiritual brokenness is impressively provincial. Hell, Diogenes was a semi-revered figure in ancient Greece, and all the way on the other end of the world there was a prominent and respected hermit tradition in ancient China (which actually continues to this day), vagabondism has held sway for a long time.

I think there is a good point hidden somewhere in that post about the vaunting of alternative lifestyles that in practice won't be suitable for the majority of the population and the demonisation of lifestyles that do work for the majority of the population such as the supposedly "conformist" life so lambasted by the counterculture of the 70s (who were just reflexively in favour of anything hoe-scaring), and if the post had just made that argument I would consider that a fair enough point. But it loses the plot once OP tries to imply that nobody could ever be happy living transiently, using the case study of Anthony Bourdain as if it's necessarily the norm for people who do choose to live that way. It's very possible that some of the people who do so are trying to run from something, and it's also very possible that many of the people who do this just possess outlier levels of openness to experience and aren't "broken" in any meaningful sense except being weird. So much of the argument appears to almost be a definitional one - if you are not doing Normal Things then you are not normal and that indicates something wrong with you.

Also to add to the list of TheMotte cliches that this post appears to be attempting to speedrun through, there's that one obligatory throwaway line about the Third World. I have to say that my experiences in many third world countries in Asia have led me to conclude that much of the "third world" is badly miscategorised; it's a sloppy category error to lump them in with places mired in a horrific, almost Hobbesian state-of-nature, which I think represents a far smaller proportion of the world than most here appear to believe.

I'm starting to notice that a lot of online discourse is just p-hacking.

First time?

Do you think I'd piss on Ram Dass' grave too? Did I pick on Iggy Pop?

I pick on Bourdain because he's so widely celebrated and because I think it's misplaced. If you're going to be an advocate for the Hero's Journey, I require you to at least not die pathetically.

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