The Myth Of Old Towns
If you consume travel videos on social media, which I presume you do since they are hard to ignore, you must have come across videos of small European towns that evoke the feeling of the medieval era. These towns carry a certain allure that is difficult to resist.
Imagine an endless blue ocean, an old European town rooted in the Renaissance, roads constructed using Roman techniques, and people welcoming you with warmth. This is the fantasy of almost everyone who dreams of travel.
But there is a problem with this imagination.
While we long to escape to such towns, we are not equipped to live in them. Technology has made us inept at developing other skills. We do not know how to survive without hotels, how to prepare food using local ingredients, or how to structure our days without technological assistance.
We often say we want to move away from city life, yet we lack the skills required to survive outside its comforts. We are deeply acclimatised to our mobile phones. Living without them feels impossible. It is not the device itself, but what the device enables.
Our books, our friendships, and even our routines exist through smartphones. The nostalgia and longing you feel when looking at these towns is nothing more than fatigue from constant digital exposure. But what happens once you feel rejuvenated?
Would you be able to live life through traditional means, in the old-fashioned way? The answer is no. And it should be no. The purpose of technology is to make life easier so that we can progress further.
These towns were abandoned because they no longer offered what people sought, progress. When we say it would be fun to live in these places, we are really saying it would be fun to return to older ways of living. If those ways were truly better, humanity would not have laboured so relentlessly to build technology.
Since ancient times, humans have found fulfillment in progress. No single state brings happiness on its own. Excess of anything leads to despair. Too much food, sleep, or idleness eventually breeds monotony. We then seek conflict, challenge, or disruption just to escape the mundane.
We love rest because we are tired. We love food because we are hungry. We love God because we seek solace. We yearn for these towns because we are weighed down by city life.
No one in their right mind enjoys a town where tasks that take minutes with technology require hours without it. That is precisely why we lack those skills. We no longer needed to develop them.
Many people cannot light a medieval stove to boil water. Almost no one can survive in a jungle or identify which plants are poisonous. People struggle to change a car tyre, let alone fetch water from a well.
We cannot carry heavy loads and walk long distances. We have outsourced these challenges to technology and infrastructure. In essence, we neither possess the skills to survive in such towns nor the will to abandon modern conveniences.
What remains, then, is burnout masquerading as nostalgia. We admire peaceful towns because we are not at peace ourselves. We are drawn to oceans because endless horizons momentarily free us from our thoughts.
We are not craving old European towns. We are craving peace, quiet, and solitude. There is no harm in visiting such places, but wondering why anyone would abandon them is hypocritical.