Touristification
Taleb calls the removal of uncertainty from life touristification. He criticizes tightly scripted activities that sacrifice opportunities for discovery in pursuit of comfort, convenience, and efficiency.
THE IDEA
Touristification
My friend Chad benefited from the kind of disorder that is less and less prevalent thanks to the modern disease of touristification. This is my term for an aspect of modern life that treats humans as washing machines, with simplified mechanical responses—and a detailed user’s manual. It is the systematic removal of uncertainty and randomness from things, trying to make matters highly predictable in their smallest details. All that for the sake of comfort, convenience, and efficiency.
What a tourist is in relation to an adventurer, or a flâneur, touristification is to life; it consists in converting activities, and not just travel, into the equivalent of a script like those followed by actors. We will see how touristification castrates systems and organisms that like uncertainty by sucking randomness out of them to the last drop—while providing them with the illusion of benefit. The guilty parties are the education system, planning the funding of teleological scientific research, the French baccalaureate, gym machines, etc.
And the electronic calendar.
But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail.
This “goal-driven” attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self.
When to use it
Planning a vacation: instead of a minute-by-minute schedule, leave half the days free for spontaneous decisions.
Designing a course syllabus: include open-ended projects or 'wildcard' sessions where students choose the topic.
Allocating research funding: reserve a portion for exploratory, high-risk projects rather than only goal-driven proposals.
Organizing social events: avoid over-structured parties; allow for unstructured mingling and improvisation.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Overplanned Vacation
A traveler schedules every hour of a trip: museum at 10, lunch at 12, walking tour at 2. When an unexpected alley café or a local festival appears, they skip it because it doesn't fit the itinerary. This touristification eliminates the serendipity that makes travel memorable.
Rigid Curriculum
A school system forces all students to follow a fixed syllabus with standardized tests, leaving no room for curiosity-driven exploration or creative detours. The student becomes a passive recipient instead of an active adventurer in learning.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
In what areas of your life (work, leisure, relationships) have you most succumbed to touristification?
What is one specific activity you could redesign this week to reintroduce uncertainty and randomness?
How does touristification affect your ability to be spontaneous or to handle unexpected challenges?
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Antifragile (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)