Playlist Travel Quotes

Books. Rain. Libraries. Driving alone at night with my favorite playlist in the background. Traveling—mainly for the food. But the historic stuff is decent, too.

The browser was sick with user-generated opinions and misinformation. I was in a million places at once. My mind pooled with strangers’ ideas, each joke or observation or damning polemic as distracting and ephemeral as the next. It wasn’t just me. Everyone I knew was stuck in a feedback loop with themselves. Technology companies stood by, ready to become everyone’s library, memory, personality. I read whatever the other nodes in my social networks were reading. I listened to whatever music the algorithm told me to. Wherever I traveled on the internet, I saw my own data reflected back at me: if a jade face-roller stalked me from news site to news site, I was reminded of my red skin and passive vanity. If the personalized playlists were full of sad singer-songwriters, I could only blame myself for getting the algorithm depressed.

The sort of moment, I imagine, that people go travelling for. One of complete presence. A moment that will play longer in the theatre of the mind than a hundred nights of Netflix on the couch, a thousand boring business meetings, ten thousand uneventful commutes. A moment that you sense, while in it, will become one of your stories. A track on your anecdote Greatest Hits playlist. Part of your identity.