Let's all agree to stop saying we "did" a place
Sitting in a café this week, I overheard:
“Have you done Venice?”
“Oh, yes, I did Venice, Florence, and Rome last summer.”
Fellow travelers, let’s talk about this.
What kinds of things can we do?
- Chores that can be completed: “I did the laundry,” “I did the dishes.”
- Emphatic voice: “I did pay the bill! I did sweep the floors!”
- Plausible denial: “I didn’t do it!”
- An inquiry on progress: “Are you done with this crossword / that book / your name / all this nonsense?”
It’s clearly vulgar when you do a person: Oh, yes, I did him back in college. In large part because of treating the other as an object. But notice, as a euphemism for sex, it seems marginally better, even slightly charming or old school: We did it in the back seat of the car! Here, both actors are treated as engaged subjects, which improves not only the expression but likely the act itself.
Why doesn’t it work?
- “Done” implies completeness. But experiencing a country, a town, or a culture can never be complete. These things are infinite. And they are always changing, and always experienced by a person at a moment in life, in a season, at some time.
- Doing promotes check-box-ism. The worst kinds of travel are task lists of tourist sites that leave you frazzled and empty. But this attitude starts at the beginning, of wanting to “do” a place, which disrespects a living place, a living culture.
- It closes doors to opportunities. Once something is done, why revisit it? But my best travel experiences have been to revisit a place, in different seasons, with different people, at different times in my life: to witness the changes in places, in culture, and myself.
- Not to get existentialist, but Sartre calls it bad faith. It’s false consciousness to act towards others, ourselves, or experiences as if they were things. It’s a lie we tell ourselves to avoid the fear of the truth of our radical freedom and mortality: i.e., instead of lying here on the couch, I could be out there, relishing what I can before I die, but I’ve already done it, so why bother?
- It just sounds stupid today. You may think it is faux funny — darhling, haven’t you done Paris yet? — but it’s tired, an exhausted parody of itself. Paris isn’t done because you took a selfie at the Eiffel Tower. Venice isn’t done because you chased some pigeons in San Marco Square.
With all the rich alternatives, let’s cast off “doing” a location. We can visit, explore, travel through, get lost in, fall in love with, thrive in, be indifferent to, or even hate. My preference going forward shall be “to visit.”
Next up: let’s stop saying, “I’m off to…”