In tourism, the fundamental problems of late modernity become concentrated: restless escalation, alienation from the world, the compulsion to make time, places, and people available.
ISLAMIC TIMES – In the eighteenth century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe complained during his journey to Italy that the stagecoach was too fast to truly take in landscape and nature.
Today we are amused by the poet’s observation, which seems like a premonition of the society of acceleration. Hartmut Rosa, one of the most influential social theorists of the present day, has systematically unpacked this experience of “too fast.”
His books are bestsellers and deal with phenomena such as “acceleration,” “resonance,” “unavailability,” and, most recently, “situation and constellation.” His diagnosis strikes at the heart of modern travel: we move ever faster through a world that responds to us ever less.
Rosa, born in 1965 and a professor in Jena, uses his theory of social acceleration, resonance, and shrinking spaces for action not only to analyse work, politics, or everyday life, but also, indirectly, to question our travel habits.
What sounds academic at first glance explains, on second thought, why the dream vacation often feels hollow and why we return from ten cities in fourteen days more exhausted than when we set out.
In tourism, the fundamental problems of late modernity become concentrated: restless escalation, alienation from the world, the compulsion to make time, places, and people available. Anyone who wants to understand why, as travel speeds increase, we can “have it all” and yet truly experience so little must examine the logic of this acceleration and its effects on our relationship to the world.
Layered Acceleration: From the Coach to the Jet
Historically, the transformation of travel experience can be read as a sequence of stages of increasing speed: coach, railway, automobile, airplane. Goethe marks an early threshold here: the coach is already “too fast” for him to experience nature and landscape in their own time.
With the railway, a qualitative leap then takes place: the traveller glides through the world in an enclosed carriage; the world passes by behind glass, condensed into a series of images and strictly synchronized by timetables. The automobile individualizes this acceleration. Subjectively, it conveys sovereignty: route, speed, and stops appear to be in one’s own hands.
At the same time, perception narrows to the act of driving: the landscape becomes a backdrop. With the airplane, the logic of acceleration reaches its extreme. The space between origin and destination is almost erased; distances that once meant weeks shrink to hours.
Airports function as non-places: standardized nodes in a global network where differences of place and time are smoothed out. The principle of increasing speed promises liberation and an abundance of experience, but at the same time produces a loss of depth and commitment in the experience of space.
Availability and Alienation: Vacation as a Project of Escalation
Never has the world been as available as it is today: online booking portals, navigation apps, and review platforms turn every place into a reachable, calculable object. What appears technically as a success is described by the sociologist Rosa as the fourfold making-available of the world: it becomes visible (guidebooks, Instagram, reviews), reachable (global mobility networks), controllable (touristic development), and serviceable (vacation as a regeneration module for labour power).
Yet precisely this total availability endangers what we are actually seeking in travel: contact, surprise, and transformation. A journey planned down to the minute leaves no room for detours, irritations, and chance. What is available, Rosa argues, tends to lose its capacity for resonance: it leaves us cold because it has been forced into a schema of expectations.
Rosa’s theory of acceleration makes the underlying paradox visible. Technical acceleration (faster means of transport), the acceleration of social change, and the acceleration of the pace of life mutually reinforce one another in an “acceleration cycle.” In travel this means: the faster we can be on the move, the more we want to see. Subjectively, a sense of chronic shortage of time arises, although – and this is the paradox – time has objectively been saved.
Philosophically, this experience touches on the problem of our finitude. If lifetime is limited, so the implicit logic goes, it appears rational to compress as many experiences as possible into it. Those who live twice as fast can – apparently – double the sum of their experiences and thereby lead a “richer” life. Rosa explains the existential background: “The promise of acceleration lies in the (unspoken) idea that the acceleration of the pace of life is our (that is, the modern) answer to the problem of finitude and death.”
Photo: Freepik.com
When the World Falls Silent: the Resonance and the Logic of Industrialized Tourism
Rosa’s counter concept to alienation is resonance. Resonance denotes a living relationship to the world in which we allow ourselves to be addressed by something, respond to it, and in which mutual transformation takes place.
When we say that a place has “given us something,” or that a journey has “changed” us, we are intuitively describing events of resonance. What is crucial here is that resonance requires a moment of unavailability: it cannot be forced, planned, or bought. Goethe’s idea of metamorphosis echoes here: the meaning of travel does not lie in changing our destinations, but in changing ourselves.
This is precisely where the problem of mass tourism lies. It constantly attempts to make resonance available: “authentic” folklore evenings, arranged encounters with locals, staged insider tips, or artificial snow when nature does not deliver. Rosa illustrates the dynamic with the example of snow cannons: we can technically produce snow, but artificial snow loses the capacity to touch us in the same way as an unexpected onset of winter.
The same applies by analogy to tourism products: the precisely expectation-conforming “experience” – the sight that looks just like it does in the brochure, the standardized hotel room, perfect predictability – calms the need for control but often obstructs the possibility of genuine resonance.
Phenomenologically, this produces a world that has fallen silent. Cities become increasingly alike, inner cities turn into interchangeable consumer backdrops, and tourist hotspots are staged so that they correspond to a pre-anticipated logic of images. The traveller moves through spaces in which everything seems tailored to them, but nothing truly responds.
Rosa defines burnout as a state in which the axes of resonance fall comprehensively silent – psychically as well as physically. From this perspective, the disappointing vacation appears not as an individual failure, but as a structural problem of a world systematically organized toward availability rather than relationship.
Situation and Constellation: Vanishing Spaces for Play in Travel
In his latest book, Situation and Constellation: On the Disappearance of Room for Maneuver, Hartmut Rosa analyzes how our lifeworld is increasingly dominated by rigid constellations rather than open situations. A situation is open, ambiguous, and demands judgment and genuine action: for example, a conversation in a foreign language, an unexpected invitation, or a spontaneously changed route. A constellation, by contrast, is structured by predetermined options.
Here the logic of binary choice, standardized processes, and algorithmic guidance prevails. In travel, this shift becomes exemplary. Booking platforms suggest infinite freedom of choice but move us within a narrow grid of filters (price, stars, location, rating) in which we mainly optimize rather than truly decide.
Navigation apps prescribe the route, so that we no longer explore streets but follow route suggestions. Review portals define what is “worth seeing”; the vacation becomes the working-through of a pre-structured list. We become executors in someone else’s script instead of actors shaping situations.
Rosa warns when spaces for discretion shrink, our energy for action withers – we lose the ability to deal with uncertainty, ambiguity, and open situations. Precisely the vacation, which should be a place of freedom, thus falls under the logic of constellation: we click, book, follow, check – and then wonder why the promised freedom fails to appear. Philosophically, the question arises whether a life organized predominantly in logics of execution can still count as “action” in an emphatic sense at all – or whether we are submitting to an existence as functionaries of our own travel algorithms.
The Dark Triad: Nature, Others, Self
In his theory, Rosa describes modernity as a “multiple relationship of aggression” toward the world: against nature, other people, and us. In tourism, this triadic aggression becomes especially clear. It is directed against nature in the form of ecological damage: cruise ships that burden marine ecosystems, air traffic that intensifies the climate crisis, and overtourism that overstretches fragile landscapes.
We travel to experience beauty and at the same time contribute to its destruction. Against other people, this aggression appears in the transformation of living spaces into mere backdrops. Cities such as Barcelona, Venice, or Dubrovnik experience housing being converted into holiday apartments, local infrastructure being subordinated to tourist needs, and residents being pushed into the role of extras in their own everyday lives.
Overtourism destroys not only ecological but also social spaces of resonance – places in which local life takes root and recognizes itself. Finally, the aggression is directed against us. Travel becomes a stage for self-optimization: we must constantly show that we are “making something of our time,” that we are leading an intense, rich life.
Slow Travel between Critique and Complicity
Against this background, slow travel appears to be an obvious countermovement. Time, one could say following Rosa, is a basic prerequisite for resonance: encounters, familiarity, and transformation need duration and repetition. However, Rosa explicitly warns against misunderstanding deceleration as a simple solution.
“Simply slowing down is not enough,” he objects to the mindfulness and slow movements, if the structural logics of acceleration remain untouched. Resonance does not depend on mere speed, but on the kind of relationship to the world. A slow but entirely instrumental stay – for example in a secluded luxury resort – can be just as alienated as a fast city trip.
Conversely, even a brief, intensely lived encounter on a train or in the street can be a resonant event. Sociologically, slow travel itself is also at risk of being absorbed by the logic of acceleration. It becomes a market segment, a lifestyle product. Those who travel “slowly” signal awareness, sustainability, and depth – and capitalize on this attitude on social media.
Critique speaks here of pseudo-resonance: products that promise resonance but ultimately represent only a more refined form of making things available. The danger is that slow travel does not change the paradigm but merely reverses its signs: in place of the quantity of many places comes the quantity of “intense” experiences, which in turn are collected, optimized, and displayed.
Photo: hafizismail, Adobe Stock
Resonance Instead of Tempo: Travel as a Relationship to the World
A resonance-oriented travel practice shifts priority. Time instead of space: better two weeks in one region than once around the continent. Analog instead of digital: not documenting moments primarily as content for an outside perspective but experiencing them as events in which one is oneself involved.
At the same time, such a practice presupposes a change in attitude, which Rosa circles with the concepts of “unavailability” and “spaces for discretion.” Unavailability means the willingness not to control everything, not to know everything in advance, to leave room for what withdraws from us and surprises us.
Spaces for discretion mean not leaving decisions to algorithms but allowing situations that require judgment and creativity: detours, spontaneous conversations, and changes of direction.
The Uncomfortable Question: How Much Travel Is Enough?
As tempting as the idea of a resonance-oriented ethics of travel may be, it leads to an uncomfortable question: how much travel is still justifiable at all? Rosa describes late modernity as marked by multiple crises: economic, ecological, political, and psychological.
Mass tourism exacerbates all four: it intensifies climate and environmental problems, reproduces global inequalities, shifts urban structures in favour of visitors, and contributes to individual exhaustion. A consistent application of Rosa’s thought to travel therefore suggests that “traveling differently” might also mean “traveling less” – at least in the form of long-distance, resource-intensive tourism.
World reach is then no longer the central criterion; what matters is the quality of one’s relationship to the world. Resonant experiences are not limited to long-distance travel – they can arise just as much in the forest on one’s doorstep, in the park of one’s own city, or in the rediscovery of familiar places.
Photo: Hajj on Horseback / Facebook
Rosa’s sociology offers no ready-made recipes for the “right” travel technique, but it sharpens our view of the structures into which our travel is embedded. Anyone who takes his concepts seriously will look differently at flight offers, booking platforms, bucket lists, and travel blogs. Sooner or later, the offers of the travel industry will converge in their technological perfection and distinguish themselves through the substance of what they offer – offerings that take the meaning of travel into account.
The true differentiating factor lies in the hermeneutics of travel: in the way resonance, history, and spirituality are incorporated into algorithmically generated travel narratives, and in a conscious understanding of AI as co-author, not as a replacement for the human traveller.
A different way of traveling would be a practice aimed not at appropriating the world, but at relating to the world. It would be less concerned with polishing one’s own identity through as many destinations as possible, and more concerned with taking places, people, and nature seriously as counterparts.
Resonance tourism in the narrower sense – small providers that focus on quality and encounter, regions that limit mass and foster depth – are early laboratories of such alternatives. What matters, however, is not the label, but the attitude: am I willing to let myself be disturbed, surprised, changed?
At the end stands a simple but radical question: do we want to possess the world – or enter relationship with it? In the first case, we will continue to travel faster, farther, cheaper – and wonder why the world is becoming ever more silent.
In the second case, we will determine the tempo, distance, and frequency of our journeys differently – and shape the next vacation as an exercise in a living relationship to the world. The difference is not shown in the number of our destinations, but in whether the world still answers us when we are on the move.
