Hotel melancholia

http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/hotel-rooms-and-the-despair-of-endless-travl/

by ColinWright • 11 years ago

49 19 11 years ago

golemotron• 11 years ago

I hear people say this all the time, that hotel rooms are sad and empty. I don't get it. I used to travel a lot and I always found living in hotel rooms kind of nice. I wonder whether men and women process this differently. All of her examples in the article are women.

meric• 11 years ago

I got stuck in a hotel for a few days in Pakistan when they'd schedule the flights out of the country in the foggiest hours of the early morning/late night, and had flights canceled every day for a week. It was a trap - I couldn't leave my hotel much in case the airline called the hotel to confirm a flight was available the next day. The next town with shops was dozens of minutes walk away.

michaelochurch• 11 years ago

I think that it's an uncanny valley effect. A hotel room looks somewhat like a home, but it's definitely not a home. It's great not having to do your own cleaning, but the space feels over-cleaned and sterile.

Also, hotel rooms, during the day, tend to be where one is when travel isn't going well. I used to think five-star hotels were a waste of money; why would someone pay $300+ more per night just to have a fountain in the lobby? But now that many of my friends are having children, I understand it. If you're traveling with kids (increasing your likelihood that someone gets sick, or just exhausted) then you need the 4- or 5-star accommodations that you don't need if you're a young person who'll use it as a crash pad only.

Hotel rooms, then, are places associated with misfortune: travel ruined by someone getting sick, an unexpected layover due to travel delays, or landing in a city where one feels unsafe due to local conditions like crime or dangerous weather. If your travel goes well, you're only in one to sleep. If it goes poorly, you spend an order of magnitude more waking time in it.

peferron• 11 years ago

Older hotel rooms tend to have dark carpet, dark furniture, and dismal lighting that would barely qualify to light a refrigerator. When entering a hotel room my first action is often to turn on every single lamp just because it's so goddamn dark and the master lighting is pathetic. Thankfully there's often a master switch to turn them all off when I go out.

It's getting better though, most new or recently renovated rooms have bigger windows, lighter colors, and stronger lighting.

EdwardCoffin2• 11 years ago

I'm a man and I find hotel rooms sad and empty. I, too, used to travel a lot. I spent a number of years living out of hotels in order to be at client sites, and I found them incredibly alienating. I can't be sure, though, whether this aversion to hotel rooms developed because I didn't like the rooms themselves, or because of my dislike of the travelling and client work. In either case, a decade later I still avoid travelling for pleasure at least partly because of my dislike of hotel rooms.

elsewhen• 11 years ago

Have you tried renting renting residential homes (airbnb) when on vacation?

JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

If you're single and live alone, you'd likely find a hotel room comfortable. If you life in a dynamic household, a hotel room is like a cage at the vets office - boring, barely comfortable, way too public and lonely.

JadeNB• 11 years ago

I don't know how much "a lot" is, but I think that that can make a big difference, too. If, loosely speaking, you're home more than you're in hotels, then being in a hotel can be a treat; but if you're in hotels more than you're at home, then it's likely that you'll eventually come to think of the hotel as what's keeping you from home, hence the melancholia.

abandonliberty• 11 years ago

Article is really about homesickness having a Pavlovian association with hotels.

tptacek• 11 years ago

I don't think so. I identified with some of it, and I'm rarely homesick. Confined and dissociated, though: in hotels, I feel like that regularly.

arethuza• 11 years ago

If I am travelling by myself and staying in "international business bland" style hotels I can definitely suffer from those feelings - I've certainly woken up and wondered which city/country/continent I am on!

steveklabnik• 11 years ago

Same here. I've travelled quite a bit, and I don't generally feel homesick, specifically. "Dissociated" is a word I use often. If anything, I'm 'homesick' for multiple homes: I am constantly missing Athens, Kiev, Tokyo, Berlin...

In many ways, constant travel is really wonderful: I'm almost always saying 'hello' to new friends, and 'hello again' to old ones. At the same time, though, you're constantly saying goodbye, as well...

kweinber• 11 years ago

Separation from close friends and family is correlated with hotel room stays (especially for work) . Lack of meaningful social interaction and melancholy go hand in hand.

You can have meaningful relationships in cyber-space but bandwidth is higher in meatspace. Hence the feeling of isolation.

ourmandave• 11 years ago

I see hotel rooms as a sanctuary after visiting out-of-state family all day.

All. day.

glxc• 11 years ago

this is why i love airbnb

phkn1• 11 years ago

An interesting take on the experience of occupying a transient and impersonal space, but also a reflection of the author's perspective on travel. The two are not the same.

Being disconnected from friends and family, being too narrowly focused on work, or actively avoiding human entanglements as the author admits, is a perfect framing device for melancholy. Whether this takes place in a home or in a hotel is simply a matter of setting.

Having held a travel-intensive consulting position in an earlier part of my career, I absolutely identify to the melancholy of constant dislocation. However, now that I work primarily at home, I do miss the occasional changes of scenery and am looking forward to my upcoming vacation overseas.

The moral of the story is that balance matters, as does context. Too much constant motion produces alienation. Too little produces boredom. And it's much easier to look forward to a personal trip than a business trip, because the former is much more directly rewarding. As important as it is to travel, it's just as important to have a sense of homecoming when it's over.

archagon• 11 years ago

I've been traveling over the past year and mostly staying in Airbnb accommodations. They're such a far cry from any hotel. You get to live like a local. You get a friendly local contact. You get to experience so many different living conditions, from tiny rooftop apartments to sprawling 3-story family homes to cool stone rooms in buildings that must have been around since the 12th century. You get to see all the myriad ways different people decorate their homes. You can cook. You can work. You can leave whenever you want. Sometimes you even get to play with the owner's pets!

I've had to stay in hotels a few times over the course of my travels and it's just been a drag in comparison. No matter how tasteful they are, hotel rooms just feel like prison cells with their kischy decor, activity binders, and 1970's televisions. They're cold, clinical spaces that that exist in a sort of diorama dimension outside the jurisdiction and influence of the real world. And they're more expensive, too.

phuff• 11 years ago

This song seems completely relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oKn3Hz2u_Q

Hotel melancholia

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