Stop Moralizing. Let People Take Their Fucking Vacation

Tourists are easy villains in a crisis created by governments, property owners, markets—and the rest of us.

If you read me regularly, you know I'm among the first to shit on shitty tourists.

But we often lose sight of the fact that a shitty tourist is not all that different from your garden-variety asshole in just about any situation.

I recently saw somebody on Substack argue that tourism in 2026 has become a kind of cancer, particularly mass tourism built around the fantasy of “living like a local”—a fantasy, in their telling, that romanticizes poor peasants in supposedly lesser countries rather than the wealthy people who live there too.

What bothered me wasn’t the criticism of tourism; much of it is justified. It was the populist-style simplification—the merging of an ordinary vacation, mass tourism, billionaire privilege, housing speculation, and displacement into a single offense committed by the person walking around taking pictures of cool buildings.

There’s something uniquely condescending about assuming that tourists who want a taste of ordinary local life are necessarily fetishizing poverty. We’ve reached a point where the same anti-tourism lines circulate so freely that repetition has beaten us into a type of cognitive submission. We’re willing to accept basic nonsense as fact without scrutiny. Nuance, firsthand experience, and useful analysis matter less than saying whatever an echo chamber is prepared to reward.

It’s content; it’s a “post!”

Once the tourist becomes the entire causal story, everybody else disappears.

Local property owners participate in gentrification alongside tourists and foreign residents renting short- and long-term apartments. Being Spanish—or otherwise European—doesn’t exempt somebody from the consequences of charging market rate for an apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood.

But I don’t automatically blame local property owners for doing what they do, any more than I automatically blame somebody for taking the vacation they can afford. In both cases, people are making individual-level choices within systems they didn’t create.

Understanding why individuals make these choices doesn’t require pretending the aggregate consequences are harmless. It means recognizing that regulation—not moral purity from millions of separate people—is how cities protect housing and neighborhood life.

In my experience, loud, entitled Americans and others like them are the exception rather than the rule. Most of us—regardless of national origin—go on vacation when we can and when we can afford it to do things like walk around and eat. Many of us have to save for a long time to be able to pay for the privilege. And who doesn’t hope to find at least a slice of romanticized life in the places they visit?

I've lived in Valencia for nearly two years and I rub elbows with “grandmas” (nonnas or abuelas) every single day in my neighborhood. They're not paid extras giving tourists what they want. And there's nothing wrong with finding some type of joy in that. Not a day goes by when I don't think of my Italian-American grandma as I walk the streets of Spain or, even more, when I visit Italy.

I'm not sure what people expect from tourists other than civilized behavior and respect for others and their surroundings. Should they have to take a part-time job at their destination to see how it feels to make minimum wage—after, quite possibly, saving for a year to pay for that one or two weeks their soul-sucking job back home bestows upon them? Nobody has a problem with people who take beach vacations and “live” on the beach all week. So let urban tourists enjoy old Italian women making orecchiette in the street—or the woman I photographed folding dumplings in the window of a Chinese restaurant in Paris.

Even if you think it's all bullshit. Who cares?

Paris, France—February 2024

I have no illusions about Americans—the country gave us Donald Trump more than once—but even the most seemingly clueless American tourist isn’t stupid enough to think that everyone “lives like this.” Let them have their fucking moment.

The people who fail to accept this and seem incapable of understanding that we’re dealing with complicated issues and a whole host of villains might be making matters worse.

That kind of simplification—especially when it glosses over the speaker’s own privilege—is part of what makes so much American commentary on the rest of the world unbearable. And you don’t have to be American to do it.

Cities around the world have a longstanding problem of gentrification and displacement. I had one of my first encounters with it in San Francisco in 2000—a city I likely couldn't afford to live in again. So I get it—we have a problem. But it didn't happen when you discovered your bullhorn.

Tourism contributes to the mess so many cities are in, but it also creates jobs, income, and opportunity at multiple levels. The more powerful forces include housing scarcity, short-term rental platforms, investment capital, local property owners, and governments that market their cities to the world while failing to protect the people who live there. Turning the tourist into the singular villain lets everybody else disappear.

Most of us are tourists at one time or another. Expect people to behave decently. Regulate the systems that turn homes into vacation inventory and neighborhoods into investment products. And let ordinary people have their fucking week off.