

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

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kweinber
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.

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golemotron
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.

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EdwardCoffin
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.

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

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EdwardCoffin
No, but the only vacations I've gone on since have been to visit people I
know, so I just stay with them.

Even if I weren't visiting people, I don't think I'd want to stay in a real
residential home through airbnb. I think I might lean towards a more
business-y bed and breakfast place though, instead of a hotel.

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

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tptacek
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.

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arethuza
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!

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phkn1
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.

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archagon
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.

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

All. day.

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phuff
This song seems completely relevant:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oKn3Hz2u_Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oKn3Hz2u_Q)

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glxc
this is why i love airbnb

