The Call Of Exotic Foreign Lands

A royal falcon keeper. Photo by Ramesh Shukla.

I do not understand the fascination with Dubai. When

Zuby

published this piece on it I said as much over on X. I got some pushback.

Ian Miles Cheong

said it was obvious I had never been there. I do not need to go to Hell to know it is hot.

Megha Lillywhite

said it is safe there. So is my small town. To me it is dystopian. Dubai is the ultimate liminal space. Where people go to work or play but no one is from. The rootless cosmopolitan ideal. It is urban, global, hedonistic, shining and new. The opposite of everything I stand for. A mirage. I understand the romantic allure of tales of adventure and glory. Of going to see the world to return a hero having made your fortune. But the call of exotic foreign lands is a siren song that has led more men to ruin than it ever led to greatness. While everyday heroes find fulfillment in their local responsibilities.

You are not Odysseus or Robert Clive or Papa Hemingway. You are a contrivance which turns novelty into locomotion through the application of dopamine. Men used to go to war now they go for tacos and post about it on Instagram. Eager to praise any culture and creed but their own to feel worldly. The Age of Exploration is long since over. There are no more colonial empires or gold rushes for you to get rich quick. No expat community to make you famous. It is tourists all the way down. Telling ourselves the same stories over and again from "Go West, young man" to "Eat, Pray, Love" about escaping a mundane life. Yet our survivorship bias ignores the cost of heeding the call. From the personal ruin of financial losses and alienation. To the societal harm of broken families and hollowed out hometowns caused by sending our children away to find something better than they were born to.

These influencers who are "making it" in Dubai are outliers. Not the norm. Most of them feign high end lifestyles rented luxury goods and locations. Curating idealized versions of their lives to sell whatever they are pushing. The cost of living is high so many expats there settle into the standard urban salaryman lifestyle. One person told me they lived in a condo where they had everything done for them. Ate out all the time. Played golf and went fishing. But that it was an unfulfilling consumerist lifestyle. Of course people rarely mention the slavery. Dubai imports workers from all over the world via an employer sponsorship system. Which gives them some control over the visas and legal status of the migrants they hire. While officials point out that practices like passport confiscation and wage theft are illegal they are also widely documented and unevenly enforced. At this point I assume anyone who praises Dubai publicly is doing so because they are paid to. Or else some dark taskmaster compromised them with a honey trap.

This is not who our young people should seek to become. We need to stop giving them devices by which they develop very online sensibilities. And idolize TikTok and Instagram stars instead of people who make the world a better place. Then stop sending them off to out of state liberal arts colleges to learn how to look down on where they come from. We should teach them that the best chance they will have to be an influencer is in their own life. The value of being rooted in a place, a culture, a community, an identity. Rootedness is a choice. Creating a life centered on a place and taking responsibility for what happens there. Wendell Berry said:

“And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.”

There are not luxuries enough in the world to rival the joy of living in a place you love. Among people who care for you. There is no greater adventure than this. Than everyday deeds pursued with chivalric a vigor.

New England is my Dubai. The mountains are my high rises. The stars my bright lights. Where simple pleasures like judging a children's cookie baking contest mean more to me than a ride in a supercar ever could. Do not heed the call of exotic foreign lands. Let yourself hear the call home. Throw yourself into your culture and do not apologize. Cling to regional microcultures like life rafts on a rising tide of global mediocrity. Be a big fish in a small pond. But above all find your pond.