1. Even if you’re a poor budget traveler, you are part of a privileged elite that gets to travel the world for pleasure instead of necessity.
  2. A lot of people who wander are legitimately lost.
  3. You thought you were being quiet while having sex in the hostel dorm, but literally everyone heard you.
  4. You just think you speak the language better when you’re drunk.
  5. The Canadian flag patch has never saved anyone.
  6. You’ll probably do or say at least one racist thing on your trip to a foreign country.
  7. Yes, they are laughing at you.
  8. No matter how low you bargain, you’re still getting the jacked-up tourist prices.
  9. You are not an expat. You are an immigrant.
  10. The money that was pickpocketed from you will probably be spent on more important things by the thief (like food) than it would have if you had held onto it (like a bong carved to look like one of the thief’s gods).
  11. Tourism helps support locals, but it also contributes to a quicker, more rapid decay of the sites that they depend on for their livelihood.
  12. That picture of you putting a finger on top of the Taj Mahal or Eiffel Tower has been done before, and it’s been done better.
  13. Giant global sporting events like the World Cup and the Olympics may actually do a tremendous amount of economic and humanitarian damage.
  14. People visit the place that you live and find so boring, but for them, it’s a vacation that they’ll remember for the rest of their lives. Travel is all about perspective.
  15. Even if you’re in a place where prostitution is nominally legal, it’s still doing a lot of harm, and you totally shouldn’t be taking part in it.
  16. Your parents are the only people looking at your vacation pictures on Facebook.
  17. “Awareness” about issues like global poverty is completely useless if you don’t do anything about it.
  18. You could’ve gotten just as blackout drunk at home, for thousands of dollars less.
  19. You’re not going to live to see tourism on Mars. That Mars One thing is probably a scam.
  20. Plane flights are actually really bad for the environment.
  21. You’re not passing as a local.
  22. There’s pretty much nothing left to discover. You’re not blazing any trails.
  23. The “authentic” local thing you wanted to see, like the hula, for example, was once a sacred rite, and has now degraded into a tourist gimmick that’s primarily geared towards helping haoles ogle local girls.
  24. Install Google Analytics and see, for the first time, just how few people are reading your travel blog.
  25. No one’s keeping a tally of the places you’ve been. (Well, except for Matador.)
  26. Your consumerism back home makes you complicit in the poverty you see abroad.
  27. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” –Hamlet by William Shakespeare.