The American TikToker (@millenniallex) has gone viral with her rant from one of the world’s most beautiful places, whining that nobody told her that she and her boyfriend were going to have to expend effort to get there, including—wait for it—having to walk up an outdoor staircase with their luggage to get to the hotel.
Jordan, who comes from Denver, has a hissy fit on a terrace overlooking the glorious Mediterranean, demanding “jail time” for the influencers who told her that it was gorgeous there, but who failed to mention that it wasn’t necessarily going to be easy to get to the place.
“It’s literal manual labor!” Jordan fumed. She’s a black millennial Karen who insists on speaking to the Amalfi Coast’s manager.
“You have to walk up 160 stairs with all of your luggage to get to the top of this gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous area, with these beautiful views!” she bleats. “Omigod!”
The struggle is real, girl.
It’s such a pure example of ‘hathos’—a word combining hate with pathos, to mean the experience of loving to hate something—that one hesitates to watch it without a dose of Narcan near to hand, or at least Jack Daniels. I can’t get over her sense of entitlement. I had thought the ‘ugly American’ abroad stereotype was a thing of the past, but bratty Lexi renewed my lack of faith in humanity. So there’s that.
Lexi’s meltdown is only offensive because of her haughty indignation. It’s understandable that she is taken aback by the experience of European travel, and of Europe. If you only know it from carefully curated social media takes, and if you, like many of her generation and younger, mistake social media for real life, you may easily be shocked by the fact that they do things differently here. Only a prisspot American could be shocked and offended by the fact that villages built on the side of steep cliffs could require visitors to, you know, walk uphill.
A few years back, I flew from the U.S. to Italy for a book tour, and began by arriving early to give a talk in a picturesque tourist town in Sardinia. The airlines lost my luggage in Milan, and I had to wait a couple of days for my suitcase to catch up with me. If you have no change of clothes during summer in Sardinia, you’re in trouble, as you will have sweated through your shirt by simply walking down the street for your morning cappuccino. In this picture-postcard town, there were no places to buy clothes, so I had simply to sit in my sweat and stink, and wait.
It’s called traveling. Traveling involves friction—and friction used to be a thing that young Americans enjoyed about being in Europe. In the olden times—the 1980s, the last time hipsters actually wore mullets unironically—we American young people would throw a copy of Let’s Go in our backpacks and hit the road, Eurail pass in hand, looking for adventure. One night in Paris in 1988, my college buddy Paul and I could not find a hostel, and could not afford a hotel, so we slept on benches, and hid our traveler’s cheques in the crotch of a high statue. When we caught the train for Nice the next morning, we smelled awful and felt worse. But we were having an adventure.
Four years later, I flew to France with a plan to meet some Dutch friends in Paris, and gallivant around before I headed down to Chambéry to visit a French pal and her family. When I arrived at my hotel in the Latin Quarter, there was a message from the Dutch saying that something had come up, and they couldn’t make it. I had three days alone in my favorite city in all the world—and I did not waste it.
Back home in America, when I mentioned to my parents that my Dutch friends had not shown up, my father looked stricken.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Well, what did you do?” he said.
“Um, put my luggage in my room and went out exploring.”
He shook his head, disbelieving.
“Well,” I asked, “what would you have done?”
“Sat in my room till it was time to take a taxi back to the airport,” he said.
This shocked and delighted me. Granted, my small-town father had never been abroad, but that’s not the point. The point is that until that moment, I had always seen my dad as omni-competent, as a big, brave country man able to master any situation. When we were kids, and my sister’s little dog got lost in the woods, my dad went into a rattlesnake-infested thicket and down into a creek bed at night, looking for the hound. I couldn’t have done that with a gun pointed to my head.
But I could find my way around a foreign city, alone, and have a blast doing it. I was still young then, but left my mom and dad’s that day feeling like I had grown up several years by telling the story.
Again, this is traveling. It builds character—or, as in Lexi Jordan’s case, reveals the lack of it.
The thing is, there’s more to the Lexi story than a spoiled brat’s disappointment that she had to break a sweat to get to the Amalfi Coast. She may be a Millennial Karen, and the best-looking Ugly American of the summer, but she is also a metaphor for the kind of people we are becoming in postmodernity. No, really.
Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman said that in modern times, Western man has gone from being a pilgrim to being a tourist. He wasn’t talking about vacation travel. Rather, Bauman meant the way people journey through life today.
Bauman came up with the concept of ‘liquid modernity’ to describe the condition of modern times, in which the rate of change is so fast that all that is solid dissolves into directionless flow. In ages past, a person could go through life as a pilgrim: following a predictable path, reaching foreseeable milestones that told one where one was on the journey, and arriving at a definite destination.
This is no longer possible, says Bauman.
No consistent and cohesive life strategy emerges from the experience which can be gathered in such a world—none remotely reminiscent of the sense of purpose and the rugged determination of the pilgrimage. Nothing emerges from that experience but certain, mostly negative rules of thumb.
Like what? Not making commitments for long stays anywhere. Preventing yourself from becoming emotionally attached to the people you meet. Keeping yourself from becoming invested in a place. The idea is that to move as painlessly and as friction-free through the world of liquid modernity, you need to be prepared to hit the road at a moment’s notice.
What does this have to do with a gripey, pampered American tourist put out that she had to climb stairs to gain a thrice-gorgeous view? After all, there have always been Lexi Jordans who expect the world to cater to their whims, have there not? One imagines that Zsa Zsa Gabor would not welcome perspiring on the arduous ascent.
It’s because the Lexi character is becoming normal among the young raised in the comforts and choices of late capitalism. They cannot bear even the slightest glitch in the matrix of experience without going to pieces. A Hungarian millennial friend told me once that her friends led lives of material abundance and freedom that were unknown to their parents’ generation, which lived under communism, but they were also constantly stressed out and unhappy. The slightest complication or discomfort in life unhorsed them. They had no resilience.
La nausée de Lexi is a characteristic sickness of our time. In her viral TikTok rant, Lexi Jordan faults her social media followers for recommending that she vacation on the Amalfi Coast without warning her that she couldn’t simply swan in like the Duchesse de Guermantes and experience instant enchantment. The thing is, we have constructed a world, and are raising generations, of people who mistake the map for the territory. That is, they believe that a representation of the world is the same thing as the real world.
Thus, when they are confronted with struggle in the real world, with the fact that some things of value have to be fought for—even an endurance test as negligible as ascending an Italian coastal town’s staircase—they shatter emotionally. Not only can they not understand the struggle, or even a minor inconvenience, as part of the meaning of the trip (as a pilgrim would), they prove incapable of savoring the beauty of arrival at their destination. The thrice-gorgeous world can only disappoint.
Judging by the other videos in her TikTok account, the self-involved young Miss Jordan has problems that were with her before she took the first step up the Amalfi Coast’s staircase of travail. That will be with her throughout her life, for as long as she is satisfied to be a trifling tourist who demands to control experience, and not a resilient pilgrim open to learning from surprise and adversity.
Amalfi Coast, you have failed Lexi Jordan
Photo: millenniallex on TikTok
The American TikToker (@millenniallex) has gone viral with her rant from one of the world’s most beautiful places, whining that nobody told her that she and her boyfriend were going to have to expend effort to get there, including—wait for it—having to walk up an outdoor staircase with their luggage to get to the hotel.
Jordan, who comes from Denver, has a hissy fit on a terrace overlooking the glorious Mediterranean, demanding “jail time” for the influencers who told her that it was gorgeous there, but who failed to mention that it wasn’t necessarily going to be easy to get to the place.
“It’s literal manual labor!” Jordan fumed. She’s a black millennial Karen who insists on speaking to the Amalfi Coast’s manager.
“You have to walk up 160 stairs with all of your luggage to get to the top of this gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous area, with these beautiful views!” she bleats. “Omigod!”
The struggle is real, girl.
It’s such a pure example of ‘hathos’—a word combining hate with pathos, to mean the experience of loving to hate something—that one hesitates to watch it without a dose of Narcan near to hand, or at least Jack Daniels. I can’t get over her sense of entitlement. I had thought the ‘ugly American’ abroad stereotype was a thing of the past, but bratty Lexi renewed my lack of faith in humanity. So there’s that.
Lexi’s meltdown is only offensive because of her haughty indignation. It’s understandable that she is taken aback by the experience of European travel, and of Europe. If you only know it from carefully curated social media takes, and if you, like many of her generation and younger, mistake social media for real life, you may easily be shocked by the fact that they do things differently here. Only a prisspot American could be shocked and offended by the fact that villages built on the side of steep cliffs could require visitors to, you know, walk uphill.
A few years back, I flew from the U.S. to Italy for a book tour, and began by arriving early to give a talk in a picturesque tourist town in Sardinia. The airlines lost my luggage in Milan, and I had to wait a couple of days for my suitcase to catch up with me. If you have no change of clothes during summer in Sardinia, you’re in trouble, as you will have sweated through your shirt by simply walking down the street for your morning cappuccino. In this picture-postcard town, there were no places to buy clothes, so I had simply to sit in my sweat and stink, and wait.
It’s called traveling. Traveling involves friction—and friction used to be a thing that young Americans enjoyed about being in Europe. In the olden times—the 1980s, the last time hipsters actually wore mullets unironically—we American young people would throw a copy of Let’s Go in our backpacks and hit the road, Eurail pass in hand, looking for adventure. One night in Paris in 1988, my college buddy Paul and I could not find a hostel, and could not afford a hotel, so we slept on benches, and hid our traveler’s cheques in the crotch of a high statue. When we caught the train for Nice the next morning, we smelled awful and felt worse. But we were having an adventure.
Four years later, I flew to France with a plan to meet some Dutch friends in Paris, and gallivant around before I headed down to Chambéry to visit a French pal and her family. When I arrived at my hotel in the Latin Quarter, there was a message from the Dutch saying that something had come up, and they couldn’t make it. I had three days alone in my favorite city in all the world—and I did not waste it.
Back home in America, when I mentioned to my parents that my Dutch friends had not shown up, my father looked stricken.
This shocked and delighted me. Granted, my small-town father had never been abroad, but that’s not the point. The point is that until that moment, I had always seen my dad as omni-competent, as a big, brave country man able to master any situation. When we were kids, and my sister’s little dog got lost in the woods, my dad went into a rattlesnake-infested thicket and down into a creek bed at night, looking for the hound. I couldn’t have done that with a gun pointed to my head.
But I could find my way around a foreign city, alone, and have a blast doing it. I was still young then, but left my mom and dad’s that day feeling like I had grown up several years by telling the story.
Again, this is traveling. It builds character—or, as in Lexi Jordan’s case, reveals the lack of it.
The thing is, there’s more to the Lexi story than a spoiled brat’s disappointment that she had to break a sweat to get to the Amalfi Coast. She may be a Millennial Karen, and the best-looking Ugly American of the summer, but she is also a metaphor for the kind of people we are becoming in postmodernity. No, really.
Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman said that in modern times, Western man has gone from being a pilgrim to being a tourist. He wasn’t talking about vacation travel. Rather, Bauman meant the way people journey through life today.
Bauman came up with the concept of ‘liquid modernity’ to describe the condition of modern times, in which the rate of change is so fast that all that is solid dissolves into directionless flow. In ages past, a person could go through life as a pilgrim: following a predictable path, reaching foreseeable milestones that told one where one was on the journey, and arriving at a definite destination.
This is no longer possible, says Bauman.
Like what? Not making commitments for long stays anywhere. Preventing yourself from becoming emotionally attached to the people you meet. Keeping yourself from becoming invested in a place. The idea is that to move as painlessly and as friction-free through the world of liquid modernity, you need to be prepared to hit the road at a moment’s notice.
What does this have to do with a gripey, pampered American tourist put out that she had to climb stairs to gain a thrice-gorgeous view? After all, there have always been Lexi Jordans who expect the world to cater to their whims, have there not? One imagines that Zsa Zsa Gabor would not welcome perspiring on the arduous ascent.
It’s because the Lexi character is becoming normal among the young raised in the comforts and choices of late capitalism. They cannot bear even the slightest glitch in the matrix of experience without going to pieces. A Hungarian millennial friend told me once that her friends led lives of material abundance and freedom that were unknown to their parents’ generation, which lived under communism, but they were also constantly stressed out and unhappy. The slightest complication or discomfort in life unhorsed them. They had no resilience.
La nausée de Lexi is a characteristic sickness of our time. In her viral TikTok rant, Lexi Jordan faults her social media followers for recommending that she vacation on the Amalfi Coast without warning her that she couldn’t simply swan in like the Duchesse de Guermantes and experience instant enchantment. The thing is, we have constructed a world, and are raising generations, of people who mistake the map for the territory. That is, they believe that a representation of the world is the same thing as the real world.
Thus, when they are confronted with struggle in the real world, with the fact that some things of value have to be fought for—even an endurance test as negligible as ascending an Italian coastal town’s staircase—they shatter emotionally. Not only can they not understand the struggle, or even a minor inconvenience, as part of the meaning of the trip (as a pilgrim would), they prove incapable of savoring the beauty of arrival at their destination. The thrice-gorgeous world can only disappoint.
Judging by the other videos in her TikTok account, the self-involved young Miss Jordan has problems that were with her before she took the first step up the Amalfi Coast’s staircase of travail. That will be with her throughout her life, for as long as she is satisfied to be a trifling tourist who demands to control experience, and not a resilient pilgrim open to learning from surprise and adversity.
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