Travel, Modern Art, and the Strange Power of Not “Getting It”

I picked up a zine on absurdist art at a local zine fest recently — mostly because it had a snarling chihuahua on the cover and I thought that was funny.

Inside was a line I haven’t stopped thinking about:

“Experiencing semantic instability is characterized by a dynamic process of meaning-making in which initial uncertainty can transform into insight.”

That phrase, semantic instability, sounds like something a philosophy professor mutters before assigning 400 pages of reading. But the underlying idea is surprisingly useful for understanding why some travel experiences stay with us for years while others barely leave a mark.

What Is Semantic Instability?

In art, semantic instability refers to the experience of encountering something that resists a single, clear meaning.

You stand in front of a painting or sculpture and think:

What am I looking at?

The work challenges your expectations. It doesn’t hand you an obvious interpretation. Instead, it forces you into an active process of meaning-making.

And that process matters. The uncertainty itself is not the point. The point is what happens after the uncertainty.

Do you shut down and reject the experience?

Do you skim the surface and move on?

Or do you stay with the discomfort long enough for insight to emerge?

That dynamic exists in travel, too.

Travel as Semantic Instability

Travel constantly confronts us with unfamiliarity:

• different social norms

• different values

• different rhythms of life

• different ideas of beauty, time, family, success, and normalcy

In other words, travel destabilizes our assumptions.

And just like in a modern art museum, we have choices about how we respond to that destabilization.

To illustrate the difference, let’s follow three fictional travelers.

Andy: Comfort Above All Else

Andy would never voluntarily go to a modern art museum. Why would he spend his weekend staring at weird paintings he doesn’t understand when he could be relaxing instead?

For Andy, art should be obvious. Beautiful. Easy.

On vacation, he wants much the same thing: beaches, drinks, sleep, guided excursions, and low stress.

And honestly? That sounds pretty great sometimes. There’s no moral failing here. Not every trip needs to become a spiritual awakening.

But there is a trade-off.

By avoiding experiences that challenge him, Andy also avoids the possibility of deeper insight or transformation. His experiences are pleasant, but largely frictionless. And frictionless experiences rarely change us.

Patty: Open, But Surface-Level

Patty is willing to enter unfamiliar environments. She goes to museums with her boyfriend Gerald. She travels internationally. She notices differences. But her engagement remains mostly observational.

She reacts:

• “I like this.”

• “That’s weird.”

• “This is interesting.”

• “That’s dumb.”

She experiences contrast, but she doesn’t linger with it long enough to ask deeper questions.

When Patty travels with Gerald, the unfamiliarity washes over her, but she mostly remains external to the experience.

Again: not wrong. She still has a good trip. She still enjoys herself. But enjoyment and transformation are not the same thing.

Susan: Staying With the Uncertainty

Susan is different.

At a museum, she encounters a painting she initially doesn’t understand.

“This is weird,” she thinks.

But unlike Andy, she doesn’t reject the discomfort. And unlike Patty, she doesn’t stop at reaction. Instead, she begins connecting ideas: religion, symbolism, womanhood, caregiving, cultural expectations, her relationship with her sister, her own exhaustion as a mother.

Meaning emerges through reflection.

Eventually, she reaches a quiet realization: “Oh. I kinda get it.”

That moment matters. Not because she “solved” the artwork like a puzzle, but because the process changed how she understood part of her own life.

Later, when Susan travels abroad, she responds to unfamiliarity in the same way.

She stays curious. She talks to people. She tries unfamiliar foods. She connects what she encounters to her own memories and experiences.

And gradually, the unfamiliar becomes meaningful. That’s where transformation lives.

Why Meaning-Making Is Personal

One of the most fascinating parts of this process is that meaning-making depends heavily on memory.

Susan interprets the painting by pulling from her own life experiences and long-term memory. Someone else standing in front of the exact same artwork might arrive somewhere entirely different.

The same thing happens in travel. Two people can walk down the same street in the same city and come away with completely different experiences because each person brings a different internal world to the encounter.

That’s part of what makes meaningful travel so powerful: the transformation is deeply individual.

The Real Point of “Meaningful Travel”

When I talk about deeper or more meaningful travel, this is what I mean. Not that every trip should become emotionally intense. Not that every museum visit needs to end in revelation. And certainly not that relaxing vacations are somehow inferior.

The point is simply this: When we resist uncertainty, we flatten experience. When we remain open to uncertainty and engage with it thoughtfully, experience becomes richer, more memorable, and more transformative.

Travel can absolutely remain light and easy. But sometimes, if we allow ourselves to stay with the unfamiliar just a little longer, we walk away with something much bigger than photos or souvenirs.

We walk away seeing the world and ourselves differently. And honestly? That’s kind of the whole point.