"To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change"
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Cooley smuggles a small provocation into what sounds like polite advice: travel isn’t primarily about seeing the world, it’s about interrupting the version of you that your job continuously manufactures. For a sociologist who helped define the “looking-glass self” - the idea that identity is built from reflected expectations - that’s not a romantic claim, it’s a structural one. Your “working environment” is not just a location. It’s a machine of cues: routines, status hierarchies, performance metrics, coworkers’ glances, the steady pressure to be legible and useful. Step out of it and you don’t simply rest; you loosen the social scaffolding that holds your self together.
The phrase “in a sense” is doing tactical work. Cooley isn’t pretending you can escape your biography with a train ticket. He’s saying the self is partly situational, and the most immediate way to change the situation is to change the stage. That’s why “change” sits beside “travel”: the point is not postcards but dislocation, a temporary unhooking from the scripts that make you predictable.
Read in context of the early 20th-century churn - expanding corporate life, urbanization, the professionalization of identity - the line anticipates a very modern malaise: when work colonizes personality, leisure becomes less entertainment than counter-programming. Travel’s “chief advantage” is almost clinical: it creates a gap where you can notice how much of “you” is really just the job talking.
The phrase “in a sense” is doing tactical work. Cooley isn’t pretending you can escape your biography with a train ticket. He’s saying the self is partly situational, and the most immediate way to change the situation is to change the stage. That’s why “change” sits beside “travel”: the point is not postcards but dislocation, a temporary unhooking from the scripts that make you predictable.
Read in context of the early 20th-century churn - expanding corporate life, urbanization, the professionalization of identity - the line anticipates a very modern malaise: when work colonizes personality, leisure becomes less entertainment than counter-programming. Travel’s “chief advantage” is almost clinical: it creates a gap where you can notice how much of “you” is really just the job talking.
Quote Details
| Topic | Travel |
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