There is a type of traveller who arrives in a city with a spreadsheet. A colour-coded spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet contains: restaurants sorted by neighbourhood and star rating, museums with pre-booked timed-entry tickets, an algorithmically generated walking route, a morning activity AND an afternoon activity AND an evening activity, notes on which cafe has the best light for Instagram, and transport options between each point timed to the minute. This spreadsheet was crowd-sourced from blogs, Reddit threads, and the star ratings of strangers who experienced things numerically.
This traveller will see a LOT in forty-eight hours. They will have "done" the city, in the language we now use: "I've done Barcelona." "I've done Lisbon." Ticked. Processed. Rated. Uploaded. Next.
What they will not have done is actually met the city. The city tried to introduce itself several times but they were rushing to their 2:30pm reservation.
Encounter requires surprise. Surprise requires not knowing what's next. Not knowing what's next is precisely what the spreadsheet murders in its sleep. Every moment pre-researched. The restaurant was 4.7 stars before you sat down. The viewpoint was on the magazine cover. The "hidden gem" neighbourhood was on four different listicles and is about as hidden as the Eiffel Tower. You're not discovering anything. You're confirming what you already Googled.
We have turned travel into project management with better scenery.
The original point of travel — the reason humans voluntarily moved across the earth for centuries, often miserably, on boats that smelled bad — was not "optimal experiences." It was the collision with difference. Becoming a different version of yourself in a place with different rules and different languages and different ways of doing Tuesday. The person you become when your normal context is stripped away. The things that get interesting because you're unexpectedly HERE.
None of that fits in a spreadsheet.
Here's what happens when you travel without an itinerary and let the city decide. You walk until hungry and eat wherever looks good from outside, which sometimes means a disappointing meal and sometimes means the story you'll tell for five years. You follow a sound into a courtyard and find a market nobody mentioned. You get lost and, while figuring it out, stumble onto a street so perfect you briefly consider never leaving. You sit in a square for two hours watching life happen and learn more about the place than any guided tour could teach you.
Productivity-brain travel — maximum content, minimum waste, every hour filled — has made a lot of people genuinely worse at being somewhere new. We're optimising the spontaneity out of spontaneous travel. It's like meal-prepping a surprise party.
It's not really anyone's fault. The infrastructure nudges you there. Hotels have recommendation cards. Every city has a "best of" list funnelling everyone to the same twenty spots. Apps fill every hour. The FOMO of missing the "must-see" is real pressure, especially when everyone's photographing and posting and implicitly comparing.
But the must-see list was made by other people. The city has its own opinion about what you should find. And the city's opinion is usually better.
The travellers I know with the best stories never had the best itineraries. They had a rough sense of the shape of a place and then put themselves at the mercy of what happened.
They ate lunch with strangers who became friends for three days. They took the wrong bus to the wrong town, which turned out to be better. They sat in a park all afternoon doing absolutely nothing and by evening actually knew something about where they were.
You cannot schedule an encounter. You can only make space for one.
Leave the spreadsheet at home. Take the city as it comes. It's been here longer than your itinerary and it knows what it's doing.