Irrational Actor

Ripping on cruises is a time-honored tradition, and all the criticisms people make against them are basically true, but somehow, everyone who does this just kind of ends up telling on themselves. A cruise is a middlebrow vacation. You hang out on a ship. It stops in some places that are nominally different destinations, but they’re all cruise ports and are all kind of the same. You look at the ocean. You go to the pool. You play blackjack. You read a book. There is a lot of food that is generally decent but not great, and there is a lot of alcohol. It’s fundamentally similar to any other vacation that mostly centers around eating and drinking a lot — Resorts, Vegas, Disney, whatever. Let’s be honest, when most people vacation in Europe or Japan, they mostly just eat and drink. The two most famous examples of the “looking down my nose at cruises” essay are David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and Gary Shteyngart’s “Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever.” When I read DFW’s essay the first time, I was in my early 20s and he was still alive. It seemed like they had sent the coolest guy in the world to a decidedly uncool place, and his jarring presence within it laid bare all its defects. When I read it the second time, I was in my thirties, and he had killed himself to escape the unbearable torture of living in his own head, and it seemed like a story about a guy who went to a place with unlimited bourbon and ice cream and managed to find a way to be miserable. Shteyngart’s essay, I always felt, took an obvious and banal observation — the upgraded version of this kind of vacation has serious diminishing marginal returns — and tried to stretch it into a comedic premise for a 20 page essay. One big knock against the cruise industry is that they try to upsell you on a bunch of expensive stuff that isn’t very good. You can pay $3-5000 for a cruise with a basic room with a window, or you can pay $25,000 to go on the same cruise in the deluxe suite, which is what the Atlantic booked for Shteyngart. But once you leave your suite, you’re on the same ship with the same bars and the same pool and the same activities, and when you get off the ship, you’re still in the same port, wandering around and looking at the same shops or going on the same excursion. So you’ve really paid ten times as much for what is substantially the same vacation. So the essay was basically Shteyngart doing all this and then being like: “Can you believe this shit is happening on a $25,000 vacation?” Granted, nobody should spend $25,000 to go on a Royal Caribbean cruise, but it’s a lot more competitive among the $5000 vacation options, and once you recognize that the essay is basically contrived by booking the $25,000 suite everyone knows is a poor value and then bitching about it, the premise of the essay starts to seem like it’s actually: “I am too good for this $5000 vacation.” And really, what it comes down to is that, when you are a relatively virtuous person who leads a responsible but ordinary life and you’re not that cool or interesting and you find yourself old and somewhat affluent, going on cruises is the kind of thing you do to enjoy your disposable wealth. And so people with main-character syndrome find it horrifying to be confined in such a middlebrow normie space — it’s their worst nightmare come true; crowding into an elevator to go wait in line for the buffet with all the sheeple. Anyway, I have not watched the Lindsay Ellis video, but even though she may correctly be repeating the tired observation that cruise ships are not very cool, she is clearly incorrect in her belief that she is too cool for it, because she is not cool at all. Eat your ice cream, drink your bourbon and shut the fuck up.