What distinguishes us from other animals is the diversity in how we live. There is a greater difference between a resident of Hanoi and a resident of Istanbul than there is between a rat in Hanoi and one in Istanbul. While so much modern discourse is about the universality of humanity, it is in fact the variation within our species that defines us as a big-brained species. Rats live rather similar lives, regardless of where they are born, because they are driven by their inborn instincts. But rather than being led by genetically programmed impulses, we use constructed tools, whether literal or figurative, to survive and thrive. And those tools are what comprise a place’s culture.

Your definition of culture might be different from an anthropologist’s. In his book of essays, The Interpretations of Culture, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz writes that a human being is imbued at birth with “the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life” but generally ends up “having lived only one”. That one life we end up living is largely determined by what culture, and place in it, we are born into. “As culture shaped us as a single species so too it shapes us as separate individuals. This,” writes Geertz, “is what we have in common.” Oddly enough, many of our subjects express this more clearly than we anthropologists. In Java, Geertz points out, the people quite flatly say: “To be human is to be Javanese.”

What anthropologists seek is not that different from what most people say they want to get out of travel: an understanding of a place. But most travellers’ grasp of culture is what Geertz calls a “thin description”. A listing of the foods, faiths, clothes, and customs that make it unique. For tourists, understanding a place is about figuring out what you need to do to “pass for a native”. That is, to know enough of the language, styles of dress and etiquette to be able to spend time in Lima without causing offence out of ignorance.

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While culture, to Geertz, does encompass the surface-level rules that “guide behaviour”, to him they aren’t nearly as interesting or meaningful as what lies beneath. Culture, he writes, is “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life”. In other words, culture is about why we think we are here, and why we think it’s worth being here. Where the “thin description” asks “how do you live?”, the “thick description” asks: “Why do you live?”

That different cultures, and different places, have different answers to that question shows the depth of human adaptability. It is those differences that fascinate me as a traveller. For me, to travel is to learn how to be human, by observing the variety of ways you can be human.

Most of what passes as travel these days, though, is “thin travel”. It’s about selling an experience of a place, staging a version of its culture. The travel industry proffers package dinners, where you can drink traditional liquors, eat traditional food, watch traditional dances. If there is any meaning there, it’s buried so far beneath the glitz that it’s dead. Meaning isn’t staged. It is so interwoven into one’s sense of self that it’s often unacknowledged, like the water a fish swims in, or the air you breathe.

Every city has a tourist district, which bundles up a culture and puts it in one, easy-to-find, safe area full of quaint shops. These places are the hallmarks of “thin travel”. Sure, you are in Hanoi. Sure, the people here are Vietnamese. But they are not living their true life. They are performing, mostly as a job. Their intention might well be to educate people about their culture. But thick travel is about getting away from performances, and into neighbourhoods where people are going about their lives. People who aren’t trying to teach or sell you something.

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So, how do you travel in a way that allows you to understand a place’s meaning, as best you can, rather than travelling just to see its surface? Thick travel isn’t about intensity, or danger, or going to extremes; it is about seeking the normal, and often the banal. In ordinary places, people are in their default mode, and it is their default mode that people are most “genuine” to their culture. That is why, when I’m in a new place, I try to become a regular in a few average places. Not to blend in, but to let others blend out, by being themselves.

Taking risks, entering sacred or profane spaces against the wishes of residents, or going to the place with the most X or the least Y, isn’t necessarily thick travel. It’s not about trying to play-act as a native, or putting another check on a list of crazy things you’ve done for clout. It’s not about eating the weirdest dish served in that one restaurant highlighted by that guy on the travel channel, but about eating what’s most commonly eaten. It’s about going to 7-11s in the middle-class neighbourhoods of Taipei for breakfast.

Thick travel might not require hours of YouTube research, but it does require time. On my travel blog, I have a bad habit of posting my first thoughts on a place, after three or four days of walking it. I did that in Taipei, writing: “Taipei in many ways is like Seoul. Both have grown quickly, become relatively wealthy, and in the process jumped headlong into materialism while shedding a lot of their traditional culture.”

While that’s partly true, it’s also a “thin description”, because as I learned, after spending two more weeks in the city, religious traditions are central to Taiwanese culture, to people young and old. My epiphany came in a midtown temple. I was only there grudgingly, because I couldn’t book an earlier flight back home (something I had tried to do based on my first impressions).

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I entered the temple at the same time as a young man, a guy who on the surface seemed pretty secular. He was dressed like a kid from a western MTV video, with baggy clothes and a bucket hat. He had three tattoos on his forearms — a pile of US dollars, brass knuckles, and the Mercedes Benz logo. I watched him, figuring cynically that he was there for something other than the rituals. But no, he quickly took off his hat, then slowly worked his way around the circuit of altars and statues, performing all the ritual steps with the upmost reverence. The only scepticism was mine, and it quickly faded.

Faith plays a different role in Taiwan than in Western cultures. That’s not a value judgement, or even an “othering”. “Understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity,” writes Geertz. The clearer your picture of another culture, the more rational it seems, while also remaining unique. That is, the teenager in a bucket hat going to the temple to do his daily rituals is, at both at a thick and thin level, very different from a young man in Lima going to the cathedral, but both are being very human. They are both seeking meaning, not through their animal impulses, but through their traditions.

Once you see how a thick description of culture provides people with meaning, you also see how lost we would be without it. “The extreme generality, diffuseness, and variability of man’s innate response capacity means that without the assistance of cultural patterns he would be functionally incomplete,” wrote Geertz. It is “a kind of formless monster with neither sense of direction nor power of self control, a chaos of spasmodic impulses and vague emotions”. Or, to quote the philosopher Suzanne Langer: “[Man] can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos.”

Thick travel has made me realise how much chaos we have here in the US, at a spiritual level, compared with the rest of the world. We are becoming a thin culture, obsessed with the surface, more and more in denial about the importance of what is beneath. We have forgotten that we need webs of meaning, eroding so many of them. People are left trying to cope with what we humans are not equipped to cope with — the isolation and chaos that follows from meaninglessness.

I spent over 10 years documenting poverty, homelessness, and addiction in the US. Now, I am walking around the world, writing dispatches. But my current project is not that different from my last one. My three years of thick travel, of trying to understand other cultures, has given me a much clearer picture of the problems here in the US. It’s made me aware just how deep they are. Our culture is harsh and transactional; it doesn’t respect the very human need for a deeper sense of meaning. The result is our epidemic of suicides, overdoses, and other early deaths.

Worse still is that culture, while easy to erode, is very hard to rebuild once gone. You can’t legislate back meaning. If thick travel teaches you anything, it’s that people don’t work that way.

A version of this essay first appeared on Chris Arnade Walks The World.

TSP Chairman Chen Yi-chi is diminutive, spritely, and much more youthful than his 50 years. Inspired by his time in the Netherlands, where he studied for a PhD in political economy, he sees the country’s “progressive, tolerant society” as a model for Taiwan. Resting on his desk is a plastic fan featuring the image of the TSP’s candidate in Saturday’s local elections. Wu Hsin-dai, a 35-year-old cardiovascular surgeon, is running in Taipei’s Nangang district. Chen is not optimistic about her chances. “It’s hard to break the grip of the two big parties,” he says, referring to the pro-China KMT and the ruling nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

Attention for Saturday’s midterm vote is focussed on constituencies in the north, where the KMT hopes to wrest control from the DPP. Despite the prospect of a KMT reinvigoration, the vote largely seems insignificant to international observers. News about Taiwan is usually pegged to China’s sabre-rattling, particularly after outgoing US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei in August. While they might give a sense of public attitudes towards Beijing ahead of the 2024 presidential election, these local polls are largely irrelevant to cross-strait relations.

However, amid the din of campaign-truck loudspeakers, news of a concurrent referendum to lower Taiwan’s voting age from 20 to 18 has been drowned out. And while an unfeasibly high threshold makes passage unlikely, the plebiscite highlights Taiwan’s ontological dilemma: the existence of an alien constitution, imposed by a colonising power.

Promulgated by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist party (KMT) government in Nanjing in 1946, the Constitution of the Republic of China derives from the political philosophy of Sun Yat-sen. The teachings of the KMT founder and “Father of the Nation”, as he is known in Taiwan, are emphasised in the constitution’s preamble. To combat the corruption and lawlessness of early-20th century China, Sun espoused an enhanced separation of powers, into five branches — or yuan. In addition to the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial yuan, he proposed the creation of Control and Exam yuan modelled on China’s old imperial censorates. These latter two organs would be tasked with supervising official performance and overseeing civil service exams.

After he lost the Chinese Civil War to Mao Zedong’s Communists, Chiang, his KMT forces and roughly a million refugees fled to Taiwan, transplanting the ROC Constitution to the island in the process. The Taiwanese were given no say in this, and those who called for political participation were imprisoned or murdered.

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Fast forward 75 years to a democratic country around 267 times smaller than China, with a population less than 4.5% the size of China’s back then, and it is obvious these supervisory bodies are unnecessary. Taiwanese politics may be plagued with corruption, but these extra layers of oversight don’t help. If anything, they’re part of the problem. Appointments to the Examination Yuan have been labelled “fat-cat patronage” by opponents, with academics vying for the exorbitant salaries of the positions they carry. Control yuan positions are similarly cushy: members are frequently friends with the politicians they should be monitoring. It’s hardly surprising cross-party support for the abolition of the two yuan has increased in recent years.

But there is a more fundamental problem with the constitution. Having remained intact during the KMT’s five-decade dictatorship in Taiwan, it has undergone minimal revision since the country’s democratisation. As such, it continues to enshrine the One-China principle in law, legitimising the CCP’s otherwise spurious claims over Taiwan.

Saturday marks the country’s first constitutional referendum since the 2005 abolition of the National Assembly — a detested symbol of KMT cronyism. Nicknamed the “old thieves”, the assemblymen nominally represented constituencies in China for decades, drawing huge salaries, and maintaining the fiction of the KMT’s continued authority over the “Mainland”. By the Nineties, a democratising Taiwan had had enough, and the “10,000-year assembly” was wound down.

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Yet the amendment that abolished the assembly replaced one undemocratic element of the constitution with another, albeit less egregious, one. Until then, constitutional amendments were ratified by the assembly. Now, a bill must be initiated by 25% of Taiwan’s legislature. After that, approval from three-quarters of voters with a quorum of three-quarters of legislators is required. Finally, the amendment must be ratified within six months by an absolute majority of the eligible voting public. Before it even gets to the legislature, a proposal needs signatures from 1.5% of the eligible electorate — currently about 180,000 people.

It’s a credit to Taiwan’s civil society activism — particularly the efforts of youth NGOs — that we’ve got this far with the voting age amendment. Still, the prospect of its passage remains dim. And if this relatively uncontroversial amendment can’t be passed, what hope for root and branch reform?

“The constitution is both procedurally and substantively undemocratic,” says Lin Chien-chih, an associate research professor of jurisprudence at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s preeminent research institute. “The hurdle to amending the constitution is unreasonably high — the highest among non-federalist countries.”

The procedural obstacles are even more disconcerting when considered alongside the constitution’s content. Article 11 of the additional articles from 2005 refers to the “rights and obligations between the people of the Chinese mainland area and those of the free area [Taiwan]”. National unification is also specified as a goal. “In other words,” says Lin, “our constitution still bizarrely argues that the PRC is part of the ROC or at least that the territory controlled by the PRC is part of the territory of the ROC.”

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Not only is this “undemocratic in the sense that it defies what the Taiwanese people think or hope for”, but it also bolsters Beijing’s One-China narrative. Chinese officials regularly cite these provisions as confirmation of PRC sovereignty, a situation that Lin has described as “embarrassing and actually hard to gainsay”.

Does this mean the cause is lost? Not entirely. Social movements are one avenue to so-called “Taiwanisation” of the constitution. The 2014 Sunflower Student Movement was a notable success in this regard. After occupying the Legislative and Executive yuan, protestors managed to block the KMT government’s sleight-of-hand passage of a trade bill with China. But, as Lin notes, such protests cannot fundamentally alter the One-China bent of the constitution. The same goes for judicial review by Taiwan’s constitutional court, which avoids “the political thicket of controversies concerning national identity, operating at the margins rather than the centre”. A further possibility is constitutional desuetude — where provisions that fall into disuse are informally abandoned. With pro-unification politicians in Taiwan continuing to invoke the constitution’s One-China articles, Lin sees this as doubtful.

The best hope in the short term might be a return to the incrementalism that accompanied Taiwan’s democratisation. “This referendum could be a first step,” says Lin. “You start with less politically sensitive issues, and if successful, you move to things like the Control Yuan.”

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Despite a reputation as a radical with a penchant for hurling flip-flops at adversaries and paint at dead dictators, Chilly Chen agrees with this approach. From his 11th-floor office, a view onto the Control Yuan building is a daily reminder of everything he rejects. As director of the Taiwan Republic NGO, Chen agitates for an end to the ROC and independence for Taiwan under that name. But he is pragmatic. In the face of Chinese threats, Chen accepts international recognition under the ROC rubric as a temporary compromise. “The end goal is to build a country called Taiwan,” he says. “But we have to keep this island safe. We’re democratic. We follow the rules. Nobody wants a bloody revolution, and nobody wants to see a war. So, we’ll go step by step.”

Yet in a climate of heightened Chinese aggression, many analysts believe that wholesale constitutional overhaul must wait. Even the groups behind Saturday’s referendum share this view. “Most Taiwanese won’t accept just ending our constitution immediately,” says Michelle Wu, director of Taiwan Youth Association for Democracy. “It can be adjusted softly.” While Lin agrees that enactment of a new constitution is “neither feasible nor necessary in the near-future”, he fears that failure on Saturday could convince radicals that incrementalism is doomed. This, in turn, could destabilise Taiwanese politics. “I’m pessimistic, but I do hope it passes.”

Back at TSP headquarters, Chen Yi-chi expresses similar sentiments. As he escorts me to the elevator, we pass the wall of shame again. Shaking his head in frustration, Chen says Taiwanese have been reduced to “self-censorship” for fear of enraging China. The constitution, he believes, should never be sacrosanct. “Revising the constitution represents protection of democratic freedom,” Chen says. “If Taiwan wants to decide its future and China says ‘no’, they are attacking the practice of democracy.”