Risk-averse preference for the known can make travel pointless

Evidence

Of course, having encounters entails risks that not everyone is willing to take. For example, I once dated someone whose very intelligent brother only ate at chain restaurants when he traveled, his reasoning being that he wanted to know what he was getting and that he didn’t want to waste time risking something he wouldn’t like. This used to infuriate my then-boyfriend whenever he visited, since we lived in a part of San Francisco famous for its Mexican, Salvadorian, and Ecuadorian food. The idea of eating at Chipotle instead of La Palma Mexicatessen or Los Panchos, especially when you were only going to be in San Francisco for a few days, seemed absurd. Food-wise, this man had achieved the strange feat of going somewhere without actually going anywhere. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 475

Categorization

• CANDY: The chain-restaurant brother is a funny, everyday instance of filter-bubble thinking — ‘gone somewhere without actually going anywhere’ is a shareable punchline.
• XREF: connects to: Travel yields little the traveler did not already possess perceptively — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 661