The Existential Quandary of the Millennial at Disney World

This summer, a mother posted on Facebook bemoaning the childless visitors of Disney World. “DW is for CHILDREN!!!!” she wrote. “People without children need to be BANNED!!!!” Her comments went viral on Twitter and sparked a massive backlash. In a column titled “Sorry, childless millennials going to Disney World is weird,” New York Post Entertainment Critic Johnny Oleksinski furthered the controversy by coming to the mother’s defense and criticizing the apparently endless adolescence of the millennial generation:

Millennials are indeed in an unhealthy relationship with Disney, having granted control of so much of their leisure time and personality to a single, enormous corporate entity meant for children. …

The usual complaint about those born between 1981 and 1996 remaining constant 12-year-olds is that the behavior amounts to self-infantilization and a lifelong immaturity that bleeds into basic decision making: getting jobs, paying bills, staying alive.

But another oft ignored problem with letting a kids brand control your adult life is the stupidity and culture ignorance it leads to.

Oleksinski raises many questions about Disney’s pop culture hegemony and how millennials spend their money, but his argument rests on a judgement about the vacations people take and why they take them. Why would someone choose to be entertained by characters from their favorite childhood film well into their 30s? Are millennials abdicating the responsibilities of adulthood?

No, they aren’t. It’s a vacation.

There’s a line in David Mamet’s State and Main where Annie, a bookseller played by Rebecca Pidgeon, quips, “You always make your own fun. If you don’t make it yourself, it ain’t fun, it’s entertainment.” We toss the words “fun” and “entertainment” around interchangeably, but separating them here provides a useful dichotomy. Fun is your creation; it is you extending beyond your mere existence to make a project of your own enjoyment. Entertainment is inactive: You are simply absorbing pleasures; you consume but you do not create. Fun is acting in a play, entertainment is attending it. There is nothing inherently wrong or immoral, of course, with being entertained, nor is there anything particularly ethical or moral about it. Its core value is that it is passive.

Consider popular tourist destinations: There are natural areas of beauty, cities full of organic culture, and then there are the designed tourist experiences: theme parks, casinos, resorts. These are places where someone has constructed for you a play area, as one might place a child’s swing set in the backyard of a house—central Florida is one of these places. If you count Disney World’s separate sections, there are more than a dozen amusement parks in the Orlando, Florida area. Many of them, doubling down on the entertainment aspect, are themed after films: Harry Potter World, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, Universal Studios. These places are jammed full of shows, rides, games, food and beverage, and offer packages that minimize the need to make decisions.

The child’s swing-set analogy comes from the work of Simone de Beauvoir, who believed children were metaphysically privileged: Since their decisions are largely inconsequential, their lives sheltered, they “escaped the anguish of freedom.” They are only partially free, but also they are almost entirely free of consequence, in a “state of security by virtue of [their] very insignificance.” If they love Harry Potter World, that is fine; it is made for them. Eventually they will become aware of and burdened by their immense freedom and responsibility, trading their Mickey Mouse hats for berets and their sippy cups for wine bottles, chain smoking and reading Kafka—but not yet.

There is an ethical quandary when adults do not make this transition. Existentialists such as de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre believe that a person needs to use their innate freedom to create their own essence, to build their own meaning in life through projects taken on in good faith; they referred to this as “transcendence.” Those adults who do not move beyond this childhood state, who do not consider their freedom and act upon it, are “sub-men” according to de Beauvoir. These are the thoughtless people out there living wholly unexamined lives, coasting along on metaphysical cruise control. “His acts are never positive choices, only flights,” she writes of the sub-man. “He cannot prevent himself from being a presence in the world, but he maintains this presence on the place of bare facticity.” In the credits, after this world is over, these are your “bar patron #4”-type characters—they add nothing to the plot, they simply fill in the background. But de Beauvoir thought that their emptiness made them susceptible to dangerous influences, “He is more readily anti-Semitic, anti-clerical, or anti-republican,” she writes. “Thus…the sub-man is not a harmless creature. He realizes himself in the world as a blind uncontrolled force which anybody can get control of.” The Nazi ranks were filled with such men.

We must avoid this path at all costs, you insist. But let’s not be hasty. Consider the respite offered by temporarily adopting the path of the sub-man in a safe context, such as a vacation. Like indulging in hallucinogens, the environment is key to a good trip.

Certainly, if you are making life decisions in 1930s Germany, putting some thought into the consequences of your actions may be useful. Hannah Arendt notes in “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” that psychologists who examined Adolf Eichmann considered him to be a typical, everyday guy—a travelling lubricant salesman who stumbled into the role of a middle-manager of the Holocaust by simply not thinking. “A leaf in the whirlwind of the time,” as Arendt calls him, he took a decent-paying government job and worked his way up to facilitating genocide. Passivity of thought in such a context is dangerous.

But if you’re just thinking about where to go on vacation for a week or two, letting go of executive function is not as risky and may be valuable. Let Mickey take control for a bit, send you on a guided tour of a zoo, or provide you a list of the best rides. Disney World, Harry Potter World, Sea World, they make decisions for you, take control of your mind, and allow you to exist without existential “transcendence” in an enjoyable and safe environment. Certainly, Disney’s ethics can be called into question on a number of fronts, but again we must choose our battles—and if this is one of yours, then you probably weren’t considering a theme park vacation to begin with.

What about the objection that Disney World is for children? Disney’s own marketing puts that to rest fairly quickly, advertising “Enchantment for All Ages…Especially Adults!” The other point made, though, is that somehow adults should be vacationing in a more adult way. Oleskinski comments that for the price of a Disney vacation one could travel to Europe: “Why do the same old, safe, boring thing when you could buy a round-trip Norwegian Airlines flight from New York to Paris right now for $280, get an Airbnb and sit along the Seine drinking rosé?” Post-modern tourism has created a thirst for authenticity in contemporary travelers, a desire to find the locals’ spots, the towns unchanged by tourism, the gritty and offbeat rather than the glossy and polished. Oleskinski is phoning it in here on the example—lounging on a riverside Parisian patio with a glass of wine is in most people’s top-ten vacation clichés. But the endless search for something new and different has driven tourists out of Paris, New York, and Orlando. Industries like ecotourism and dark tourism have grown, where the idea of finding something true and meaningful on your journey became more important than relaxing. This is why people keep dying on their way to see the bus where Christopher McCandless, whose life was chronicled by Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild, died. This is why you can take a tour of kill sites with a former Pablo Escobar hitman in Medellín, like David Farrier did on Netflix’s Dark Tourist. These trips aren’t inherently better or more authentic; they are often built and curated to draw tourists in the same way theme parks are—contrived experiences with a thin facade of realism. Additionally, they are often ethically more fraught, as they commoditize tragedy and turn suffering into entertainment. So why have tourists become so serious? Why must every decision on your trip be some meaningful step in a quest for a truly authentic experience? Regardless of what motivates these travelers, such single-minded search for novelty and authenticity carries risks. On the other end of the spectrum from the sub-man, in de Beauvoir’s mind, was someone who threw away their freedom wholly to some purpose: the serious man.

If we lament purposelessness and gullibility as the flaw in the sub-man—the “inauthentic” cargo-short clad tourist in line for Splash Mountain sans offspring—we might react accordingly to ballast ourselves with purpose and dogma. A person who remains a child, who does not actualize herself by “transcending,” is squandering her freedom. A person who goes to the opposite extreme, however, one who devotes herself totally to a life of purpose, faces a similar quandary. De Beauvoir says they both run from freedom and responsibility: “The serious man gets rid of his freedom by claiming to subordinate it to values. . . .” These values aim at some overarching objective, and that initial, specific objective is the only thing that matters. This is a rejection of freedom, because each choice is no longer made in freedom, but is determined by the prior choice.

More to the point, it also doesn’t seem like a very fun way to spend a vacation. This can lead to flawed attempts at authentic or ethical tourism: ecotourism after a carbon-dumping intercontinental flight, or developing-world voluntourism that degrades the local economy. Seems great, right? You build a schoolhouse for the poor children in some tiny village, they get a school and you get to feel great about yourself. But Peter Singer (whose work on effective altruism argues that first-worlders should really just be donating money to the poorest and most desperate) and the fine folks over at GiveWell (an effective altruist charity-ranking organization) could have told you that it would be more effective to have wired them the cost of your flight directly. Short-term voluntourism undercuts local laborers by presenting a free source of unskilled workers in areas often desperate for employment, reinforces the idea of the “white savior,” and tends to serve the volunteer more than the locals. A voluntourism tour operator sells the idea of these trips as effective and moral interventions which will help the lives of the less fortunate in a way similar to how Disney sells you light-hearted fun and relaxation. Both are ultimately about your experience. The difference may be that you could actually have light-hearted fun at Disney, but it is unlikely you did much (relative to the money and effort) to solve world poverty.

These archetypes de Beauvoir creates are about the totality of your choices. No reasonable person can be expected to make existentially significant decisions all the time, it would be exhausting. If you painstakingly assess the morality of every decision you make all day long you’ll become Chidi, a character from NBC’s philosophical sit-com The Good Place who is a hypercritical moralizer plagued by indecision and anxiety-related stomach aches. At a certain point you just have to decide between the bagel and the muffin, and it doesn’t matter that much. Yes, seeking out simple entertainments instead of creating your own fun is the choice a sub-man would make, but sometimes you don’t need to be a philosophical moral hero. Maybe you are doing other great things when you aren’t at Disney World—you could be a human rights activist or a doctor in a free clinic and you just want to relax and drink a butter beer on your vacation and shake Goofy’s hand. You aren’t a sub-man, but you are taking a sub-man vacation. On the whole you’ll probably be fine, but it ultimately doesn’t matter because no one is keeping score.

Existentialism may frame a certain lifestyle as less ethical than another, but it doesn’t mete out punishments for it. There is no God, no moral arbiter. In the end, those who spend much of their lives making lazy and ignorant decisions often get off scot-free because they never consider the consequences of their actions (or inactions) and are thusly able to extricate themselves from the painful knowledge of freedom and responsibility that the rest of us deal with on a daily basis. But in the same way, it is risky to subordinate yourself and your freedom to some false quest for purity in your leisure time. Disney World, for all its hyperreal simulations and fantastical imagery, exists for your enjoyment. The same cannot be said about some impoverished village in the developing world, or Mount Everest, now littered with garbage and corpses from decades of adventure seekers tempting its summit. Disney World is a safe place to let your guard down, if only momentarily, whether you are a child or not.

This isn’t to approve of Disney World or its less-than-stellar labor practices—that’s capitalism for you—but it is simply to say that the gift Disney World gives adults is the ability to live as the sub-man, to be entertained rather than make their own fun, to ignore the impossible weight of their freedom, for a short time. In this space, designed for just this purpose, it allows one to return to the state of a child, ignorant of so much, but unburdened by so much more. If kept within the confines of a brief vacation, this is a perfectly fine way to take a break. The nature of the sub-man is vulnerable, controllable, childlike. And there is obviously a demand for this in modern Western culture, as Oleksinski pointed out in his op-ed. These parks market not only to families and children, but adults as well, those seeking a return to childhood innocence.

But there is a reason why de Beauvoir loathes and pities the sub-man, who “makes his way across a world deprived of meaning toward a death which merely confirms his long negation of himself.” Try to spend a month or more at a theme park or at Las Vegas casinos and shows. Even if it weren’t prohibitively expensive to do so, you would at some point confront its emptiness. Disney, Universal, and even adult-centric Las Vegas all offer thousands of activities and restaurants, so many that you could never get bored. But I assure you, you will get bored. You will get tired of, as Jean Baudrillard described Disney Land, “the perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation.” Fake mountains and plaster boulders, the scale models of world heritage sites, the Italian restaurants with tiny Venetian canals built right into them—their facades only work for so long before betraying their emptiness. An oasis of relaxation quickly reveals itself to be desiccated of purpose. If you want to go to Disney World, go to Disney World. Let Disney World make your decisions for you, guide you on its shuttles to its lines, onto its tracks, into its restaurants—let them sate your hunger with overpriced churros. But let that denial of your freedom be temporary. Do not treat your whole life as a Disney vacation, or you may risk barely living at all.

Christopher B. Riendeau

Christopher B. Riendeau holds a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from University of North Carolina Wilmington. His research focuses primarily on applied ethics in tourism, existentialism, and the life and travels of Simone de Beauvoir.