The Existential Dread of Hotel Carpets and Other Travel Truths

There I was, standing in the hallway of a mid-tier hotel in at 2 AM, staring at a carpet pattern that seemed designed by someone having a particularly vivid fever dream.

Geometric shapes in colors that don't exist in nature repeated endlessly down the corridor, lit by overly weird lights that made it too dark to be inviting, but light enough to not walk into the wall. That's when it hit me: hotel carpets are a form of psychological warfare.

Think about it. You're already disoriented from travel, displaced from your normal environment, possibly jet-lagged and definitely running on airport coffee and determination. Then you're confronted with flooring that appears to have been designed by an algorithm trained exclusively on the aesthetic preferences of beings from another dimension. It's like the hospitality industry is conducting a massive experiment in human tolerance for visual chaos.

But hotel carpets are just the beginning of travel's assault on your sense of reality.

There's the elevator music that exists in some temporal loop, playing the same thirty-second instrumental version of "Girl from Ipanema" that you'll hear in hotels from Tokyo to Toledo. I'm convinced this music exists in a parallel universe where time moves differently, which explains why those elevator rides always feel both eternal and impossibly brief.

Then there's the breakfast buffet phenomenon. Somewhere, in some corporate headquarters, people in suits have calculated the exact temperature at which scrambled eggs become simultaneously too hot to eat and somehow still cold in the middle. They've determined the precise staleness level that makes toast technically edible but spiritually crushing. I don't drink coffee anymore, but when I did it was always either strong enough to wake the dead or weak enough to make you question whether it's actually just hot water with commitment issues.

Don't even get me started on hotel shower controls. I'm convinced they're designed by engineers who have never actually taken a shower. There's always one knob that controls both temperature and pressure in a way that defies physics. Turn it one millimeter to the left, and you're being gently misted with lukewarm disappointment. Turn it one millimeter to the right, and you're being blasted with water hot enough to strip paint while the pressure tries to relocate your spine. Or in most cases these days, unless you're spending a fortune on your hotel, the water comes out tepid in temperature and softer than a sparrows fart.

The bathroom lighting deserves its own psychological study. It's always either so dim you can't see what you're doing or so aggressively bright that you look like you're auditioning for a role as "recently deceased" in a medical drama. There's no middle ground, no flattering light that makes you feel human after a long day of travel.

And what about those hotel key cards? They have a half-life shorter than most isotopes. They work perfectly when you first receive them, then gradually lose their magnetic properties through what I can only assume is spite. By day three, you're standing outside your room at midnight, frantically swiping a piece of plastic that has apparently forgotten its purpose in life, while the little light blinks red in what feels like mockery.

The TV remotes are another conspiracy. They're either missing half their buttons or have so many buttons that operating them requires an engineering degree. Want to change the channel? First, you need to figure out which of the seven inputs corresponds to actual television, then navigate a menu system designed by someone who clearly believes that accessing basic functions should require the solving of riddles. Trying to connect your device so you can stream from it? Forget it!! If you have an Apple device it doesn't work and if you have an Android it might work, but not the way you want it to.

But perhaps the most psychologically disturbing aspect of hotel stays is the ice machine.

It's always located at the end of an impossibly long hallway, behind a door that slams shut with the sound of doom, on a floor that's never the one your room is located on. The ice itself is either completely absent or dispensed in such quantities that you could supply a small arctic expedition. There's no middle ground.

Room service menus are works of creative writing that would impress Kafka. A sandwich costs more than a decent restaurant meal, and somehow takes longer to arrive than if you had grown the ingredients yourself. When it does arrive, it's accompanied by enough packaging to supply a small moving company, and the sandwich itself has been designed by someone whose understanding of food exists only in theory. Pro tip - if you want to test hotels, they all generally have some version of a Club Sandwich (I am going to write an entire blog on Club Sandwiches, so stay tuned). Order this in every hotel. If they don't have one, they're not a good hotel.

Yet despite all this, the carpets, the elevators, the showers that alternate between arctic and volcanic, we keep traveling. We keep staying in these liminal spaces that exist somewhere between reality and a David Lynch film. Why? Because travel itself is transformative, even when the hotels seem designed to break our spirits.

Maybe that's the point. Maybe the mild psychological torture of hotel amenities is actually preparation for the disorientation of being in new places, meeting new people, experiencing things that don't fit into our familiar categories.

The carpet that hurts your eyes might be training you to see beauty in unexpected places. The shower controls that defy logic might be teaching you patience and adaptability.

Or maybe hotel carpets are just really ugly, and I'm overthinking things because I've spent too much time staring at them while waiting for elevators that may or may not arrive in this lifetime.

Either way, I'll keep traveling, keep staying in hotels, and keep wondering what exactly goes through the mind of someone who designs carpet patterns that look like they were inspired by a kaleidoscope having an anxiety attack.

Some mysteries are meant to remain unsolved.