A Pilgrimage Without Transformation
Hadas Weiss, an anthropologist and author of We Have Never Been Middle Class (Verso, 2019), walked roughly 300 kilometers of the Camino de Santiago along the Portuguese Coastal Route. She did not do it for spiritual reasons. She did it because literary agents kept rejecting her book manuscript, and she needed to get out of the house.
Published in The Hinternet, the essay is introduced by the editors as an experiment: could a brilliant Twitter presence sustain a longer form? The answer turns out to be an unqualified yes. Weiss writes with the comic precision of someone who has spent years compressing observations into 280 characters, then finally been handed room to breathe.
The Anti-Pilgrim's Progress
Weiss begins with research, and her survey of Camino literature is devastating. She skims Paulo Coelho's The Pilgrimage, whose mentor offers wisdom like:
"When you have an objective in your life [it] will turn out to be better or worse depending on the route you choose to reach it."
She tries ChatGPT for a summary but finds it fabricated quotations. Coelho's actual words, she reports, "turned out to be far sillier." The Shirley MacLaine memoir, a German comedian's bestseller, vanity-press accounts from ordinary walkers -- Weiss dispatches them all with a single comparison:
They weave through minor adventures like a painful blister, getting lost, wanting to give up but soldiering on -- all about as exciting as your uncle's 1980s vacation slide show.
The memoirs promised transformation through vulnerability. Weiss is not buying it. The lessons learned, she notes, "could easily have been picked up from a Hallmark card without walking a single step."
The Comedy of the Trail
What makes the essay genuinely distinctive is how Weiss handles the people she meets. There is no sentimentality. She records human encounters with anthropological sharpness and comic timing, but also with real affection.
When she buys her pilgrim passport at the Lisbon cathedral, the saleswoman barely looks up from her phone. "Two euros." Weiss draws the right conclusion:
It gave me my first inkling that I would not, in fact, be the pilgrimage's main character.
The physical toll mounts quickly. Her old foot injury flares up, producing a limp that earns her sympathy from fellow pilgrims. A Dutch man offers sheep's wool for a pressure point. A French woman finds her a walking stick so enormous and twisted it makes her "look like an evil pilgrim on her way to worship Satan." She tosses the stick the moment the woman is out of sight, because she needs her hand free for "that far more important crutch -- my phone."
Then a pilgrim with a prosthetic leg appears on the route and steals all the inspirational thunder. Weiss's reaction is pitch-perfect petulance:
Him again, I muttered every time he was mentioned.
Neediness as Honest Position
The essay's philosophical center arrives through two contrasting encounters. Kyle, a Midwestern seminarian, has the self-possession Weiss craves. He heard a calling at thirteen, resisted it through medical school, then surrendered to it completely. He no longer needs anyone's approval. Weiss asks him if he is 100 percent certain. He is.
But when Weiss later sees Kyle at a pilgrim debriefing, speaking in religious language with "unusual confidence," she is repelled. She slips out to avoid him. The reversal is sharp and honest:
God might make you more secure but at least insecurity forced you to pay attention to people who could alert you when you went off the deep end.
Miguel, a Mexican pilgrim doing online therapy twice a week even on the trail, delivers a harder truth. He tells Weiss her comedy is a defense mechanism. She might get a laugh, but then people move on. Weiss suspects he is right, but her response is characteristically stubborn: "Better funny and needy than serious and miserable."
The Limits of Self-Awareness
There is a counterpoint worth noting. Weiss is so skilled at self-deprecation that it becomes, paradoxically, its own form of armor. She identifies comedy as a defense, quotes Miguel calling it out, and then deploys it again immediately -- as if naming the pattern exempts her from changing it. The essay is brilliant precisely because of this refusal, but a reader could reasonably wonder whether relentless self-awareness, without any movement toward vulnerability, eventually becomes its own kind of stasis.
Miguel's critique lands harder than Weiss lets on:
"You can't both have the emotional intensity and stay inside your comfort zone."
She frames this as teasing. It reads more like diagnosis.
The Sociologist's Pilgrimage
Weiss draws on Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's essay about the pilgrim as a symbol of modernity -- a pursuer of truth and constructor of identity, always walking toward a protean, ever-unfulfilled ideal self. Bauman distinguished the pilgrim from the tourist: the pilgrim seeks meaning, not experience.
Weiss positions herself somewhere between the two categories. She wants transformation but will not pay the emotional price. She wants recognition but mocks the desire for it. She walks 300 kilometers and arrives at the same place she started, which she knows perfectly well. Her closing line loops back to the Coelho she mocked at the start:
"I've risen above and beyond the details of my problems. Don't ask me how though. The search for happiness is a personal search and not a model we can pass on to others."
The joke works because it is also not entirely a joke.
Bottom Line
Weiss has written one of the sharpest Camino essays in recent memory, largely by refusing to play the genre's game. There is no epiphany, no tearful cathedral moment, no gratitude list. There is instead a writer of real talent doing what she does best: watching other people, collecting their sentences, and arranging them with merciless comic precision. The Hinternet's editors asked whether Weiss's Twitter voice could survive the transition to longer form. It does more than survive. It thrives. The question the essay leaves behind is the one Miguel posed -- whether being funny about your own neediness is the same thing as addressing it. Weiss does not answer. She takes a bus home to Lisbon and checks her phone for likes.