Pilgrimage traditions persist across cultures and are being taken up by substantial numbers of people with no religious commitment. What distinguishes them from ordinary travel is structural rather than doctrinal.
The destination is not chosen for its qualities
A holiday destination is selected because it will be enjoyable, and it can be exchanged for another that would be enjoyable in the same way.
A pilgrimage destination is fixed by tradition, and its significance comes from the accumulation of people who have gone there rather than from anything about the place itself.
Because it cannot be substituted, the journey stops being a comparison between options and becomes a commitment to one route.
Difficulty is part of the design
Modern travel is organised to minimise effort, and the shortest and most comfortable route is the obviously correct one.
Pilgrimage routes retain length and hardship that could easily be avoided, and the walking is understood as the practice rather than as the cost of arriving.
Sustained physical effort with a single simple aim occupies attention in a way that reliably quietens ordinary planning and rumination.
Repetition of a simple day does the work
A pilgrim's day is highly repetitive: walk, eat, rest, walk again, with almost no decisions of consequence to make.
The absence of choice removes the low-level administrative load that fills most days, and people commonly report thinking becoming clearer within about a week.
This is closer to what a retreat provides than to what a holiday provides, achieved through movement rather than stillness.
Strangers on the same route form a temporary society
Everyone on the path is doing the same thing at the same pace, which removes most of the usual markers by which people sort each other.
Conversations between strangers become unusually direct, partly because the participants will separate permanently and partly because there is nothing else to discuss.
Many pilgrims describe this as the most memorable element, and it is produced by the structure rather than by anyone's intention.
Why the arrival is often anticlimactic
Pilgrims frequently report the destination itself as the least affecting part, which is a consistent enough pattern to be worth taking seriously.
The destination functions as the constraint that makes the journey coherent, rather than as the reward the journey purchases.
This is why routes are increasingly walked by people who reject the associated doctrine entirely: the structure produces its effects without requiring the belief that established it.