Comments so far are missing a major reason travel is likely enjoyable. One of my favorite theories on why time feels like it accelerates as you get older is that your brain tends to only store unique memories. Like that daily commute you do every day and the odd feeling you sometimes get at the end of it where you can’t remember driving…
Travel is a set of unique experiences that form unique memories. Part of what’s addicting and pleasurable is that it helps slow down the perception of the passage of time, among many other positives.
It’s also self reinforcing in that when you think back, you tend to disproportionately remember travel vs other experiences.
There’s clearly a lot more benefits than that, but it certainly seems like a significant factor.
That unique experience is hard to find, though, especially as one gets older, I find. Once you've been to a handful of cities, you've kind of seen them all. If you live near a major city it's even worse because chances are you've seen most of what it has to offer, and if you visit another city somewhere else in the world it's like "Oh, yeah... more museums... more theme parks... more bars and clubs... another beach... some skyscrapers... street food... people who don't speak my language... I should have stayed home." I know it's not like that for everyone, but that's essentially why I don't always like traveling and why it annoys me when people tell me I should get out more and travel.
When I travel, either I want people or I want solitude. Most of my enjoyment from traveling comes from seeing family and friends, and it really doesn't matter that much where we're situated. But if I have neither, then being in a sea of people is really worse than just being at home. In that case, I want to be alone, and I can easily get that by driving 1.5 hours into the mountains where I live.
Travel isn't a bad thing, in fact it can be a great thing. My problem is that we've made travel out to be a grandiose life achievement. In the near past and for millennia, humans spent most if not their entire lives in one place, and there's nothing wrong with that.
As an avid traveler, I disagree with your assessment. Yes, there are definitely things that are very similar in all places, particularly as western companies take over the world (much to my disappointment).
However, if you get away from the "tourist" spots, every place is unique and does offer something interesting to experience.
My wife and I were driving back to our rental in France from someplace and stopped for lunch at the only restaurant we could find in the little town in the middle of I have no idea where we were. Very little English spoken (we don't speak French, but can manage with a few words and technology) and had a very enjoyable meal and a little sightseeing in this small town.
Not saying that everyone enjoys that kind of thing, but if someone travels to Paris, for example, and has their sights only set on the popular things, Eiffel Tower, Louvre, etc. They're missing so much more to the city. Yes, certainly plan on seeing what's popular because that's why you went there, but also spend at least half the time exploring the little gems that every city offers that unique to it.
And for the love of everything, don't eat at places you can eat at home every meal just because you know it.
A bit hyperbolic, perhaps intentional, but I agree. It's compounded by the fact that I'm just not cut out for true adventure travel. Sorry, I need some modern conveniences. The result has been that over the years my travel preferences have become decidedly more milquetoast.
What you are saying rings more true to me for domestic travel. Do you have this experience (or lack of it) for international travel as well? Even for countries that are more different from the one you live in?
> In the near past and for millennia, humans spent most if not their entire lives in one place, and there's nothing wrong with that.
I don't think that's true, maybe just leisure travel is cheaper in the last hundred years so its more common. There was movement to the americas, westward expansion in the us. Europe immigration movements. large wars. pilgrimages
> In the near past and for millennia, humans spent most if not their entire lives in one place, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Same can be said about slaves. What conclusion should I draw? Honestly, I think you should get off of Instagram if you think travel is about life achievement. If getting to know your fellow humans and expanding your understanding of why the world is the way it is is not interesting to you, stay home. But also don't be surprised if people call you a troglodyte. I agree with everything you said about the problems of modern day traveling, that it is incredibly geared towards empty experiences. However, I believe this is because people only have a few days to travel. What irks me is seeing "43 countries visited!" because, as you allude to, it is a vanity number. It takes months to fully immerse oneself in a culture or even be invited into local life. However, that's obviously out of reach for 99.99% of the population and so we have the current set of cookie cutter experiences. Of course, none of what I suggest is easy. I also classify myself as an introvert, which you don't say explicitly but is abundantly clear you are as well. Just make a new friend in the country you want to go to, just one. The emotional energy it takes upfront is paid tenfold in the experiences that come after. Oftentimes, you will discover that traveling with said friend brings them tons of joy because it gives them a reason to go do all the things in their backyard that they have never done because it is in their backyard.
This is a more specific instance of something more general: new things are more exciting in the short term.
Someone else commented below about the hedonic treadmill.
Travel is what creates unique experiences in people because traveling is a rare thing for people in general.
When I toured we had 220-230 shows a year, everyday in a different place. I did it for 5 years.
It's hard now to even tell one year from the other.
I surely made great stories, but most of them are foggy nowadays.
Most unique experiences I have left of that time are either global events, I shared the merchandise stand with Nick Alexander the merch manager of EODM the night before he was brutally killed in the Bataclan attack, or too important to forget, like one of the crew members having a baby and rushing him to the airport so he could be there on time.
I think you have a point. But it sounds to me like your example was more similar to repetitive traveling for work than a unique travel experience each time. I don't know much about touring, but how different could've your daily routine really have been?
I've moved a lot as an adult, and I can confirm that this is true. It's nothing to do with how old you are, and all to do with how much your life changes.
Last time I stayed in the same place/job for a few years it was a blur.
Really? When my kids were young (< 10, so a 12 year span), they were recognizably different cognitive functioning every month or so. Every month was a whole new game.
But yes, I do remember some of the early games, building block towers, as if they were yesterday.
I was in Japan for a student exchange in 2016/17 and the amount of detail I remember from that time is astonishing. I can barely remember how I spent my day yesterday (in general I feel like I don't have a very good memory), but I can easily list all the trips we've taken during that semester and remember details that I would usually forget.
In general, I feel like most of my memories are structured around my unique (mostly travel-related) experiences. Oh 2015, that was the first time I ever left continental Europe and flew to Iceland in the middle of the semester to visit my friend. Things like that.
Unfortunately, travel has been turned into a commodity just like anything else. “Bragging rights” associated with travel have only become more desirable with the spread of social media, and other things that allow you to “travel” superficially- such as cruises.
> theories on why time feels like it accelerates as you get older
My theory is that everything takes a little longer as you get older, but in very small increments, so you don't really notice it. E.g., getting ready in the morning takes just a few seconds longer each day as you get old and slow down, but you remember it taking a set time, say 30 minutes. Then one day, you're up to 40 minutes, but it still feels like 30 to you. Aggregated across your myriad daily activities, and you're either getting the same amount of things done in a day, but your day is "shorter", or you're just running out of time altogether, because "where did the time go?" So, you perceive that time is moving faster, because you're getting less and less done in the same span.
I've noticed this some 14 years ago when doing mighty backpacking trip(s) in India. 2x 3 month trips, traveling all around that place with little plan and just return ticked, planning max few days in advance. Every day was so different.
It didn't feel like years after some time on the trip. More like I've switched whole reality, myself and everybody else. After some 2 months, life and reality back home was just a distant dream, too unreal to even consider seriously. Thank god it was before phones and wifi became so commonplace, it massively helped with that, writing an email once a week in some obscure internet cafe.
Coming back, it felt I've spent a lifetime away. Twice. Now I judge vacations on how it feels how long it lasted, the more it does the happier I am with deciding for it.
> One of my favorite theories on why time feels like it accelerates as you get older is that your brain tends to only store unique memories.
My theory is that it's less that it only stores unique memory, but it is always trying to resolve things into generalizable patterns. Kind of like a compression algorithm - but in this case not always accurate or reversible.
For me, time during the pandemic has been flying by because every day is nearly the same. Wake up work, maybe excercise in the evening, play video games, sleep.
I think time feels like passing faster because 1 month at 50 years old is a much smaller portion of your life than it is at 8 years old. It's a matter of relativity.
I feel that time goes faster as I get older but I don't enjoy travel. I don't make more memories in different places. All but few memories from the time I spent abroad evaporate very quickly and I'm left with general feeling that I lost a clearly defined chunk of my life. What remains more often are bad memories about being tired and uncomfortable.
There is a deeper reason for slowing perception of the passage of time: mindfulness. When you travel or do a unique experience you usually are fully committed to living these experiences. Practicing mindfulness has worked great for me to achieve the same results in my everyday life (granted, I have the chance to live in the countryside with a garden). From the outside I don't do much and live a very mundane life, but for me everyday is very different and time has slowed down. Like watching how birds or insects behave differently everyday, trees grow, and more generally how every microscopic bit of nature change slowly day after day to cycle through the seasons.
Travel can still be an enjoyable experience but there is nothing more meaningful I'm searching for.
I believe culture is a factor that we can't remember and enjoy daily commute. Most people consume just pop culture, that makes them to enjoy and fantasize only "unique" and spectacular aspects of life.
I recently traveled by bus not exactly by standards, in a more modest area. Before that I read some literature, which had as characters normal people, with some life situations in which normal people face.
It made me feel different that two-hour road, I saw people differently, I felt a little like in one of the stories and I enjoyed.
This reminds me of one of the most epic episodes of Money Heist where $character, shortly before dying, says something that resonated a lot with me:
> Mucha gente cree que en la vida solo hay un gran amor, lo que no saben es que se pueden vivir varias vidas. […] Hoy acaba algo pero es el día de tu siguiente vida. Tienes que vivir muchas vidas […], muchas...
I like to think that this can be applied not only to love (like here) but also to switching jobs, careers, places, … anything really that causes a big change (a diff, as you say) in life.
Also, if the 20 year old looks back 5 years, they were a hormonal teenager, still growing physically, treated as a minor and had never experienced half the things they'd experienced now. They were a completely different person in many respects then, and if they look back 15 years it's their very first memories.
If the 50 year old looks back 5 years, their life probably wasn't all that different. If they look back 15, their kids were still at home and they had a different job title but they were fundamentally the same person, and they feel they've been that way for a very long time.
That's just a statement, there is no logic behind why life would be experienced as percentages rather than in absolute time. Personally, I'm more prone to believe the unique experiences concept, because that actually has some basis for it, and also meshes with my real life. I have a few years in my early 20s which are just a blur (because I was working a crummy office job), but I have a year or two in my 30s which feel like a lifetime in themselves, and I can recall numerous specific days, because I was doing a totally new thing (road tripping around the mediterranean)
Also, travel tends to give a context to unpleasant or difficult experiences that make them tolerable. They led to something. They weren't mindless petty humiliations like one experiences in an office job (a recurring eight-hour economy-class flight to nowhere). They were scenes in a story.
There's a lot about travel that just sucks. Flying is horrible, especially now. Hotels are soulless. You're surrounded by people trying to take petty economic advantage of the fact that you're in an unfamiliar place. Things never happen quite the way they're planned, and while sometimes this produces serendipity, it's sometimes infuriating or even terrifying. Still, people are remarkably able to handle discomfort, pain, and even danger if there's a purpose to it. With travel experiences, there almost always is. Sure, you spent six hours in an airport because some reptilian airline executive saved a few thousand dollars by cancelling a flight... but you got there, and you got to see and do things most people, in human history, could only read about.
Travel itself isn't fun at all. It's the experiences that travel makes possible that are rewarding. The good recontextualizes the bad.
This is paradoxical in a number of ways. For one thing, putting too much prior effort into engineering the experience leads to high expectations and disappointment. "I saw the thing. Now what?" We often don't know in advance what will produce the true prize memories. For some people, this is infuriating, and they have coped by creating Instagram culture, where the focus becomes the mindless collection of digital images ("look at all the expensive experiences I can buy") that makes travel, far from an escape from our decadent and purposeless treadmill culture, an extension thereof.
Travel and "education" are the two forms of conspicuous consumption that are socially acceptable. Spend $200,000 on a car and people will make small penis jokes (as they should) behind your back. Spend $200,000 (or forgo earnings in an equivalent amount) to take pictures of yourself next to recognizable world monuments... and you're "worldly". Travel makes you more interesting, people say, and it sure can... but if it were always so, then why are the people who get to do it all the time, the rich, so uninteresting and so useless?
Ultimately, what distinguishes travel is not that the experiences are good or bad in different proportions than are possible in a more homely life, but that we have the cognitive machinery--an innate conception of story--that makes the negative experiences, even if they are in fact petty and pointless, tolerable in the context of what is gained by going through them. In office life, this doesn't exist. We spend so much time there, we know the unpleasant bits are not only unnecessary but utterly detrimental. Office life is never physically or cognitively demanding, but it is emotionally stressful, and furthermore it delivers absolutely nothing of value. The people who stole all the money sell a little bit of it back to you, so you can survive today and return tomorrow. So perhaps the lesson is not that travel is wonderful, but that today's working life is so atrocious that people will spend substantial proportions of what little disposable income the system has given them, not to have rewarding experiences (which are possible through, but not guaranteed by, travel) but merely to escape it.
This very much captures the hedonic treadmill: when you increase your baseline level of happiness, you re-normalize to the new level, with relatively little change in your absolute happiness.
But while I do think appreciating what you have is part of how to avoid the hedonic treadmill, I don't think it's a matter of learning to be happy with a routine.
I've found it possible to make a conscious effort to avoid hedonic adapation, and enjoy novel things without allowing them to become a new baseline. If you can maintain your expectations at the same level, while improving your actual circumstances noticeably above that level, you can maintain a higher level of enjoyment of your life.
It does make me think it's - once again - a privilege thing. A lot of people can't afford vacations full stop. Another group can, but only in their own country or only stepping over the border.
Single, full-time working people, especially in tech, start to unlock the ability to travel abroad, maybe even one of those big two-three week Life Changing things to somewhere exotic, but only once in a lifetime or once every few years.
Middle / upper-middle class incomes eventually get to a point of wealth and freedom where they can take vacations abroad multiple times a year.
And I think you need to be even above that level, where you don't have to worry about your base income or mortgages or whatever, where you can have this lifestyle where you can have novel things and experiences all the time. And even then there's a risk people get used to it.
Bull. This is such a boring way to look at life. You can’t go on ‘vacation’ unless you’ve reached a certain (extremely high) level of material success? Maybe if you think of vacation as a place you go for a little while, eat nice food, stay in an Airbnb, and when you come home, your dog is waiting for you at the pet hotel to go back to your condo where all your stuff, subscriptions, job and ‘real life’ is still waiting as if you never left.
Even with very little means you can travel and see the world. It’s just a matter of priorities and what kind of life you want to make for yourself. If you think you have to establish the standard life package first and then go see the world when you have spare time and money, sure, maybe you won’t until you’ve made it pretty far. Right out of high school, instead of going to university, I decided to travel abroad. I didn’t have family money. I’m from a poor family in a small town. I just saved a little money working service jobs and traveled on the cheap. CouchSurfing, hitchhiking, camping out, hostels, etc. I’m not special. My little sister is doing the same thing now on waitress money. I’ve met countless people out on the road living interesting and meaningful lives, traveling abroad without being a single, full-time tech worker. You just have to ask yourself whether you need to compete materially with everyone who’s staying in one place and accumulating stuff.
To think you only deserve a couple Life Changing, two or three week trips, even as a high earning tech worker… Such poverty of spirit makes me depressed just thinking it. Consider a few great authors, like Orwell for example. As a broke 20 something he was tramping around living a series of great stories. If he’d chosen to play it safe, stay home and work at some Important Career and collecting stuff, he’d probably never have gone to Spain in 1936, and the world would probably never have received his most important works as a result.
I mean, you're kind of choosing to care about those things.
In general, these are just different goals in life. If you want a house and kids more than you want the freedom to travel, that's cool and pretty normal. There's no stone tablet handed down from the skies that says that has to be the way it is, though.
When I was 23 I saved a few grand up and went hitchhiking around Europe on a budget of something like < 500 eur a month.
I didn't care about my base income and still don't. I think most people accidentally structure their life so that the 9-5 becomes necessary (e.g. if you rent a room in an expensive city, or a flat or house, now you need to pay for that).
The income is a means to achieve the things that you want. If you can't X because Y, and you want to X, then give up Y, not X, find a different way to do X.
I have a mortgage now, but I didn't bother with it for the longest time for precisely the reason you'd described. It locks you down. I waited until I was sure that it _wouldn't_ lock me down because I could really afford it (i.e. it's not 50% of my income from a full time job).
If I'm being charitable, I had the advantage that I could move my belongings etc in to my parents' house if I wanted to. They're pretty poor, probably in the bottom 20% in the UK, so that's not some fantastic privilege.
If you have fuckup parents (not just poor but failed in some way), then yeah, this becomes a lot harder, and I'm sorry about that.
For someone to say that being "single, full-time working people, especially in tech" is a matter of privilege is such a sign of our excuse-seeking times. Literally, every single one of those attributes are (or used to be before you made certain decisions) 100% within your control.
I have to wonder how people will look back at the current period. I really doubt we'll compete with the WW2 folks for the term "the greatest generation."
So if I'm not mistaken, the hedonic treadmill is not about baseline happiness. It's about increasing your set-point for joy and/or excitement. Happiness is a state, joy is fleeting.
So the goal is generally to increase your level of happiness - to have a higher baseline in terms of feeling good and having a sense of well-being.
It's futile to chase joy in place of happiness, because each hit of joy makes the next one feel less exceptional.
Although joy feels like happiness, it's not the same thing, and it's barely related. Joy often has to do with doing more. Doing something extra and exceptional to move the needle.
Happiness often has to do with doing less. With being less focused on doing/attaining/obtaining something new, and more focused on mindset: on finding happiness in what we already have.
Disagree. I grew up in Scandinavia but have since lived many different places all over the world and for me it remains enjoyable to move someplace new, get to know it and the culture over a few years, and if I stagnate or get bored, switch it up again. It has also paradoxically been good both for my career and personal life. (exposed to more potential jobs, friends, partners etc I otherwise wouldn't have)
YMMV and it's certainly not for everyone. But I'm skeptical that staying in your comfort zone your whole life will do anyone much favors. (and the odd few week trip here or there doesn't really count, by all means all travel is great but vacation and just passing places through is fundamentally different from spending at least a few months or even years somewhere)
I will say that I met my wife traveling and my kids were born on a different continent than me. There is a lot to find out there but travel as a value itself gets old and doesn’t fulfill your soul like it felt like it would when I was young.
To me, it seems like the comic is saying, rather than using a switch in your environment as a crutch for happiness, find happiness in your routine.
Having a routine that makes you happy is important and not bad advice!
But sometimes, at least for me, I kind of exhaust my options for happiness in a given environment. Eg maybe I've already gotten a job with the best employer in a given location and can't climb any higher professionally, friends have moved away or started a family or whatever, hobbies and activities that used to be novel and fun have become repetitive and dull, I've mastered the local language I wanted to learn etc etc.
That feeling, combined with a basically infinite and always in flux list of places and things I want to experience before my time is up, makes switching my environment up very powerful and enjoyable for me.
Happily admit there's downsides to not "settling down" too and it's not for everyone. But I think most people would benefit from fundamentally switching up their environment at least a few times in their life. If it turns out you were happier where you started you can always go back. But you'll never know other places if you don't give them a shot.
Sure, the act of travelling seems to be his bade state which stays constant. Like, you can not travel and be content with what you have. Or you can travel and be content with switching it up.
It is what the comic is saying, but the conclusion is different. The comic concludes that we should not attempt to escape by changing routine, but we must accept the routine and find ways to relax within it. The previous poster says that the excitement of changing your routine is a good solution, although temporary, it's still helpful.
I tend to agree: it's really nice to build up experiences and "novel routines". But you can't do it forever, at some point this becomes a "meta-routine" that drains you (it's not easy to keep changing your life).
The idea that it's better to stay where you are and instead meditate and build up good habits is great and I subscribe to it, but with caution. It should not be an alternative solution to, say, escaping a toxic work environment or a bad place. You shouldn't "meditate away" real problems.
for me, moving = giving up close friends. in my heart I love them but in reality we quickly lose touch because we can no longer do things together. sure I can try to make new friends at the new place but it seems to get harder the older I get and there's a part of me who feels like staying long term in one place for those long term connections is better than lots of acquaintances all over the world
I personally despise travel, almost every aspect of it. Planning, making reservations, trying to figure out airline tickets, packing, parking, waiting, being groped by the pre-flight fondlers, cramming myself into a seat, sitting there for hours, the mystifyingly slow process of disembarking, getting to the hotel, registration, lugging luggage, the cautious exploration of the room, the scan for bedbugs, arraying the hopefully adequate creature comforts imported to the destination on some tatty drawer, all of it is terrible. But then people say, "Oh, but the thing you came for!" And whatever it is leaves me unmoved. I could have been shown a photo of it for all that it matters. Or conferences were nothing was conveyed. Then you get to do all of it in reverse, perhaps with a careful notebook of receipts tucked away.
Even hearing about it. And what is beyond the pale is that if word gets out you don't like travel, the Travel People simply won't have it. They're like a cult.
In my black little heart, I wonder if people would on the whole travel less if they weren't permitted to speak about it, because lord knows some bore bringing up their time in Nepal yet again at the merest whiff of conversational relevance makes my cortical folds smooth out.
So, let me get this clear, I just ... get in my car and go in a direction. No medication, no change of clothes, no toothbrush. I stop at some random location for the ... view? I ... sleep in the car? Help me out here, because none of this sounds like a good idea.
Well if I am being made to go to a conference, I kinda need my money back, you know? Bleak or not, they want receipts.
Why is someone not enjoying something someone else does sad? You probably have things you do not enjoy, yes? And people pestering you to partake of those things you do not enjoy ("just try the liver") annoys you, right? And if someone told you that made them sad you would ... well, I don't know, what would you do?
I shared, and in many ways, still share your sentiment. But, having recently done my first international trip (to Mexico) for about three weeks, I would say my perspective has changed.
I think it helped that I stayed in hostels. Basically, all of the fun I had came from meeting people at breakfast or at bars, and then doing things with those people. The people you meet at hostels are open to meeting people and, being travelers themselves, are usually coming from somewhere interesting, with an open mind, and with nothing to do. I had a lot of great conversations with people I wouldn't have normally ever met, learned a lot about their cultures, and learned to get really comfortable meeting and befriending people.
The other thing I consciously tried to do was be open to everything. If someone invited me to go do something I hadn't done before, I'd say yes unless I had a good reason not to. That led me to a lot of interesting places!
The experience for me, as an American in Mexico, I would also say genuinely did make me rethink how I understood Mexico and Mexican culture in the US. I would be very excited to go see firsthand a lot of the countries that have influenced me in some way, because it really seems different when you see it directly rather than just on TV.
I think it also helped that Mexico was very cheap and I had no responsibilities back at home. I showed up with no plans to do anything at all, and no expectations. Some of the days especially at first were relatively boring. But it felt okay, as part of the goal was challenging myself to enjoy life even when I really wasn't doing anything.
Have you considered traveling in ways besides simply sightseeing? I think the travel industry pushes one idea of travel onto us, but it's not the only way. Many of the people I met were lifelong travelers, who worked in their home countries until they saved up enough to travel for six months, and then they would go and try to make their money last as long as they could while still enjoying themselves before repeating the process.
And I agree the logistics of travel are terrible. But, it wasn't actually too bad on my trip here. It was easy enough to book a flight to Mexico. And once I was there, I basically booked space at hostels for 1-3 days at a time, and then just extended my stay one day at a time if I wasn't bored yet. Unlike the hundreds of hotels in big cities, there are usually 3-10 hostels in any given area of Mexico so the choice was always easy, and since they're so cheap ($15-25/night) and have good availability I never really worried about booking them.
All of this said, I think I could probably have traveled even more adventurously. And actually that's a good summary of the mindset I think you should consider: be adventurous. Try to challenge yourself by eating foods you normally wouldn't eat, going places you wouldn't normally go, talking to people you wouldn't normally talk to. I think you'll get a lot more from travel that way.
Well, I don't speak Spanish. Going to a country without a working command of the language seems like a bad idea to me. This seems like an extraversion vs. introversion thing, because "meeting a bunch of new people" is on my list of things I do not enjoy. It would seem even worse if I did not know the language.
New foods don't thrill me, and I have to be careful with what I eat anyway. As to enjoying life when I wasn't really doing anything, I could do that at home.
There's nothing about travel that is for me. Even if I could teleport across borders, I don't think I would. Other people like being in new places, and I just ... don't.
After reading the article it seems that the author frames the problem in the wrong way.
Travel is not a _cure_ for the mind. There is no cure for the human condition.
It's better described as maintenance. If I'm feeling cooped up indoors and I jump on the metro and go to Chinatown, does that cure all of my existential ills?
No, but it's fun, and tomorrow I can go somewhere else.
The same is true of all activities. I quit my job a while back and now I'm studying full time. Is that going to scratch my itch forever? No, eventually I'll get bored and want to do something else.
But now I've done more different things, I'm more well rounded, and I experienced a lot of joy over and above what I'd have if I just sat in the office counting beans all year.
I'm going to meet some friends this afternoon, and that's not gonna cure my mind either, same as eating lunch doesn't cure hunger.
Yeah I agree, what a strange premise, do people really have this expectation on travel? And the conclusion too, is to replace travel with mindful meditation and try to use that one single thing instead to fix everything.
Indeed humans, many of us at least, thrive on novelty: new things, new experiences. Meditation, thankfulness, and other forms of inward focus may bring some respite from the desire for novelty, but...
What is the point of life if not to enjoy it? What defines enjoyment varies from person to person, but for some of us it is ABSOLUTELY certain that some environments are more pleasant than others. Some people/friends/lovers are more pleasant than others. Some foods are more pleasant than others. Our tastes and interests change over time.
We could live on one place, tend our little garden, eat the same meals each week, talk to the same people, and meditate. For those who want that life, great for them. It's not for me.
The world is vast, and there are so many experiences discover and enjoy. And actually, a Thai beach suits me VERY well. It is my next long stay, and after it there will probably be other long stays. Maybe when I get too old to move about, I'll pick a spot to die.
I think this "stay put and be zen" mentality is less common for tech people (especially developers). If we were satisfied with status quo, we wouldn't be constantly trying to develop solutions to "problems". If we were more able to be satisfied, we would still be using Fortran and COBOL (or pick any old language). There would be no smartphones (for better or worse). Heck, you could unwind all human advancement back to pre-agriculture days... which might actually be an improvement... but that cat is too far out of the bag.
Have fun in Thailand! I lived there two years, from 2019-2021. Not exactly the best time frame to experience the country, but it was awesome nonetheless. There is so much to do and see there, and the energy is intoxicating.
>"And actually, a Thai beach suits me VERY well. It is my next long stay, and after it there will probably be other long stays."
I was curious if you've looked at the state of this recently? Is this doable for a foreigner/digital nomad again? Any insights? What are the long stay options there? I know visas used to be very generous, I've no idea now. It does sound nice though.
TLDR: it's very doable, and I will be spending many months there again this year.
I spent several weeks of Nov/Dec 2021 in Phuket while I was between contracts. Things were just starting to open up and come back to life as restrictions were being lifted. Many places were still closed or had gone out of business, but there was no lack of dining, massage, bar, or outdoor activities.
Internet was reliable and fast with my 30 EUR 30-day unlimited data Thai SIM card (AIS brand if I remember correctly). Most hotels had decent wifi as well, but I often didn't even bother using it.
There are multiple visa options (which you can do a search for), and there's a subreddit just on this topic if you don't mind digging a bit. All options involve some expense and/or extra effort, but it's still a small cost considering the benefits of being there.
Lodging is easy and cheap (particularly with COVID 50% discounts which may be vanishing slowly). My advice if you're going to stay for more than 30 days is to get a hotel for 5 days, and then start asking around and just walking/driving around looking for flats or rooms to rent. Not everything is listed online. There are also a lot of Youtube bloggers who like to show off places they encounter.
One can live comfortably for $1500/mo or less, or frugally for $1000 or less. It's also possible to spend $5000+/mo if you want to live in luxury. Speaking fankly, luxury villas and "human entertainment" tend to be the big costs for some people. I can't speak to specifics since that's not my kind of scene (and honestly I didn't really see many other visitors who were acting like high roller party boys in Vegas).
Be aware that officially, working while in Thailand is not approved without the proper visa (which probably 99% of DNs don't have). Practically though, sitting on the balcony behind a computer (and getting paid to do so) for several hours a day is not high risk. Just don't flaunt it.
I don't know. If you live your self repeating life and weeks become months and months become years and then you go to say Korea for half a year and make new friends and pick up new routines and eat new foods and then you go back to your routine, isn't your life just better than if you hadn't gone? The new stuff might still become a routine, but it is still extra.
It helps if your life problems are true first world problems (viz. tech guy with million or more in savings but thinks the cushy job isn’t rewarding enough and wants more purpose or something). It doesn’t matter you’re sitting in Kyoto eating sushi if you’re depressed to begin with. Only therapy and treatment could help. Maybe.
Just a side note - you absolutely don't need to be millions rich to travel for extended periods. You just need to have few financial obligations that are location dependent.
In an extreme example (which some of us fantasize about), you could have all your necessary possession in two bags, have no "home" (and no car and no other anchors), and travel the world for less than many people spend living in one place. This is especially true if you take a US/EU salary and spend time in much lower cost of living places.
The comic seems to be saying that travel and living overseas doesn’t even help with simple problems like being bored in your routine beyond the very short term, which doesn’t really match my personal experience at least.
I guess it depends, I used to travel a lot when I was in my 20s (I guess it would add to about 5 years spread over 8 years period) and now after close to 10 years being home it just feel like it never happened: sure I do have some memories, stories and some connections on Facebook to people I haven't seen in many years. Don't get me wrong it was fun and interesting, but I guess thats it.
But maybe thats me, when I was traveling I was feeling happy and excited, but I feel same just walking in the park outside my home and actually looking forward to just get my coffee at usual place and spend time programming. Basically same routine, now I just have more comfortable setup.
You are missing the point. The article focuses on mindless tourism as a source of excitement rather than any deeper meaning. Just an embodiment of the hedonistic treadmill or consumerism.
The article makes some valid points. I did a year and a half working as a "digital nomad" traveling through the middle east, Europe and Africa. It was an incredible part of my life - just an incredibly dense stream of experiences; some good and some bad, some fun, some challenging, from pure joy to wrenching heartbreak and everything in between.
There was a lot of superficial joy and excitement during that period. And as the article says, there were times when the novelty of going somewhere new, seeing the sights, meeting new people wore off, and that was really depressing. I felt the lack of roots: of having people who really knew me around, and having the chance to build things which take time and stability.
At the same time, there were a lot of real experiences that time. I faced and overcame certain challenges, and I met certain people, and I had certain experiences which fundamentally changed who I am and how I and how I approach the world. And just that project of living with something approaching to absolute freedom for an extended period allowed me to choose who I want to be in a way which would not have been possible otherwise.
I'm on a different project now, and I don't think I will be disappearing for a year and a half any time soon, but I still find travel to be an incredibly valuable tool. I like to set up trips which include the right mix of planning and improvisation to put me in that mindset where I have to be open to possibility and really engage with the world around me. Almost like an experiment where certain parameters are set in order to test myself in a certain way. And I have found that during a trip, or coming back from one, is often when I can think the most clearly about my life and make important decisions.
Travel will not solve your problems on its own, but it can certainly help.
> Travel will not solve your problems on its own, but it can certainly help.
I don't agree that most of what you wrote there in any sense refutes the article or Seneca's letter on which is it is based, but this line definitely rings true to me. I think there are two reasons why it can help:
1. there was a line in a book from the 1940s that I browsed once in a cafe in London, written by someone who was (it seems) one of that era's most committed Egyptologists. Early in the book, he wrote (and I have to paraphrase it now, because I can't remember the elegant, if dated, prose he used): the point of travelling to places where things seem strange and different is so that when you return (or choose) somewhere, even if you had spent your whole life there before, it now also seems strange and different.
2. Getting a sense of the expanded boundaries of possibility can help make the walls of the Box of Daily Experience a bit more porous. When you have a clearer picture of the many different Boxes of Daily Experience that you and others live in around the world, it can (I think) become easier to find a new relationship with your own.
Another angle on this: I took 8 months off work, did lots of DIY, adopted two greyhounds, started walking them 20km+ per day. It has been life changing and yet I don't think I've been more than 50km from my house at any point during that time. So maybe life altering experiences happen because you alter your life, not change where your are.
I wouldn’t discount alternative environments for stimulating latent or dorment parts of a person, but you certainly have a good point about the perennial capacity for self transformation
Agreed. Never been a full nomad, as I always had my own base in Berlin, but I’ve been around enough of them (and wrote reports about it) long enough to see it.
Digital Nomadism hasn’t solved the problem of rootlessness. If you’re nomadic long enough, you risk ending up with a very odd kind of depression. It’s also a different way of getting stuck on the same thing. Most nomads I know tend to stay longer and longer in a place, and to go back to that place eventually.
I’m still a huge fan of it, and I think that remote work and work from anywhere is the only way forward for most intellectual workers.
Yet, I can see the problem more clearly now that I’ve forcefully stayed put for two years, then when I was kind of compulsively traveling.
Nonetheless I write this while on a 2.5 months workation break in Southern Europe to flee from Berlin’s gray winter (which has a devastating effect on anyone’s mood).
I think the key difference between your narrative and the authors is that you kept moving. It seems like when you were a nomad you never stayed in one place for too long.
Readit News
Travel is a set of unique experiences that form unique memories. Part of what’s addicting and pleasurable is that it helps slow down the perception of the passage of time, among many other positives.
It’s also self reinforcing in that when you think back, you tend to disproportionately remember travel vs other experiences.
There’s clearly a lot more benefits than that, but it certainly seems like a significant factor.
When I travel, either I want people or I want solitude. Most of my enjoyment from traveling comes from seeing family and friends, and it really doesn't matter that much where we're situated. But if I have neither, then being in a sea of people is really worse than just being at home. In that case, I want to be alone, and I can easily get that by driving 1.5 hours into the mountains where I live.
Travel isn't a bad thing, in fact it can be a great thing. My problem is that we've made travel out to be a grandiose life achievement. In the near past and for millennia, humans spent most if not their entire lives in one place, and there's nothing wrong with that.
However, if you get away from the "tourist" spots, every place is unique and does offer something interesting to experience.
My wife and I were driving back to our rental in France from someplace and stopped for lunch at the only restaurant we could find in the little town in the middle of I have no idea where we were. Very little English spoken (we don't speak French, but can manage with a few words and technology) and had a very enjoyable meal and a little sightseeing in this small town.
Not saying that everyone enjoys that kind of thing, but if someone travels to Paris, for example, and has their sights only set on the popular things, Eiffel Tower, Louvre, etc. They're missing so much more to the city. Yes, certainly plan on seeing what's popular because that's why you went there, but also spend at least half the time exploring the little gems that every city offers that unique to it.
And for the love of everything, don't eat at places you can eat at home every meal just because you know it.
I don't think that's true, maybe just leisure travel is cheaper in the last hundred years so its more common. There was movement to the americas, westward expansion in the us. Europe immigration movements. large wars. pilgrimages
Dead Comment
Same can be said about slaves. What conclusion should I draw? Honestly, I think you should get off of Instagram if you think travel is about life achievement. If getting to know your fellow humans and expanding your understanding of why the world is the way it is is not interesting to you, stay home. But also don't be surprised if people call you a troglodyte. I agree with everything you said about the problems of modern day traveling, that it is incredibly geared towards empty experiences. However, I believe this is because people only have a few days to travel. What irks me is seeing "43 countries visited!" because, as you allude to, it is a vanity number. It takes months to fully immerse oneself in a culture or even be invited into local life. However, that's obviously out of reach for 99.99% of the population and so we have the current set of cookie cutter experiences. Of course, none of what I suggest is easy. I also classify myself as an introvert, which you don't say explicitly but is abundantly clear you are as well. Just make a new friend in the country you want to go to, just one. The emotional energy it takes upfront is paid tenfold in the experiences that come after. Oftentimes, you will discover that traveling with said friend brings them tons of joy because it gives them a reason to go do all the things in their backyard that they have never done because it is in their backyard.
Someone else commented below about the hedonic treadmill.
Travel is what creates unique experiences in people because traveling is a rare thing for people in general.
When I toured we had 220-230 shows a year, everyday in a different place. I did it for 5 years. It's hard now to even tell one year from the other.
I surely made great stories, but most of them are foggy nowadays.
Most unique experiences I have left of that time are either global events, I shared the merchandise stand with Nick Alexander the merch manager of EODM the night before he was brutally killed in the Bataclan attack, or too important to forget, like one of the crew members having a baby and rushing him to the airport so he could be there on time.
Deleted Comment
Last time I stayed in the same place/job for a few years it was a blur.
But yes, I do remember some of the early games, building block towers, as if they were yesterday.
In general, I feel like most of my memories are structured around my unique (mostly travel-related) experiences. Oh 2015, that was the first time I ever left continental Europe and flew to Iceland in the middle of the semester to visit my friend. Things like that.
My theory is that everything takes a little longer as you get older, but in very small increments, so you don't really notice it. E.g., getting ready in the morning takes just a few seconds longer each day as you get old and slow down, but you remember it taking a set time, say 30 minutes. Then one day, you're up to 40 minutes, but it still feels like 30 to you. Aggregated across your myriad daily activities, and you're either getting the same amount of things done in a day, but your day is "shorter", or you're just running out of time altogether, because "where did the time go?" So, you perceive that time is moving faster, because you're getting less and less done in the same span.
It didn't feel like years after some time on the trip. More like I've switched whole reality, myself and everybody else. After some 2 months, life and reality back home was just a distant dream, too unreal to even consider seriously. Thank god it was before phones and wifi became so commonplace, it massively helped with that, writing an email once a week in some obscure internet cafe.
Coming back, it felt I've spent a lifetime away. Twice. Now I judge vacations on how it feels how long it lasted, the more it does the happier I am with deciding for it.
My theory is that it's less that it only stores unique memory, but it is always trying to resolve things into generalizable patterns. Kind of like a compression algorithm - but in this case not always accurate or reversible.
For me, time during the pandemic has been flying by because every day is nearly the same. Wake up work, maybe excercise in the evening, play video games, sleep.
Travel can still be an enjoyable experience but there is nothing more meaningful I'm searching for.
I recently traveled by bus not exactly by standards, in a more modest area. Before that I read some literature, which had as characters normal people, with some life situations in which normal people face. It made me feel different that two-hour road, I saw people differently, I felt a little like in one of the stories and I enjoyed.
> Mucha gente cree que en la vida solo hay un gran amor, lo que no saben es que se pueden vivir varias vidas. […] Hoy acaba algo pero es el día de tu siguiente vida. Tienes que vivir muchas vidas […], muchas...
(English translation: https://www.deepl.com/translator#es/en/Mucha%20gente%20cree%.... )
I like to think that this can be applied not only to love (like here) but also to switching jobs, careers, places, … anything really that causes a big change (a diff, as you say) in life.
1 year for a person who lived 50 years is relatively short(2%) compared to someone who lived for only 20 years (5%)
If the 50 year old looks back 5 years, their life probably wasn't all that different. If they look back 15, their kids were still at home and they had a different job title but they were fundamentally the same person, and they feel they've been that way for a very long time.
There's a lot about travel that just sucks. Flying is horrible, especially now. Hotels are soulless. You're surrounded by people trying to take petty economic advantage of the fact that you're in an unfamiliar place. Things never happen quite the way they're planned, and while sometimes this produces serendipity, it's sometimes infuriating or even terrifying. Still, people are remarkably able to handle discomfort, pain, and even danger if there's a purpose to it. With travel experiences, there almost always is. Sure, you spent six hours in an airport because some reptilian airline executive saved a few thousand dollars by cancelling a flight... but you got there, and you got to see and do things most people, in human history, could only read about.
Travel itself isn't fun at all. It's the experiences that travel makes possible that are rewarding. The good recontextualizes the bad.
This is paradoxical in a number of ways. For one thing, putting too much prior effort into engineering the experience leads to high expectations and disappointment. "I saw the thing. Now what?" We often don't know in advance what will produce the true prize memories. For some people, this is infuriating, and they have coped by creating Instagram culture, where the focus becomes the mindless collection of digital images ("look at all the expensive experiences I can buy") that makes travel, far from an escape from our decadent and purposeless treadmill culture, an extension thereof.
Travel and "education" are the two forms of conspicuous consumption that are socially acceptable. Spend $200,000 on a car and people will make small penis jokes (as they should) behind your back. Spend $200,000 (or forgo earnings in an equivalent amount) to take pictures of yourself next to recognizable world monuments... and you're "worldly". Travel makes you more interesting, people say, and it sure can... but if it were always so, then why are the people who get to do it all the time, the rich, so uninteresting and so useless?
Ultimately, what distinguishes travel is not that the experiences are good or bad in different proportions than are possible in a more homely life, but that we have the cognitive machinery--an innate conception of story--that makes the negative experiences, even if they are in fact petty and pointless, tolerable in the context of what is gained by going through them. In office life, this doesn't exist. We spend so much time there, we know the unpleasant bits are not only unnecessary but utterly detrimental. Office life is never physically or cognitively demanding, but it is emotionally stressful, and furthermore it delivers absolutely nothing of value. The people who stole all the money sell a little bit of it back to you, so you can survive today and return tomorrow. So perhaps the lesson is not that travel is wonderful, but that today's working life is so atrocious that people will spend substantial proportions of what little disposable income the system has given them, not to have rewarding experiences (which are possible through, but not guaranteed by, travel) but merely to escape it.
YMMV.
Having to fill in bureaucratic forms and pick your nose on demand with a stick, probably not fun.
Hitchhiking? Long distance sleeper trains? Motorhome? Sounds great to me.
I'd get on a Soviet sleeper train if it just took me from my house back to my house via some rolling countryside with the provodnitsi.
Outlier example, but I mean, I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that flying on a private jet wouldn't be fun.
But while I do think appreciating what you have is part of how to avoid the hedonic treadmill, I don't think it's a matter of learning to be happy with a routine.
I've found it possible to make a conscious effort to avoid hedonic adapation, and enjoy novel things without allowing them to become a new baseline. If you can maintain your expectations at the same level, while improving your actual circumstances noticeably above that level, you can maintain a higher level of enjoyment of your life.
Single, full-time working people, especially in tech, start to unlock the ability to travel abroad, maybe even one of those big two-three week Life Changing things to somewhere exotic, but only once in a lifetime or once every few years.
Middle / upper-middle class incomes eventually get to a point of wealth and freedom where they can take vacations abroad multiple times a year.
And I think you need to be even above that level, where you don't have to worry about your base income or mortgages or whatever, where you can have this lifestyle where you can have novel things and experiences all the time. And even then there's a risk people get used to it.
Even with very little means you can travel and see the world. It’s just a matter of priorities and what kind of life you want to make for yourself. If you think you have to establish the standard life package first and then go see the world when you have spare time and money, sure, maybe you won’t until you’ve made it pretty far. Right out of high school, instead of going to university, I decided to travel abroad. I didn’t have family money. I’m from a poor family in a small town. I just saved a little money working service jobs and traveled on the cheap. CouchSurfing, hitchhiking, camping out, hostels, etc. I’m not special. My little sister is doing the same thing now on waitress money. I’ve met countless people out on the road living interesting and meaningful lives, traveling abroad without being a single, full-time tech worker. You just have to ask yourself whether you need to compete materially with everyone who’s staying in one place and accumulating stuff.
To think you only deserve a couple Life Changing, two or three week trips, even as a high earning tech worker… Such poverty of spirit makes me depressed just thinking it. Consider a few great authors, like Orwell for example. As a broke 20 something he was tramping around living a series of great stories. If he’d chosen to play it safe, stay home and work at some Important Career and collecting stuff, he’d probably never have gone to Spain in 1936, and the world would probably never have received his most important works as a result.
In general, these are just different goals in life. If you want a house and kids more than you want the freedom to travel, that's cool and pretty normal. There's no stone tablet handed down from the skies that says that has to be the way it is, though.
When I was 23 I saved a few grand up and went hitchhiking around Europe on a budget of something like < 500 eur a month.
I didn't care about my base income and still don't. I think most people accidentally structure their life so that the 9-5 becomes necessary (e.g. if you rent a room in an expensive city, or a flat or house, now you need to pay for that).
The income is a means to achieve the things that you want. If you can't X because Y, and you want to X, then give up Y, not X, find a different way to do X.
I have a mortgage now, but I didn't bother with it for the longest time for precisely the reason you'd described. It locks you down. I waited until I was sure that it _wouldn't_ lock me down because I could really afford it (i.e. it's not 50% of my income from a full time job).
If I'm being charitable, I had the advantage that I could move my belongings etc in to my parents' house if I wanted to. They're pretty poor, probably in the bottom 20% in the UK, so that's not some fantastic privilege.
If you have fuckup parents (not just poor but failed in some way), then yeah, this becomes a lot harder, and I'm sorry about that.
I have to wonder how people will look back at the current period. I really doubt we'll compete with the WW2 folks for the term "the greatest generation."
So the goal is generally to increase your level of happiness - to have a higher baseline in terms of feeling good and having a sense of well-being.
It's futile to chase joy in place of happiness, because each hit of joy makes the next one feel less exceptional.
Although joy feels like happiness, it's not the same thing, and it's barely related. Joy often has to do with doing more. Doing something extra and exceptional to move the needle.
Happiness often has to do with doing less. With being less focused on doing/attaining/obtaining something new, and more focused on mindset: on finding happiness in what we already have.
In any case, I'm not claiming a universal recipe here, just observing something that seems to have worked well for me.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27061860
YMMV and it's certainly not for everyone. But I'm skeptical that staying in your comfort zone your whole life will do anyone much favors. (and the odd few week trip here or there doesn't really count, by all means all travel is great but vacation and just passing places through is fundamentally different from spending at least a few months or even years somewhere)
Isn’t that exactly what the comic is about?
I will say that I met my wife traveling and my kids were born on a different continent than me. There is a lot to find out there but travel as a value itself gets old and doesn’t fulfill your soul like it felt like it would when I was young.
Having a routine that makes you happy is important and not bad advice!
But sometimes, at least for me, I kind of exhaust my options for happiness in a given environment. Eg maybe I've already gotten a job with the best employer in a given location and can't climb any higher professionally, friends have moved away or started a family or whatever, hobbies and activities that used to be novel and fun have become repetitive and dull, I've mastered the local language I wanted to learn etc etc.
That feeling, combined with a basically infinite and always in flux list of places and things I want to experience before my time is up, makes switching my environment up very powerful and enjoyable for me.
Happily admit there's downsides to not "settling down" too and it's not for everyone. But I think most people would benefit from fundamentally switching up their environment at least a few times in their life. If it turns out you were happier where you started you can always go back. But you'll never know other places if you don't give them a shot.
I tend to agree: it's really nice to build up experiences and "novel routines". But you can't do it forever, at some point this becomes a "meta-routine" that drains you (it's not easy to keep changing your life).
The idea that it's better to stay where you are and instead meditate and build up good habits is great and I subscribe to it, but with caution. It should not be an alternative solution to, say, escaping a toxic work environment or a bad place. You shouldn't "meditate away" real problems.
You are missing the point. The article focuses on mindless tourism as a source of excitement rather than any deeper meaning.
Taking pictures for instagram has little to do with exiting your comfort zone.
Deleted Comment
Even hearing about it. And what is beyond the pale is that if word gets out you don't like travel, the Travel People simply won't have it. They're like a cult.
In my black little heart, I wonder if people would on the whole travel less if they weren't permitted to speak about it, because lord knows some bore bringing up their time in Nepal yet again at the merest whiff of conversational relevance makes my cortical folds smooth out.
Also, notebook of receipts? Man, this is bleak.
Well if I am being made to go to a conference, I kinda need my money back, you know? Bleak or not, they want receipts.
I think it helped that I stayed in hostels. Basically, all of the fun I had came from meeting people at breakfast or at bars, and then doing things with those people. The people you meet at hostels are open to meeting people and, being travelers themselves, are usually coming from somewhere interesting, with an open mind, and with nothing to do. I had a lot of great conversations with people I wouldn't have normally ever met, learned a lot about their cultures, and learned to get really comfortable meeting and befriending people.
The other thing I consciously tried to do was be open to everything. If someone invited me to go do something I hadn't done before, I'd say yes unless I had a good reason not to. That led me to a lot of interesting places!
The experience for me, as an American in Mexico, I would also say genuinely did make me rethink how I understood Mexico and Mexican culture in the US. I would be very excited to go see firsthand a lot of the countries that have influenced me in some way, because it really seems different when you see it directly rather than just on TV.
I think it also helped that Mexico was very cheap and I had no responsibilities back at home. I showed up with no plans to do anything at all, and no expectations. Some of the days especially at first were relatively boring. But it felt okay, as part of the goal was challenging myself to enjoy life even when I really wasn't doing anything.
Have you considered traveling in ways besides simply sightseeing? I think the travel industry pushes one idea of travel onto us, but it's not the only way. Many of the people I met were lifelong travelers, who worked in their home countries until they saved up enough to travel for six months, and then they would go and try to make their money last as long as they could while still enjoying themselves before repeating the process.
And I agree the logistics of travel are terrible. But, it wasn't actually too bad on my trip here. It was easy enough to book a flight to Mexico. And once I was there, I basically booked space at hostels for 1-3 days at a time, and then just extended my stay one day at a time if I wasn't bored yet. Unlike the hundreds of hotels in big cities, there are usually 3-10 hostels in any given area of Mexico so the choice was always easy, and since they're so cheap ($15-25/night) and have good availability I never really worried about booking them.
All of this said, I think I could probably have traveled even more adventurously. And actually that's a good summary of the mindset I think you should consider: be adventurous. Try to challenge yourself by eating foods you normally wouldn't eat, going places you wouldn't normally go, talking to people you wouldn't normally talk to. I think you'll get a lot more from travel that way.
New foods don't thrill me, and I have to be careful with what I eat anyway. As to enjoying life when I wasn't really doing anything, I could do that at home.
There's nothing about travel that is for me. Even if I could teleport across borders, I don't think I would. Other people like being in new places, and I just ... don't.
Travel is not a _cure_ for the mind. There is no cure for the human condition.
It's better described as maintenance. If I'm feeling cooped up indoors and I jump on the metro and go to Chinatown, does that cure all of my existential ills?
No, but it's fun, and tomorrow I can go somewhere else.
The same is true of all activities. I quit my job a while back and now I'm studying full time. Is that going to scratch my itch forever? No, eventually I'll get bored and want to do something else.
But now I've done more different things, I'm more well rounded, and I experienced a lot of joy over and above what I'd have if I just sat in the office counting beans all year.
I'm going to meet some friends this afternoon, and that's not gonna cure my mind either, same as eating lunch doesn't cure hunger.
Travel can be seen as an escape for the mind. It's heroin for a daily life that could be improved.
We often say a vacation "keeps you sane" however in the context of travel as a drug we might rethink that notion.
What is the point of life if not to enjoy it? What defines enjoyment varies from person to person, but for some of us it is ABSOLUTELY certain that some environments are more pleasant than others. Some people/friends/lovers are more pleasant than others. Some foods are more pleasant than others. Our tastes and interests change over time.
We could live on one place, tend our little garden, eat the same meals each week, talk to the same people, and meditate. For those who want that life, great for them. It's not for me.
The world is vast, and there are so many experiences discover and enjoy. And actually, a Thai beach suits me VERY well. It is my next long stay, and after it there will probably be other long stays. Maybe when I get too old to move about, I'll pick a spot to die.
I think this "stay put and be zen" mentality is less common for tech people (especially developers). If we were satisfied with status quo, we wouldn't be constantly trying to develop solutions to "problems". If we were more able to be satisfied, we would still be using Fortran and COBOL (or pick any old language). There would be no smartphones (for better or worse). Heck, you could unwind all human advancement back to pre-agriculture days... which might actually be an improvement... but that cat is too far out of the bag.
I was curious if you've looked at the state of this recently? Is this doable for a foreigner/digital nomad again? Any insights? What are the long stay options there? I know visas used to be very generous, I've no idea now. It does sound nice though.
Deleted Comment
I spent several weeks of Nov/Dec 2021 in Phuket while I was between contracts. Things were just starting to open up and come back to life as restrictions were being lifted. Many places were still closed or had gone out of business, but there was no lack of dining, massage, bar, or outdoor activities.
Internet was reliable and fast with my 30 EUR 30-day unlimited data Thai SIM card (AIS brand if I remember correctly). Most hotels had decent wifi as well, but I often didn't even bother using it.
There are multiple visa options (which you can do a search for), and there's a subreddit just on this topic if you don't mind digging a bit. All options involve some expense and/or extra effort, but it's still a small cost considering the benefits of being there.
Lodging is easy and cheap (particularly with COVID 50% discounts which may be vanishing slowly). My advice if you're going to stay for more than 30 days is to get a hotel for 5 days, and then start asking around and just walking/driving around looking for flats or rooms to rent. Not everything is listed online. There are also a lot of Youtube bloggers who like to show off places they encounter.
One can live comfortably for $1500/mo or less, or frugally for $1000 or less. It's also possible to spend $5000+/mo if you want to live in luxury. Speaking fankly, luxury villas and "human entertainment" tend to be the big costs for some people. I can't speak to specifics since that's not my kind of scene (and honestly I didn't really see many other visitors who were acting like high roller party boys in Vegas).
Be aware that officially, working while in Thailand is not approved without the proper visa (which probably 99% of DNs don't have). Practically though, sitting on the balcony behind a computer (and getting paid to do so) for several hours a day is not high risk. Just don't flaunt it.
In an extreme example (which some of us fantasize about), you could have all your necessary possession in two bags, have no "home" (and no car and no other anchors), and travel the world for less than many people spend living in one place. This is especially true if you take a US/EU salary and spend time in much lower cost of living places.
But maybe thats me, when I was traveling I was feeling happy and excited, but I feel same just walking in the park outside my home and actually looking forward to just get my coffee at usual place and spend time programming. Basically same routine, now I just have more comfortable setup.
(Personally I take the view that all things pass and the novelty of travel is worth enjoying even if it will eventually wear off)
The article makes some valid points. I did a year and a half working as a "digital nomad" traveling through the middle east, Europe and Africa. It was an incredible part of my life - just an incredibly dense stream of experiences; some good and some bad, some fun, some challenging, from pure joy to wrenching heartbreak and everything in between.
There was a lot of superficial joy and excitement during that period. And as the article says, there were times when the novelty of going somewhere new, seeing the sights, meeting new people wore off, and that was really depressing. I felt the lack of roots: of having people who really knew me around, and having the chance to build things which take time and stability.
At the same time, there were a lot of real experiences that time. I faced and overcame certain challenges, and I met certain people, and I had certain experiences which fundamentally changed who I am and how I and how I approach the world. And just that project of living with something approaching to absolute freedom for an extended period allowed me to choose who I want to be in a way which would not have been possible otherwise.
I'm on a different project now, and I don't think I will be disappearing for a year and a half any time soon, but I still find travel to be an incredibly valuable tool. I like to set up trips which include the right mix of planning and improvisation to put me in that mindset where I have to be open to possibility and really engage with the world around me. Almost like an experiment where certain parameters are set in order to test myself in a certain way. And I have found that during a trip, or coming back from one, is often when I can think the most clearly about my life and make important decisions.
Travel will not solve your problems on its own, but it can certainly help.
I don't agree that most of what you wrote there in any sense refutes the article or Seneca's letter on which is it is based, but this line definitely rings true to me. I think there are two reasons why it can help:
1. there was a line in a book from the 1940s that I browsed once in a cafe in London, written by someone who was (it seems) one of that era's most committed Egyptologists. Early in the book, he wrote (and I have to paraphrase it now, because I can't remember the elegant, if dated, prose he used): the point of travelling to places where things seem strange and different is so that when you return (or choose) somewhere, even if you had spent your whole life there before, it now also seems strange and different.
2. Getting a sense of the expanded boundaries of possibility can help make the walls of the Box of Daily Experience a bit more porous. When you have a clearer picture of the many different Boxes of Daily Experience that you and others live in around the world, it can (I think) become easier to find a new relationship with your own.
I wouldn’t discount alternative environments for stimulating latent or dorment parts of a person, but you certainly have a good point about the perennial capacity for self transformation
As will jumping into a deep ocean to learn to swim.