ethnodat, Author at The Cracked Door

So You Want to Travel the World? Here’s Where to Actually Start

People frequently ask me how to travel the world. Friends, in particular, who are interested in traveling the world will approach me curious about how to best do it. There are a lot of logistics to consider. In this article, I will focus on one of the first and most central questions someone thinking about traveling the world tends to have: “I want to travel the world, but I don’t know where to start. What would it look like to take some first steps towards traveling without upending my life as it is right now?”

For anyone considering traveling the world, my first recommendation is to test it out in phases. Take a month or two long trip to see whether you like traveling. Go somewhere you’d find interesting. Then take a five or six month-long trip. And if you still enjoy traveling after that, then and only then try traveling as a full-time lifestyle.

Don’t sell everything and go. It is smart to test the waters while still retaining some ability to go back and resume a normal life if you conclude you do not like it. For example, if you can, during the first month trip, keep your apartment or home back home and your job, so that if you learn that you do not enjoy it, you still have a life to go back to. You can increasingly disconnect from your home environment little by little after each trip. World travelers commonly sell or otherwise give away most of their possessions, traveling with only a few bags. This makes sense for years-long trips, but it may be best to test the waters with trips of increasing lengths before taking such a life altering action.

Traveling long-term is the type of activity where you have to do it in order to learn whether it works for you. (And to be clear, it doesn’t work everyone; despite being many people’s dream, I think the traveling lifestyle doesn’t work for most people.) Most people’s experience with travel are short vacations for at most a few weeks, which can be a lot of fun but are totally different from long-term travel.

In life, we accrue a lot of different types of experiences, which we can use to get a sense of what to expect when we have an upcoming experience. For example, if I decide to take a course at a university, I have attended courses before. School is something I have done for many years of my life, several decades even. Even if this class may be unique in all sorts of ways, I have some reference point for what class is like and how to get by in that environment. That is not the case with long-term travel. Short-term vacations are very different and do not make a good reference point. Thus, we need to learn about what the experience is like. Testing it with a few shorter trips of a few months is the most effective way to do that.

Each person has a slightly different set of logistical questions to sort through when figuring out to go on these shorter trips. Usually, I recommend you pick a country or region of the world they you always been interested in visiting. For some friends I have spoken with they had always wanted to visit the Caribbean; others Asia; others South America. Wherever that is for you, use that.

The more complicated question is how to maintain enough ties with your previous life that you can return to it with minimal stress if you learn you do not like traveling. The most common work ways to maintain a connection to work that I have seen are to:

Negotiate to work remotely for a month or two while traveling
Opt to take a month or couple-month long break from work, where if needed, they can return to their job.
Others are already in between jobs and decided to travel for a few months to unwind from the stress of whatever they just went through and rediscover themselves.

For your home, most people who rent will keep their apartments, if they can afford to continue paying their rent while away. Obviously anyone on a mortgage will likely still have to pay their monthly dues while away. Many have family they can move back in with if need be to return home in a pinch. These will not work for everyone, but they are the most common strategies I have seen.

You can both determine whether they rhythm of traveling works for you, in many cases figuring out the exact style or approaches that work best for you. It’s a practice run. Everyone has key personal questions they have to work through if they decided to travel permanently, such as how to juggle work while traveling or how to navigate relationships with loved ones back home. On a couple month-long trip, you will naturally encounter these issues and learn about how you deal with them, and you will have to determine the techniques that work best for you to deal with them. Most world travelers realize that they are capable of dealing with it and have developed the skills to do so that they can use on a longer trip. If your issues prove insurmountable during those months of travel, you just learned that travel is not for you. Worst case scenario, you just return back home with what will still likely be some kind of life-changing experience.

Like Dandelion Seeds in the Wind

For my Life Snippet for today, I would like to describe how young women in China navigate marriage works in China – and how young adult women navigate it. Or, at least, I will summarize the perspective of a 22-year old woman I met from Southeastern China. She explained why marriage in China makes her feel nervous.

Traditionally, marriage in China has involved the wife moving into the husband’s family. The wife joins the home of her husband and his parents. This saying describes it well, “A daughter married off is like water spilled out.” In short, when a woman marries a man, they, in effect, leave her family and join his family. Thus, whenever she goes back to visit her biological parents, it should be like a guest visiting a home, not a child coming home to see her family.

They are expected to follow his family’s rules of the house, which can put wives in a very uncomfortable position. In particular, the husband’s parents often have set ways they are used to things being that they expect the wife to conform to. The wife is now expected to take care of the children, his elderly parents, and the house in general, which may involve learning to cook food in a way that matches picky parents’ preferences and following the parents’ cleaning standards. In some previous eras, she said the wives are treated more like servants in the new household without any agency or say in what they can do, even forced to eat separately from the husband and his family.

When they marry, women also loose their original names, becoming simply referred to by their husband’s family name. She lamented that she does not know the full name of her great-grandmother or other female ancestors. Once as a child, she asked her father why they don’t remember the names of her great-grandmother’s generations, but her father scolded her, saying that children shouldn’t fuss over such matters. She never asked again because it seemed “disrespectful.”

At the same time, the family line is passed down exclusively through boys, so boys become seen as the primary children. Daughters will end up in the family they marry into, but boys will be the ones who carry the family line down. This not only means that having boys is often prioritized over having girls but also that boys are more likely to receive inheritances than girls. The One-Child Policy complicated all of this nowadays by limiting the number of children Chinese families were allowed to have (until 2015 when it was ended), but if a family has both a boy and a girl, the parents will often pass down their major resources like their home or cars as inheritance to the boys rather than the girl. They see giving these things to the boy as building their family legacy; whereas, the girl presumably will receive these resources from her husband’s family. Other women told me that many sisters are often forced to give a portion of their paycheck to their brothers or pay for the houses or other major expenses for their brother.

Furthermore, wives are frequently expected to support their husbands no matter what in what she says is frequently an one-sided exchange. “Marry a chicken, follow the chicken; marry a dog, follow the dog.” Basically, in her parents’ and grandparents’ generation, no matter what happens, the wife is expected to follow her husband like a loyal slave. Whether he becomes rich or poor. No matter how often or how badly he may beat her. The idea is that because she married him (which sometimes she freely chose to do and sometimes she was forced into), she must follow him forever. She will be bound to him for the rest of this life and throughout the afterlife.

For her, the same amount of loyalty or care does not always feel reciprocated. Wives often end up as unpaid nannies, caring for both children and elderly parents-in-law while maintaining a whole host of other homecare responsibilities. At the same time, the incredible toil pregnancy has on the human body are often swept under the rug, and they still may be expected to fulfill these responsibilities even when there are complications. She said that husbands often end up being indifferent bystanders instead of relating, comforting, or helping wives. Further if there are any complications that make it difficult to have sons (or children in general), blame almost always ends given more to the wives.

She summarized it in this way:

“So in China, we girls don’t have our own homes; we’re like dandelion seeds, drifting wherever the wind takes us, and by the time we die, no one remains to remember us. No one will recall you. You might say your children and grandchildren—twice that number—will remember you, but the generations after that? They won’t even remember your name.”

What About Marriage Nowadays

All this describes traditional marriage in China, or what she often described as the view of marriage of her parents’ and grandparents’ generation. (To use academic anthropology jargon, traditional Chinese marriages are patrilocal and patrilineal.) Views on marriage have changed since, especially since many women are incredible skeptical about this kind of life.

On the one end, some still practice this kind of marriage. In Southeastern China, some minorities and specific regions follow a form of marriage pretty similar to this. Even worse to her, some older men, especially more powerful older men in a local, rural community, will force younger women to marry as teenagers.

For example, she has a few friends in their early twenties who already have two children, with the oldest being ready to start kindergarten (which often starts at 3 years old in China). They seem happy now, especially since their parents are still around to support them with their kids, but she is concerned about their life prospects when they get older. By the time, they reach their thirties or forties, disagreements and conflicts will likely multiply, and they may find themselves significantly more vulnerable. (Even though this is a different culture, here is an example of an Indonesian friend I talked with who found herself in exactly this situation in her forties: https://crackeddoor.com/putri-story/.)

She said that many other women born in the twenty-first century feel incredible skeptical and anxious about marriage in China, because they see how it has become an unequal arrangement for them. She thinks everyone has the right to be happy in life, so if a marriage is not able to support that, she will get divorced or not get married in the first place:

“If you marry well, that’s just good fortune; if you marry poorly, that’s bad fortune. That used to be the case, but now we’re the post-2000s generation. I don’t care about sayings like, ‘Marry a chicken and follow the chicken, marry a dog and follow the dog.’ As long as I’m unhappy, I have the right to choose—and if things don’t work out, we’ll divorce. Living on my own is perfectly comfortable. That’s why, in China today, our divorce rate is quite high: women are becoming increasingly self-aware.

We won’t think like the older generation: ‘I’ve married you, so my whole life must revolve around you; otherwise, I’ll be plagued by rumors and lose all face.’ People born in the 2000s and beyond don’t hold such views anymore. Life is something we all have to experience, and no matter what, we live our own lives—not someone else’s. I won’t cater to others’ expectations; I’ll live however I choose.”

What About Others?

How contemporary women navigate this is a bit complicated, but many I have talked to do are also apprehensive about marriage because it does not seem to serve them. This can range from women who have told me that they do not want to get married at all because of how bad they find the institution to women who enjoy dating but sense that they must be very picky with any guy they are considering marrying to make sure they do not fall into this kind of trap with him (or his family). Also, nowadays, many grandparents help with childcare while both parents work.

Finally, I will also see significant variations in different regions. For example, on the one end of the extreme, many women from Shanghai especially and a few other bigger cities seem to have a very similar approach to dating or marriage to what I tend to find in Western countries, and others in some other regions (especially rural communities in Southeastern China) tell me their families them pressure to do something more akin to the above.

Since many couples have jobs in the cities before they get married, they end up staying in the city where those jobs are. This can breakup the family dynamic of moving in with the husband’s family and encourage couples to develop their new homes where the economy is booming. Although this is not always true: some families are originally from the big city anyways and still live nearby, and sometimes grandparents will move into the big city with the couple in order to take care of the children.

My friend’s take on marriage helped me understand how women experience marriage in China, why many feel anxious and apprehensive about it, and how they navigate expectations put upon them to still live a vibrant and healthy life. I understand why one would be at best very careful about getting married in this kind of family environment. Her approach shows one way to resiliently navigate this kind of context as a woman while building a vibrant life for herself.

Striking the Mirror (A Short Story)

Ethan typed on his keyboard, a set of code for his virtual world. His simulation felt as real as the regular world.

He decided to make one tweak, though. Whenever a human tried to cause violence on another, that human experienced the violence instead.

Fights came to a halt. Someone punching someone else in the face only ended up hurting his own face, and a soldier shooting another person only resulted in those bullet wounds manifesting in his own chest to his death.

Ethan rigged it so that those who ordered or cajoled others to do violence likewise received that violence onto their bodies as well.

Ethan sat back as he watched his world stammer at his newfound change. Battles became immediately ineffective. World leaders engaged in wars died on the spot when their units sought to advance in combat.

He thought this would move towards peace. After the initial shock of the change, it did, but after that, new patterns would begin to emerge.

Some humans would try to provoke their enemies to make them lash out in anger and hurt their own bodies. And other humans became clever, grabbing all they could because they knew there would not be an easy way to take the stolen possessions back without violence. Some ultra-greedy wealthy people started seizing assets, knowing that without the check of violence, society could not do much to counter their acquisition.

All politicians and business leaders endured never-ending torment. Pretty much every law or policy enacted harmed another, which would result in their own harm. No one wanted these positions, but those in them could not quit, lest the action of removing themselves from office would not cause negative harm to others downstream.

Total chaos ensued, hurting those who were the most powerless, until Ethan decided to turn this off, go to bed, and think more carefully about how to best establish peace into his world. Who knew that pretty every decision any human makes connects with violence?

The Immortal Inequality (A Short Story)

In time, society figured out how to prevent death, and everyone became immortal. As a matter of fact, we can stop all unwanted forms of aging, with bodies perpetually feeling like they were in their twenties.

Amazing isn’t it? Well yes, but there were some unexpected results in how it became implemented.

First, the rich received treatment before everyone else. For a while, this was an experimental (which means expensive) treatment that only the truly wealthy could afford. As it became more established and the costs decreased, the middle classes started using it, but it was labelled as an optional medical expense by most healthcare agencies and still out of reach of many of the poor of the earth. The wealthier got to reexperience their better bodies, forever, while many poor still aged and some died before they could get this death-defying treatment.

Ok, governments and charities may have solved that one. Legislating coverage and subsidizing it so that everyone in the world can get it. But another problem persisted:

Debt has become eternal. One’s debt will never go away. Not even the slow deterioration of one’s body towards retirement absolves people from their obligation to pay their debts. Those indebted must work and work until they pay back every cent (with interest), forcing them into awful, low-paid jobs.

The wealthy, however, are able to make money at an exponential rate; whereas, the waged poor and middle class only make money through salaries, which follow a much slower, linear model. Thus, in addition to their initial lead being far too great, they continue to expand their wealth leaps and bounds beyond what everyone else can.

Where does this money ultimately come from? Those with less. They are fleeced as the cost of standard expenses rises and rises filling the coffers of the wealthy widening the chasm for the indebted.

Death was once the great equalizer, the cut-off that nerfed everyone how much further ahead or behind they happen to be at in the race, but now, that check no longer exists. The wealthy shoot at lightning speed ahead, and nothing exists to keep that lead in check.

And they use that to control the type of afterlife they would like to have. The poor are increasingly forced to harvest more and more for the rich. The middle class, too, although they have more flexibility to establish their own comforts and hobbies when they are off from working. The rich can choose whether to expand it on luxuries, or for whatever reason, spend their afterlife wasting away at work. And no individual has a real chance of catching up with them.

This is how society chugs along. We continue to build our output forever, locked into this system of inequality. Expending more and more resources and engulfing more and more planets in the universe until one day, maybe, just maybe, we will expend all the resources that keep us going in this hell of immortality, allowing the cleansing fire of death to finally renew us once again.

Fleeing the Arena: Why One Ukrainian Chose Exile Over War

I have not been able to write for a while because of my internet connection, but I am back now. Today, I am going straight into it with a Life Snippet of a Ukrainian man I spoke with in Thailand.

He gave me a totally different perspective on Ukrainian society since the war. I do not have enough knowledge of Ukrainian society (as well as Russian and other relevant nearby societies) to determine whether I agree or disagree with his take, but I found his perspective interesting because it forced me to wrestle with my underlying assumptions of the place based on the Pro-Ukrainian media common in the US. Friends I have shown early drafts of this to from places that tend towards a Pro-Russian bias told me it caused them to question their own assumptions as well, leaving them unsettled in a way that forced them to grow.

At the very least, he raises serious questions about the usefulness of suffering, war, and violence. I hope his story also helps you work through your own perspective in a unique way. (For a second perspective on the war in Ukraine, see this interview I did with an Ukrainian couple while visiting Borneo, Malaysia.)

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The man is a young adult from Kiev, but he fled Ukraine and is now traveling the world. He illegally crossed the border into Romania (paying $12,000 to be smuggled across by a group that offers this service for many Ukrainians, especially Ukrainian men who do not want to be forcibly conscripted to fight).

He left Ukraine because he got sick of the corruption. He said corruption has been widespread in Ukraine for decades, and even though the current war with Russia distracted people from it, it’s still rampant. He thinks Zelensky is a corrupt and bad leader.

He also was concerned about forced conscriptions, telling stories of government vehicles driving around the city looking for young men to grab and enlist on the spot. He said there are two types of Ukrainians: patriotic zealots who stay in Ukraine to fight and those who flee because they are sick of the place. Most of the latter settle in different parts of Europe where they work, especially as construction workers.

He works as a product manager for an online gambling company, something that allows him to work remotely, so he has been able to travel the world. He dislikes working for a gambling company and does not like the work of a product manager, but it gives him an income and the flexibility to work wherever. Ultimately, he wants to make video games as a designer and animator.

He has been traveling throughout Southeast Asia, spending several months in Indonesia and Vietnam. Now, he is in Thailand for three months where I met him. (The other Ukrainian couple I interviewed also worked in tech and were traveling throughout Southeast Asia. In contrast to the Ukrainian immigrants who work in construction or other blue collar fields in Europe, their education and expertise in tech seems to give them more flexibility in where they work and more disposable income to travel.)

He plans to go back to Europe for a little bit and then travel to Japan where he hopes he can apply for some kind of asylum or refugee status to allow him to live there permanently. He thinks Japan is unlikely to grant it to him, but he will try anyways. His Japanese is at JLPT N4, enough for basic conversations, and he needs to improve it to be successful.

He doesn’t like European cultures, preferring East Asian cultures. He finds them more spiritual, deep, and profound, especially places rooted in Buddhism and the idea of karma. To him, the faith instills a positive spirituality leading to joy and wellbeing. He sees Europe as more secular and superficial.

For him, Russian and Ukrainian cultures are secular just like European cultures, but the romanticization of suffering lies at the foundation of the form of Christianity there. Since the war, Ukraine has become an arena for people interested in glorifying suffering. He thinks this leads to a type of spiritual degeneracy that he strongly disagrees with.

For him, Russia, Ukraine, and also Belarus are fundamentally similar cultures. If Ukraine hadn’t decided to Europeanize, it would have ended up like Belarus, and he considers all three countries to be awful. Each is built on decades of conflict and misery. He also does not think there will be an actual winner of this war. If one side does manage to win, the powerful countries in the world will create an excuse for a new conflict anyways.

Ukraine for him has become a kind of masochistic society, reveling in the suffering of war and glory of defending freedom. Through this, those who romanticize suffering can endlessly live it out. I sense that he looks to Buddhism and Buddhist countries in Asia as a potential alternative that he sees as embracing peace and love instead of suffering and its resulting violence.

Because of all this, there is nothing left for him in Ukraine.

Announcement: Will pause weekly blogs and daily poems because of poor internet

It turns out where I am right now has poor internet, so I will pause weekly blog posts and daily poems until it improves.

I quite literally have trouble loading my website in order to post these materials without the internet crashing. This time, I got lucky and got in, so I am sending this quick message.

When I get my internet back, I will try to back fill, posting all the pieces I wrote during this time but could not post. I still right my daily poems. I’m simply unable to post them when I don’t have internet like this.

Why I Left NYC to Travel the World—and Why I Haven’t Stopped

In July 2024, I left my life in New York City and decided to travel the world. It has now been two years. So far, I have been to three continents on my way to travel the whole world. Why did I decide to do this, and what makes me keep going?

At the end of 2023, I had five months paid time off work, and I decided to travel throughout East Asia. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I decided to use it to see a new part of the world and its cultures, choosing East Asia more or less at random.

The trip was an eye-opening and transformative experience in so many ways. For example, getting out of my normal rhythm of life for an extended period and seeing the different ways others in other cultures chose to live their lives made me realize the extent to which my life at that point working as a data scientist in New York wasn’t working for me. I would excitedly start a new job at a new organization for a year or two only to then become frustrated and move on to another place. I was stuck in a cycle, moving between job after job. I was not fulfilled. My Asia trip showed me that something has got to give.

I concluded that I felt far more fulfilled while traveling. I really enjoyed both seeing new places and having relationships, but most importantly, I enjoyed meeting new people from different places and learning about their stories. There’s something about hearing the struggles people encounter in their lives and how different people navigate those struggles that helps center me. I wanted to continue talking to people.

I also saw how different people in different cultures experience the problems of life. In my experience, many of the struggles that people have to navigate in life are surprisingly similar in different social and cultural contexts around the world, but the strategies given to them for how to navigate them and the tools they have with which to navigate them vary widely. Over time, different people thus develop different habits and dispositions for how to respond to situations. Because of this, people experience similar patterns across cultures in the problems people experience throughout their lives, but the approaches people use to navigate these problems vary widely.

Another factor that I think contributes to the fact that I am traveling the world is that I have always had a leaning towards breadth over depth. I think I am an intellectual at heart. Some intellectuals have their single area of focus that they love. Academia, in particular, encourages this; for example, PhD programs tend to force people into a hyper-narrow specialization of a specialization of a subfield of the field they are interested in. This is an intellectual depth-focus. I am the type of person who is interested in many things, jumping around between interests and passions. At its worst, it spreads me too thin, preventing me from adequately exploring one endeavor long enough to bear useful fruit, but at its best, it allows me to notice new connections between different spaces.

This breadth has been what I have been pursuing as I travel the world: talking with more and more people from different parts of the world as I travel. Other travelers I have seen, for example, choose one part of the world to travel to for several years, but right now, I think I would get too bored doing that.

The Successes and Failures I’ve Had

As I travel, I talk with people about what it is like being them. I listen a lot and try to enjoy each place on its own terms. Or, that’s my ideal at least. I’m not always successful, but that is what I strive for. One of the biggest compliments I will get is when people tell me that I am not like a typical foreigner who visits their area because I show an interest in their lives and perspectives, asking about deeper questions. Such questions may not click with everyone, but for these specific individuals, they tell me that they appreciate how I want to know them as a person. Evidently, most foreign visitors do not.

At the same time, sustaining that kind of energy long-term is not easy, and I have found that pacing myself is crucial when traveling long-term. I have had to learn to pace myself. This is a constant struggle for me. Because I am highly motivated by my passion and curiosity, I can be the type of person who tries to do too much. I am well-known for getting swept into too many activities until I exhaust myself and need to pull back how much I try to do each day.

A one- or two-week vacation is like a sprint, and traveling for years is more like a marathon. In a week-long vacation, I can do activity after activity if I want, collapsing when I get home, but obviously every single day for months or years can’t be some grand adventure that expands my understanding of myself, humanity, or the universe. My mind would explode.

I have found developing some kind of consistency of one’s daily rhythm helps keep me grounded and centered, probably the single most important thing to do to pace myself. But how that consistency manifests will still vary widely depending on the environment. I constantly rework the details of your rhythm for your day in each new place you visit.

How I tend to work this out in practice is that I have different activities I do every single day (such as writing a haiku a day, journaling, a little bit of other writing, etc.) Having these consistent activities centers me, but how I do them each day varies at least a little, sometimes widely depending on where I am. As a morning person, I strongly prefer working on creative projects in the morning, when I first wake up. I may spend a half hour to an hour working on them before I go about my day. Then some other activities like journaling, I tend to do in the evening after my day has wrapped up. In each place, I work out different details of what incorporating them into the rhythm of the day looks like.

One thing I have learned is that I still desire to do, more specifically to create. Between this blog, my daily poetry, four YouTube channels, publishing a book, and a few other projects, I make quite a bit. I want to create and build ideas as part of my making a mark on the world.

This is a major difference with my first five-month trip throughout Asia: then I put life on hold, exclusively focusing on being in the moment. That was great for five months: a time to pause my life and figure out what I wanted to do. But, if I put everything on hold in life during this trip, it would simply mean I would not get to it. This is my life itself, not a break from it, so I feel a stronger desire (even pressure) to still incorporate the things I want to do with my life into it. And these creative projects are certainly a part of that.

Yet, they also take time and mental energy, pulling me out of the moment of traveling. Sometimes, I focus too much on them and find that I am no longer as in the moment. They can also exhaust me. The most important lesson in how to pace myself while traveling the world has been learning how to effectively navigate between being in the moment in the places I visit while also working on these projects.

The strategy I have found works for me is to split my time: time focused solely on where I am and time focused on my projects. Every week, I spend two days a week working on these creative projects, producing what I need to do to keep them going for that week. Then, the other five days, I spend going on adventures in the place I am visiting and meeting new people there. What kind of adventures I have will depend on where I am (for example, in cities, it may be visiting museums, historical sites, etc., and in a mountain village, it may be hiking or climbing a mountain, or diving if I am near a coral reef).

I used to set goals where I did a little of my creative projects everyday in the morning and then went out and about having adventures, but I found this distracted me: my mind would be split throughout the day. When I went out and about visiting adventures, I would really think about the tasks I did not finish that morning. This left me exhausted. By splitting which days I focused on what, on any given day, I could focus on exactly one thing: on “adventure days,” focus entirely on having adventures, meeting people in the place where I am, and otherwise being in the moment, and on “work days”, focus entirely on my projects.

I also traveled in bursts of a few months with longer periods of rest in between. For example, I may spend one or two months constantly traveling to new places every week and having adventures, and then spend a week or two resting. Beyond that, I find that about every six months I need about one to two months of a longer rest.

I get on what I call an “experiential overload” where I feel exhausted having to navigate new types of experiences and new cultures, and need a few weeks of constancy. Usually during this time, I do not even leave my hotel much, except to buy food and other necessities. I need a break from new things.

When resting, I often work heavily on my creative projects. For whatever reason, these projects give me something to do while I am experientially exhausted. Each type of activity allows me to rest from the other: creative projects allow me to rest from physical and social adventures, and adventures allow me to rest from the mental drudgery of my projects. On longer rest periods, I often do the more complex work of evaluating how to improve or overhaul an aspect of my creative project. During adventure times, I usually simply deploy the plan I set in motion (posting a certain type of videos or articles every week or every other week), and it is during these rest periods that I have the mental pause to be able to reflect on whether that plan is working and what improvements I would like to make to that plan.

Thus, I find my adventures tend to clump. I may have several week- or a couple month-long periods where everyday is an adventure, followed by periods when I have no adventures for a while. Both are necessary parts of my rhythm, allowing me to pace myself. At the same time, I frequently worry that my many projects overextend myself, taking me out of the moment while traveling. I have to pace myself: traveling the world is a marathon, not a sprint.

As I travel, I also find that what I am looking for changes. I have periods when I naturally tend to focus on different things. For a few months, I may focus on meeting people, but then go through periods where time in nature is my main focus. I tend to internally segment my journey into “epochs” based on what I tended to crave more of over those several month intervals. During some periods, I am inherently more extroverted and during others more introverted. If during one period, I focus on my creative projects, that will pull me in a more introverted direction. If during another time I crave socializing and a sense of community, I will become more extraverted.

I have learned to accept these different circumstances: my needs will change over time, and that’s okay. For example, about a year ago, I went through a more introverted period after a breakup, where I preferred being by myself with my emotions rather than spending time with others, and I felt guilty that I was not “getting to know” people in the countries I happened to be visiting at that time. I had to realize that it’s okay to be more introverted for a time. It’s a part of the process of long-term travel.

If I feel especially irritated or crabby in a given circumstance, it is a warning sign that I am likely exhausted from overexerting myself. I most likely need to take a step back by resting and determining what need is not being met and go meet that need (whether that means withdrawing, going on an adventure somewhere else, talking with friends back home, etc.). After that, I can reengage with the context or activity that made me crabby with a fresh mind. In general, I find my internal psychological state is the most significant factor in how I vibe with a new culture: if I am frequently getting frustrated in a new environment, it’s usually because I am exhausted. It’s not usually about that culture or community in itself. My exhaustion is coloring the lens through which I engage the context. I need to rest, rejuvenate, and then go back out, and then suddenly the culture will seem much better. I will be much more attune with what the people, environment, or other things in that specific environment have to offer rather than how they irritate me.

Why I Keep Going

The short answer is that I feel like I am still learning and growing from traveling, and I suspect as long as that feels the case, then I will keep going. I don’t succeed at this every single day, but that may not be a realistic expectation for long-term travel anyways. Overall, I still am and there is promise to do so.

Another important lesson that I have had to come to terms with is that travel can be very consumptive, and any form of consumption is ultimately vacuous. When people think about traveling the world, their minds often go to Instagram stories of the magic of daily adventures in foreign places, which make them think long-term travel is simply one iconic adventure after another. Everything in life is ultimately vanity, maybe especially in our consumerist, capitalist world, and this definitely applies to travel.

When people idealize traveling the world, they really think about the magic of their vacation. Vacations are short breaks from people’s normal lives, often not long enough to really experience the vapidness of travel and tourism. This isn’t bad per se. People go, consume experiences for a few days, and come back home. The temporary trips help them reset themselves and often recontextualize their humanity as they reenter their normal lives, clearly a good thing. This makes sense as a counter to people’s regular lives. For example, they can be in the moment for a few days in contrast to their normal, hectic daily lives; they can relax instead of running around; have adventures they can’t do where they live; and so on.

But when you spend more time in touristic spots, you often realize how superficial they are. They often foster at best superficial relationships with people there with at worst troubling power dynamics. Also, many typical tourist activities in different countries all tend to feel the same over time. For me at least, these environments do not provide good long-term ways to live life or engage with others or other cultures.

I still enjoy visiting places with a lot of natural scenery and/or historical and cultural significance, and often these places become “tourist spots” for understandable reasons. Thus, I will visit such places anyways, if the scenery or history seem worth tolerating the tourism of it. My best solution is to try to ask about and listen to people’s stories in the places I am. By asking about their lives, I often learn what life is like for the people that live there. Even the most artificial tourist spots are regular life for those who live there, and that becomes a practical way to connect that moves past consumption and my own tailored experiences as a “visiting tourist customer” (to some extent at least, not always perfectly).

But I will tend to prefer quieter settings where foreigners do not visit as much. I find it easier to talk to regular people who live there outside the tourist spots. It’s not impossible to have regular conversations with normal people in tourist areas, but sometimes, the “tourist as client” relationship can become the main way people who live in tourist spots are used to engaging with foreigners.

Visiting a beach for a few days allows one to appreciate the beauty of the beach. For some at least, living on the beach everyday makes it seem normal, like the wallpaper of their lives. I constantly travel to new places rather different from settling in one place, so I do not have to see the same beach everyday. But likewise, I can still become overexposed to wonder and to itself new types of places.

Growing up in the Eastern US, I see huge mountains maybe once every couple years during trips “out West” to see the Rockies. I would feel enraptured by mountains. Now, I see a new mountain range every several months and climb at least one mountain a month. Each one is majestic; don’t get me wrong, but much of the magic I felt when mountains were a rare, special experience fades away after I have seen so many.

Now, what I see when I see a new mountain range is how it compares with the other mountains I have seen before in the Americas, Africa, Oceania, Asia, etc. All mountain ranges have certain patterns in common yet also differences, and I think overtime the different mountains form a type of grid in my mind of characteristics: this mountain range has A and B, and the next mountain range I see has X and Y, but a third combines A and Y but neither B nor C, maybe introducing D in a rather interesting way. This applies to wildlife, foods, and many other things I encounter while traveling. It’s different from simply marveling at a new thing I have never encountered before, but it adds a richer dimension that improves my understanding of the world.

The other side of this is that the tourist industry tends to foster a specific, superficial kind of relationship. It may seem welcoming, but that only lasts for a week. Often for me personally, I tend to get sick of it even after a day or two. A crucial part of finding fulfillment while traveling long-term is to move beyond the tourist interaction and cultivate other types of relationships. I tend to do that by listening to people’s stories and trying to be with people in a genuine way. It is possible to do this in highly touristic places, but sometimes, visiting non-heavily touristed areas of a country make this much easier.

At the same time, even if the pleasure-seeking aspects of travel fade, on a practical level, of all major forms of material consumption, experiences fade the slowest. If you compare it to buying luxury items like nice cars or nice clothes, for example, the benefits of an adventure experience last longer (for me at least, but I suspect this is the case for most humans). This is one reason why for someone who dreams of material affluence, of being able to buy a bunch of stuff, once they get enough wealth to afford those things and now own them, they end up wanting more.

Buying experiences are also less likely to saddle someone with debt that they will have to deal with decades later like big single expenses like nice homes or cars, or buying many small materials things often do. Someone who primarily consumes experiences can much more easily cut back if money becomes tight for unforeseen reasons at a later point in life. So, if one is to indulge a little in consumption, for me at least, experiences seem like the best strategy.

At the end of the day, meeting new people and learning new things in the places I visit are the main two factors keeping me going. I am not always the best at receiving and cultivating that, but I am trying my best. I think as long as these forces encouraging me to keep going continue to outweigh the forces that might encourage me to settle down in one place, I will keep traveling. At a later point in my life, this may switch: I may feel greater encouragement to settle down than to continue traveling. And if they do, I will probably stop. But for now, I keep going.

The $2,000 Exile (A Life Snippet)

Photo Credit: abdullah ali (a stock photo, not the person in question for the sake of privacy)

Today’s Life Snippet is about a US military veteran from Indiana who ended up homeless and is now traveling the world.

He is 23-years old. He was in the Air Force to work in cybersecurity and cyberwarfare but injured his feet. He struggled to pass the physical clearance to be considered “combat ready.” After the fifth attempt, he tried to force himself to run a 14-minute despite his feet already being swollen from his previous attempts. Trying to do this run caused several hundred tiny fractures in his feet, and they are still injured to this day. Walking and standing is incredibly painful for him.

The military wanted to discharge him, but he forced them to keep him for two more years. They assigned him various desk jobs because of his injury. Sometimes they intentionally gave him menial tasks to degrade him and convince him to want to leave, such as telling him to digitize a room full of paper documents. He said he spent six weeks pulling staplers out of the stacks of papers, something he found mind-numbingly boring. Eventually after two years, the military forced him out.

Because of his injury, the military will give him $2,000 a month for the rest of his life. That is not enough to live on in the US. He tried to settle in Florida and tried to find a job there but ended up cycling between awful jobs that did not work for him. Some jobs, such as a waitressing job and construction job, required too much standing for his disability. He then worked in IT, but he felt like they belittled him by acting as if he didn’t understand computers when he had two years of experience doing advanced computing with the military. They bought him a car that he was supposed to pay back in installments through deductions in his paycheck, but when he quit, he simply kept the car anyways.

Overall, he said the military was the best place he worked. He loved someone telling him what to do, finding comfort in the structure that produced. He never found this comfort or satisfaction again in any of his future employers. None of them offered the stability and sense of meaning and purpose that the military provided him.

His mom offered to have him stay with her back home in Indiana while he found a new job and got on his feet. He went back home, but soon afterwards, she kicked him out of her house, because she was getting married to a new husband. Their stated reason was that the new husband had teenage daughters, and the daughters were not safe with him around. He had no interest in these girls (who were prepubescent, the oldest being 13), finding the insulation that he would want to be involved with a bunch of minors gross and offensive.

Nonetheless, she kicked him out of the house, and he ended up homeless in Indiana. He said you needed a car to go anywhere or do anything. He spent his remaining money to buy a ticket to Thailand at the end of 2025, arriving here with no money. $2,000 a month is not enough to live in the US, but it is here in Thailand and in Southeast Asia in general it is fine, so he wants to carve out his life here.

He is enrolling in a self-paced online university to study cybersecurity. They told him they don’t accept students not in the US, but through VPNs, he pretends he is in the US. They said they didn’t want to deal with the time zone shift of someone from another part of the world, but he sees that as his problem. He can meet for classes and stuff during their time zone and deal with that himself. That’s his decision.

More broadly, he said he doesn’t connect emotionally with people, like normal people seem to. When he talks to people, he doesn’t really feel like people seem to when they connect. Many people also only have superficial conversations anyways. He doesn’t really have an effective alternative way to deal with emotions. Instead dark thoughts often roll around inside of him, particularly anxiety and depression. He has found therapy really helpful, though.

The Aged in Thailand and the Young Adults Who Must Now Support Them (A Reflection)

A surprisingly high number of young adults in Thailand I speak with tell me one of their parents has cancer. If you talk to people in their twenties and thirties, this seems to keep coming up. This week alone, I have spoken with three young adults whose parents have been hospitalized from cancer. It’s a major stress for them, disrupting their lives, saying nothing of the distress their parents must be going through.

It’s sad to see such suffering, and I have been trying to figure out why. This piece is not an in-depth sociological analysis, but it is an initial reflection. I am not an expert in this topic, but I have been trying to observe and read in-between the lines to understand what is happening and how this has been impacting families in Thailand.

First, in 2023, Thailand officially became an “aged society” (aka one with a disproportionate number of older people, generally considered to be 14-19% of the population, see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13111867/). Japan and South Korea are well-known for their high proportion of older people, with many Western countries in the same boat. Southeast Asians have also been aging fast and could quickly cross the threshold of an “aged” society, with Thailand the furthest along.

Having such a high proportion of older people can produce a lot of strain on a society as it must find a way to provide resources older people tend to need, such as more medical care, generally with a lower base of younger people to help. Most “aged societies” to date tend to be wealthier (European countries, Japan, South Korea, the United States, etc.), and they still struggle to provide the resources necessary to support their aging populations.

Thailand has much less wealth per person than any of them. It seems to be the first country with a low per capita income to become an aged country. On an individual level, many older people do not have retirement savings to support them nor does the society have as much economic resources it can devote to developing the infrastructure that older people tend to need (see https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/10/12/poor-asian-countries-face-an-ageing-crisis).

So, how will older people in Thailand find the resources to support themselves as they get older? The most common answers that Thai people give when I ask is “their children.” As in common culturally in Southeast Asia (and frankly much of the world), families tend to approach this problem as a unit, with the expectation that the children will financially provide for and care for their elderly parents both in general and especially when they become sick. It is pretty normal that a significant proportion of a working adult’s paycheck will go to their parents, sometimes to the detriment of them being able to save or even get by. They are also expected to take care of many of the physical needs of their elderly parents as their bodies deteriorate.

This seems to place a huge burden on many young adults. Some feel forced to work harder or tolerate abuse at their jobs out of fear that they cannot support their parents if they lose their jobs. Young adults are often sandwiched by expectations that they must pay for their own kids and their own parents, sometimes being called the “sandwich generation”, although the number of children in Thailand is also declining (see https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/3196723/thailand-pushes-to-arrest-plunging-birth-rate). Maybe part of why is that supporting a new generation seems even more expensive when one must already support yourself and the generation above you.

I do not have an easy answer to this. For example, a common approach in the West is to send older people to “old folks home” where they can get the care they need. This certainly has its own cons. Across Southeast Asia, many people would consider the idea of sending their parents away instead of supporting them “offensive,” and these homes certainly can be dehumanizing, isolating places. That tradeoff may not work.

Instead, I am merely reflecting on a problem. I think in Thailand’s case, social safety nets seem some of the worst. The country can be very isolating. It does not have the societal infrastructure to support people who become isolated nor do many families have the wealth built up to support themselves. The family becomes the major way support occurs, but that too has its problems. All this often seems to leave some families on their own without much support, and the people in that family expected to provide with a burden to take care of everyone. If better solutions are not found, much of that burden will fall on young adults, potentially preventing them from building the life they need to themselves.

How a Tongan Pageant Queen Reclaimed Her True Self (A Life Snippet)

(This week’s Life Snippet is about a Tongan woman who used to travel around in beauty pageants across the Pacific before having a mental health breakdown from the stress. Now, she is rebuilding her life back home with the support of her family. She explains what the world of beauty pageantry was like for her, why it led to a breakdown, and how she got out of it.)

Mele (not her real name) stopped doing beauty pageants seven months ago. She started when she was 17 and ended by the time was 21.

Being from Tonga in Polynesia, she competed in different competitions throughout the Pacific, but many would treat her differently as a Polynesian woman. For example, in a competition in Manila, Philippines, the pageantry set aside her and all other Polynesian women, treating them as second class competitors from the get-go. Filipino beauty standards tend to favor lighter-skinned women. She got so frustrated she quit the pageant early. Similarly, people in Hong Kong could be rude to her because of how she looked.

She said that she used to cry every single day and experience frequent panic attacks when she did the pageants. This culminated in a mental health breakdown, which was when she realized it wasn’t worth it anymore and she needed to get out. She quit pageantry altogether.

She decided to head back home for seven months and is staying with her family while she rebuilds her life. She is doing a lot better now. She gained back some weight, and she has been dealing with the emotional and spiritual burnout from her ordeal. She no longer has panic attacks or crying episodes nor does she feel randomly agitated by little things like she did when she performed in beauty pageants. Her family has been supportive of her during this time and given her the space to figure out who she is. At the moment, she prefers staying home and being with them relationally to working or doing any other activity.

At the same time, family pressure may be slowly creeping in. She is the eldest daughter of seven kids with many obligations to take care of her younger siblings. In particular, her youngest sister is three years-old, and she acts as a second mother to her. This can be a lot of pressure, but being the eldest taught her how to take care of things and to lead.

She also seems to be experiencing pressure to marry. She said, in Tonga, despite the fact that people cannot legally marry until they are at least 18, many (especially girls) still marry between 15 and 20. There are some changes to this, but as someone in her early twenties, she seems to face pressure to get married and through that transition to a new life. This may disrupt her current respite, and she seems hesitant to do so until she’s ready. How to juggle between her own healing while rebuilding her life and facing family pressure to marry seem to be the biggest question she faces in her life right now.