How to Travel the World Archives

What Journeying throughout South America Taught Me about Find Meaning in Everyday Life

These are some of the lessons about life I learned during my trip in South America in 2024:

1) The Importance of Balance: I think I tried to do too much during the trip, hurting my mental health. Each day I gave myself too many items on my to-do list. This made me less in the moment, detracting from my ability to meet people and be open where I was. It also made me more stressed and irritable.

2) Always another adventure: No matter what happens, life goes on. There’s always another day, another struggle. When you travel, you don’t stay in a place long enough to really experience the benefits of community or the long-term consequences of your actions. You can keep certain positive things – like your memories, photos and most importantly, any good relationships you made along the way – but many negatives you can continue to leave behind. That person you accidentally offended because of a cross-cultural difference, you will never have to see again, for example.

This can create a type of Groundhog Day-like nihilistic feeling, if you allow it to. You are freed from certain types of consequences and can focus on those personal experiences, memories, and relationships that you do take with you. Navigating this can be very different from regular, settled life, and it took me many months to get used to that. You must create your own meaning as you go.

3) Finding Meaning: I think this trip made me think more about how I should find meaning and fulfillment in life. I learned how vacuous the typical “career life” can be, and how beautiful and fascinating other parts of the world are. At the same time, seeing more and more places took some of the novelty of adventure. It forced me to be more at peace with myself. I had to pause during the key moments and realize that I will be forever who I am and that I need to figure out how to find satisfaction in that.

Contentedness does not mean I do not have passions or strive to do new things: knowing myself, I would not feel fulfilled with stasis. Contentedness, for me at least, means that I feel fulfilled as I follow my passions: that’s how I find satisfaction each day of my life.

4) Every day of traveling won’t feel magical: Endless amazement only exists in one’s mind. Some days feel drab, tiring, or just plain annoying, and you need these days to make the wondrous ones feel magical. Happiness and satisfaction are really in your mindset. I can do an activity one day and love it, and do an activity another day and find it mediocre or even taxing, and the main difference is my attitude. Maybe the trick to finding satisfaction in life is to align one’s passions with what one is doing so that the winds feel at your sails as you do it.

5) The importance of communication: Traveling with my girlfriend, I learned that communicating your expectations is crucial. I think I overall did a bad job at this, and we had two different expectations for how we were traveling. In addition to getting on the same page at the beginning, communicating expectations is a constant, iterative process at almost every stage of travel. We constantly navigated between what I wanted and what she wanted while traveling. This was a constant dance that we had to work on together.

All this said, the most important lesson I learned is that traveling the world is amazing, and I would recommend it for anyone who wants an adventure.

Unlocking the World: Balancing Exploration and Reflection While Traveling

One lesson I have learned while traveling is that in order to learn from the world around you, you must first be open to listen, and to be open to listen, you must be comfortable with yourself.

You no matter where you are in the world, you are always yourself. People often think that when they travel, they will magically become a completely different person with a completely different set of interests, but that is never the case. You are who you are, no matter what continent you are on, and when traveling, you will have to face the same inner demons and flaws you already struggle with.

At the same time, the ability to learn from the world around you opens up new possibilities; the trick is to use them wisely. By learning about the world and engaging with others, you both encounter new rhythms that can get you out of your cycles, try on different identities that may offer innovative ways to resolve some of your inner issues, and can learn from other lifestyles and ways of thinking.

But how to best leverage these gains is easier said than done. I find the trick is to balance extrovertedly exploring and learning about wherever I am and introvertedly reflecting and processing.

The more I explore and learn, the more I get my own internal juices going. Learning and creatively are multiplicative: innovation connections produce even more innovative connections, cascading out overtime, and new thinking from the culture I am currently in will naturally spill over into innovative thinking in my personal life.

An S-Curve: Ramping up suddenly and then slowing

But such innovation grows exponentially and can thus become overwhelming. I need alone time to rest and process all of it. Like the s-curve models of the spread of diseases in populations (common on the news during the Covid pandemic), my learning at first shoots up rapidly but then slows down significantly as my brain becomes too filled with new ideas to handle new ones. That’s when I need to rest and process what I have learned so far. If I don’t, I will become tired and often cranky. After taking the time to process it all, I can go back out and learn some more.

That is how I navigate between both personal growth and learning while traveling the world. How you do it may be different based on your different personality, but I hope this provides good food for thought. When doing something as long-term intense as traveling the world, intentionally strategizing how you meet your mental needs and work on yourself while experiencing a literal world of things is important.

A Year Traveling the World: A Reflection on 2024 and What to Expect in 2025

I hope for three things in 2025 as I travel around the world:

1) Find balance

This past year, I ended up discovering how I want to live my life (or this current chapter of my life at least), and this year, I need to learn how to live that life in a balanced, sustainable fashion. In 2024, my girlfriend and I decided to start to travel the world. 2024 served as its childhood to develop, refine, and mature how to travel the world.

Now, I suspect 2025 will see an adolescence and introduction to adulthood. During the “childhood” of 2024, I determined whether I enjoyed this life, which I do, but then also encountered practical problems in how to bring it about. Like, how should I balance adventuring and seeing new places with the desire to do creative projects and other things like keeping up with friends, daily chores, etc.? What kind of stuff am I most interested in creating or doing? How do my girlfriend and I juggle our respective needs and paces when traveling together?

In childhood (in Western beliefs around psychological development at least), one also focuses on general skill exploration and development. You explore the world and attend school where you are supposed to learn the most basic foundational skills for your society. Likewise, in 2024, I have been similarly focusing a lot of my time on my own general skill development without knowing it.

Then in Western psychology, adolescence is the time when individuals most wrestle with their identities and emotionally how they will resolve the issues that come their way. One reason teenagers have so many mood swings is because they are encountering adult stressors for the first time and are initially developing their emotional techniques for how to respond. As they get older, these emotional techniques become ingrained as the patterns for how they will react when they encounter similar stressors, and thus they do not need to adjudicate between as many potential emotional responses as when they were a teenager.

Similarly, by the end of 2024, I seem to have encountered some of the big issues I will face traveling the world while also trying to do creative work), and I suspect I will use the beginning of 2025 to wrestle with how to best juggle all my priorities and how to overcome these potential problems. For example, I felt like I was not sufficiently in the moment and did not ingratiate form as much cross-cultural connections as I would have liked. Instead, I got too caught up and stressed out by the many many items I put on my to do list. I will likely test out different approaches, some of which will help and some won’t, determining over time what works best for me.This I consider my adolescent period for traveling the world.

As I finalize figuring that out, I predict my lifestyle will eventually transition sometime later in 2025 into a “young adult period” where I start to find my groove. How long will the adolescent period take? I predict I will be done and have a sense of balance by the first half of the year, with a decent likelihood I will be done by March or April, but I really don’t know. That may be way too optimistic, like maybe this adolescence will take the whole year, and if I read this in the future, I may chuckle at my own naivety. But I am still going to tentatively go with it.

2) Create something I am proud of

I would like to develop something insightful and useful for the world in 2025. In 2024, I focused on my own exploring, learning, and experience: being able to see interesting and great places in the world, having my own adventures, and learning about the world. But as I work through my adolescent stage and hit my stride, I would like to take those skills to good use and produce something interesting, insightful, and potentially useful to others.

I will still explore new parts of the world (don’t get me wrong), but I would like to spend more energy trying to produce something as well. Right now, my thoughts are writing a book or starting a podcast series, but I have a nearly endless list of other minor or less thought out ideas. I predict I will set my ambitions too high like I always do at first, but I will ultimately produce something that I am proud of.

Time with the Glaciers of Patagonia: Finding Humanity’s Place in Nature’s Power and Majesty

Visiting Perito Moreno Glacier in Los Glaciares National Park, I was struck by how interesting I find glaciers. They remind me of nature’s majesty and subtly. Millions of bits of snow and ice slowly pack one by one until they become a landscape-shaping force. Even through nature’s slow, subtle works, all-inspiring entities emerge. Glaciers go on to reshape the landscape around them.

Every few minutes, its mass creaks with white thunder and whole towers of ice fall into the water, demonstrating how the glacier’s powerful yet slow flow builds overtime. A glacier can seem like a static entity, but the entire walls of ice falling out of nowhere into the lake below challenge this assumption. They really flow very, very slowly as they slide down the mountains. All that pressure eventually causes the ice at the very bottom to snap off. The ear-cracking thunder removes any notion other than that these glaciers are powerful forces working their way through the valley they inhabit.

In Torres del Paine National park, I hiked within the dusty leftover basis on the retreating Grey Glacier. Glaciers move tons of earth and leave the lakes, rivers, fjords, islands, moraines, and much more in their wake. For example, massive glaciers during the Ice Age produced or reformed Long Island and most of New York City, and significantly reshaped the Eastern United States.

Seeing towering walls of ice the size of skyscrapers fall suddenly into the water, humanity’s contribution to the world looks small in comparison. Natural entities like glaciers that are bigger, bolder, and older than us emerge naturally.. We can only experience the eons of time glaciers have existed in the ways they mold the landscapes around them.

At the same time, humans have had a pretty significant impact on the glaciers. Climate change is slowly melting many glaciers around the world, piece by piece. Our decisions too can accumulate into massive impacts on the landscapes around us.

Nevertheless, this glacier is still here. No matter what humans do to it, we can never get rid of the impacts its ice has had on the landscape. Maybe this will be the route of humanity as well: slowly creep into a massive force that slowly wither as well once we reach our zenith until we dissipate out leaving an impact on the landscape around us. Specific societies will most likely go that kind of route: wither until it becomes unrecognizable as it transitions into whatever comes next.

Nature produces massive emergent forces like glaciers and humanity, and those same patterns of physics will eventually take them away. Our lives will most likely only ever be one towering column of ice in nature’s system that also eventually falls into the water below.

Where Are You From: Navigating How I Answer While Traveling the World

While traveling the world, one of my most dreaded questions, I get asked the most frequently:

“Where are you from?”

Where am I from? That’s hard to answer. I have lived in many cities: do I tell them that I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? Should I provide them with my legal residence? I spent the last five years living in New York City. What about there? Should I just say I am from the United States?

I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but internationally, your average person does not know where that is. I lived in Brooklyn for the last five years, so my most common answer is to say, “New York City.”

Oh New York, it’s the city that no matter where I am in the world, everyone has heard of, and some people I meet tell me they have visited. Everyone has an opinion about New York City, even in some of the most remote places in the world. They may view it as a spectacular land of opportunity they really want to go to (or have already visited) or as a dirty, crime-ridden hell hole, or anywhere in between this extreme, but they have heard of it.

Thus, saying I am from New York makes me familiar to them, whether they have positive or negative associations with that place. I find that it is easier to start there, rather than desperately try to explain verbally to someone where Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania fits on a map of the United States. Most often when I say I am from New York City, people’s eyes will light up; that’s a place they have wondered about from all the TV shows, movies, etc. about the city.

Most often when I say I am from New York City, people’s eyes will light up; that’s a place they have wondered about from all the TV shows, movies, etc. about the city. I can use that energy to learn about how they view the city, the United States, and the world overall.

I prefer saying that I am from New York City than that I am from the United States. The latter also puts the emphasis on the country as a whole, changing the conversation. I find people have different associations with the United States overall than New York City specifically. Sometimes even people don’t know that New York City is in the United States, but that is rare.

Both have had distinct brandings overtime. I find most people who know that New York is in the United States still don’t have the same associations when they hear “New York City” and the “United States.” And to be honest, in my current relationship with the United States and its history, I find the associations with New York City to be more interesting, preferring both to discuss that.

So, there you have it. That is how I currently answer the most complicated everyday question I get: “Where are you from?”

Everywhere You Go Is Normal: How You Can Use This to Change How You Travel

When you visit a new place in the world that you have never been to before, that place can often seem really exotic or really scary. Having never been there, we can feel an ambiguity when we think about it. Our mind sometimes casts that ambiguity into one of two extremes: the most amazing place on earth or a horrible, scary place where we will constantly have to be worried about safety concerns. Which one you pick often has to do with whether we have built positive or negative associations based on the types of stories we have heard about that place.

Psychologically, this is normal, but these initial conceptions unsurprisingly turn out to be completely wrong. You may initially see what you think you will see, but if you stay long enough or keep an open mind, you will slowly discover all the ways in which you were wrong.

For me, one of the most important lessons I learn when traveling to a new place is that this place, in all of its wonderful unusualness, is normal for the people who live there. When I visit a new part of the world, instead of thinking about how strange it is – whether strange in the exoticness or strange in the weird or scary sense – I try to think about how those who live there can consider it normal. For every place is normal for someone.

By thinking about how weird it is, I mentally separate myself from the place, but by conceiving of how this too is normal for some, I force myself to confront one of the most perplexing things about humanity and the world: how we can create so many different types of normal. Thus, I come to terms with how in its distinctiveness, it still has something major in common with the place that I call home: that it is a home for the people there.

Adjusting Expectations When Living in Abroad

Over our lives, we develop expectations for how our needs will be met based on the culture(s) we live in. This includes our physical needs but also our emotional needs, social needs, and all our other needs. There’s nothing wrong with this; expectations help keep us sane and allow us to determine how to make choices in our daily lives.

However, in new cultures, these expectations tend to break down. The most difficult yet most important aspect of long term cross-cultural adjustment is to learn how to develop new expectations and use those to determine how to meet our needs.

Every culture can meet people’s needs. If it did not, people would not survive there. But a new culture may have vastly different methods or tools to meet those needs. In another culture, you must learn how their ways of doing things can and do meet people’s needs in life. And you must not only understand this consciously but internalize subconsciously.

Internalizing that is not always easy, and it’s okay if it takes time. All humans have built a set of expectations over the course of their lives based on how we are used to things happening. This helps produce the (generally subconscious) filters we use to assess the world around us: to determine, for example, what people mean when they communicate things, what they want from us, whether we are safe or secure, and what to expect from another in any given interaction. Without these things, we couldn’t function or handle daily interactions.

But in a new culture, all of this has to be rebuilt. It’s easier said than done, but much of the difficulties one feels in another culture – including culture shock, frustration or anger at local practices, sadness, etc. – deep down stem from the difficulty of experiencing a mismatch from your expectations and subconsciously sensing that you will fail to have your needs met. If so, it’s okay to pause and know that you are doing a complex psychological reset.

How Do You Come Across in Other Cultures?

As I was walking through the Changdeokgung Palace in Seoul, South Korea, I overheard a very interesting conversation.

A Chinese tourist and a Dutch tourist were walking in front of me talking (in English). The Chinese tourist was explaining the different types of tourists he sees from around the world:

“Koreans, they are often silent. They may not say much the whole conversation, unless they have something very important to say. For example, they may say one thing in the conversation: something you should do. They’ll phrase it like a suggestion, ‘You might want to consider doing this.’ Absolutely do it. Don’t let that confuse you. It’s a complete necessity. That’s why they are bringing it up.

“Americans, on the other hand, never shut up. They will constantly ask you questions, like they are interrogating you. It’s their way to connect with you as a person and get to know you. They’re trying to be friendly, but it can take some time to get used to. They love long conversations where they ask you tons of questions about their life.”

When I heard this, I was trying not to laugh out loud because as an American it is so true for me: I love asking lots of questions as a way to get to know someone.

At the end of the day, this is only one person’s take on American vs Korean styles of interactions, but as an American, I found it helpful to hear the perspectives of US culture from others around the world. They shed new light on my styles of communicating that I often take for granted. We can become so used to our way of doing things that we can easily forget to see it for what it is: one way among many.

Thus, when you talk with others around the world, feel free to think about how they might see you, and if you are feeling particularly adventurous, you can even ask how you come across. It makes a fantastic edition to add to your long list of questions.

(If you find discussions of people’s experiences in other cultures around the world like this interesting, please let me know, and I will be sure to keep writing these.)