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.