How Long-Term Travel Makes You Richer — Explained in 8 Quotes

1. We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment. | Hilaire Belloc

On a psychological level, long-term travel helps quiet the deep dissatisfaction of not really knowing who we are or what we’re meant to do. So we start to wander in order to distract ourselves from acknowledging that disturbing notion. While wandering, you start to say Yes to things you’d usually say No to in your “normal” habitat. By throwing yourself into new, compelling, unfamiliar, uncomfortable situations and importantly, roles that you’ve never been in — dominant/submissive, feminine/masculine, leader/follower, teacher/student — it sheds light onto your Default Self.

Your Default Self is a blend of how you conduct yourself in testing situations, how you react instinctively to external, particularly, negative stimuli, how you form conclusions out of undesired outcomes, where you perceive yourself in the scheme of those outcomes — butt-end of the stick, victim, victor — and how you problem-solve, decide, and act based on how those outcomes make you feel.

In seeing yourself in that light, you meet yourself, get to know who you are, and begin to formulate understandings about your own psychology at a deeper level. From the fundamental knowledge you begin to collect, you’re empowered to elect to uproot stale, counterproductive habits in favor of constructive habits to grow into a better version of yourself, and maybe eventually grow into your Full-Potential Self. On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, this need to reach one’s full potential falls into Self-actualization. It’s where all the fun stuff happens, and where travel for fulfillment starts to ring true.

2. Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but, by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends. | Maya Angelou

When you do long-term traveling, you inevitably build relationships with a community of culturally dissimilar but ultimately like-minded individuals in affinity toward openness. You may even live with them. Through daily interaction with culturally flavorful people, you integrate their points of views, and so you soon realize that people are just people; we share a common humanity. This realization is tantamount to dispelling the notion of “other”, of “terrorist”, of “creep”, of “inferior” and fosters tolerance toward differences as they are rather than differences labeled as good or bad, right or wrong. And this perhaps can lead to preventing bigotry.

3. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. | Marcel Proust

The spectacular activities you partake in like climbing a mountain or scaling glaciers and the sheer quantity of countries you visit are exciting indeed, but the real voyage begins when you start to see the fascinating intricacies of the everyday mundane. This brings me to the next quote about approaching Objective Reality.

4. The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. | St. Augustine

By now, the majority of thinking human beings are aware that their realities are forged from a skewed, narrow perception, encased in a cushy, soundproof lair known as Your Internal Dialogue. The shard of Truth you see is merely a reflection of your beliefs, your sense of justice, your upbringing, old baggage carried from past traumas, and barely only scrapes Reality as it stands objectively. This makes it so that you take things very personally and very hard. But when you read more than a single page of a book, you begin to formulate context about the bigger picture, and the angle of a single, self-centered page devoted to its sense of self-importance begins to lay by the wayside.

5. I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within. | Lillian Smith

It’s such a nebulous, abstract thing — self-awareness — so difficult to grasp because of its immaterial nature, not to mention that all along the path are booby-traps of self-deceit and humiliating emotions that many prefer never to face, deferring dutiful introspection until something breaks — a breakup, a job severing.

But when you finally do long-term traveling and are yourself enough times in front of someone else who’s not from your culture, they inevitably show you a thing or two — by being perplexed — collective thought-forms you’ve internalized and how you communicate that you were unaware of. Travel long enough and meet enough people and you’ll start to recognize your patterns and your culture’s patterns.

6. The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes ‘sight seeing.’ | Daniel J. Boorstin

The distinction between a traveler, especially long-term, and a tourist who strings together a series of attractions over several weeks or months, is that one lives in an active manner while the other one in a passive manner. Snow White wasn’t interesting because she was interesting; Snow White the story was interesting because of what happened to the girl. Snow White’s a tourist in the story of her own life.

Any person who lives actively does not, by definition, have set-and-forget modality — “I know this to be true in one case, and so it must be true in another case, therefore I can apply what I did the last case so I can stop thinking further in this case.” As an active traveler, you apply yourself and mold your approach to fit the circumstance, which will be inevitably unique every time. A person considered a “traveler” thinks and lives beyond what’s plainly in front of them and better understands the world and the people who occupy it.

7. If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it’s lethal. | Paulo Coelho

Having too much of anything is lethal. Eat too many Oreos and you have cancer. Overdosing on routine is no exception. While long-term traveling, you can never tell what you’re going to do next or where you’re going to be. The best, most exciting, most satisfying adventures are ones born out of spontaneity. And so you adopt a go-with-the-flow attitude and buy only one-way tickets, 24 hours in advance, because you know better than to burden yourself by predicting where you’ll want be at exactly what times when you don’t even know what to expect out there.

Most people are stuck in a state of homeostasis, paralyzed by the dread of change and the unknown, compelled by their fears to stay where they are and make up excuses not to leave their comfort zones. The fear that everything you know and love back at home will be different when you return causes friction against your desire for adventure, for excitement. But after you live a life of constant change, of one-way tickets, change no longer becomes a problem. And when you start feeling the changes within yourself, growing from seed to sproutling to tree, you’ll know that change is not something to be feared, but rather something that’s a necessary part of life; it’s rainwater to the drought of routine.

Adopting a laid-back, change-tolerant attitude inevitably builds strength in adaptability, flexibility, and detachment from any one laid-out itinerary or outcome or place. This is an immensely constructive mentality, especially when addressing the “where do you see yourself in 5 years” question. Most people, when thinking about the future, consider where they want to be in terms of career, relative level of success, monthly income, or units of physical property owned. That’s missing the point. It’s not about where you want to be in terms of external markers but about who you want to be, internally. And this is exactly what “travel” prescribes — it’s the red pill you swallow to open the path to meeting your future, wiser, actualized self. You’ll never know this person if you’re comfortable, pitted in the quicksand of routine.

So if you’re worried about addressing the ugly gap in your resume, to any potential employer who asks, you’ll have an answer for them. Taking a year off to travel and transmute lessons out of adventures is the farthest thing you’ll do from wasting your time.

8. The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready. | Henry David Thoreau

Our much-beloved American solo-travel artist, the man whose famous words ignited the first sparks of fire in me to travel and live deliberately, speaks of the liberation in independence from others. But independence goes beyond just waiting for others; it extends into your sense of obligation to others, your willingness to meet expectations, your sentiment toward material “stuff”, and so on.

Being on the move, staying in no one home for more than a few months forces you to travel lightly, carrying only what you need and nothing more. Little by little, over the course of your travels, you begin to shed the weight of the “stuff” you’d been carrying from when you initially started off. Curiously, this ritual of getting rid of stuff translates into, little by little, severing the cords to stale collective thought forms, submission to status quo, worries about receiving negative judgment, identities you held onto — all excess mental baggage which prevents you from starting today.

Travel enables you to shed your old skin and emerge a new person, freer and more independent, light with carrying only the mindset, the courage, the inner-validation, the newfound eyes, the confidence, and the attitude that you only ever needed in the first place.

Freedom is the art of letting go. When your very lifestyle demands that you exercise freedom, a life constructed from your own volition, things that used to hold you back becomes as easy as letting go of a grain of sand on the beach.