Travel As the Cure For Everything
A few years ago, I was at a housewarming party with a strange hodgepodge of guests — fellow college students, older family friends, young children. To break the ice, the new tenant’s mother asked the question, “if you had unlimited time and money, what would you do?” One by one, answers came from the slice of the population. One response vastly outnumbered the rest. Over half of the guests said, “travel.”
A brief scroll through my Instagram feed reveals something similar. A video from a popular travel account has the caption “POV: They ask me how many times a day I think about traveling,” to which the answer is, apparently, “500 times.” Another account offers the age-old sage advice that “The trick to getting through Mondays is to always make sure you have a holiday booked.” There are a disproportionate number of posts from people I follow in exotic locations (a trend to which I certainly contribute). The moments we are away from our homes are the ones we deem worthy of sharing. Travel has become, in our consciousness, an easy fix for all our problems, an opioid to soothe any psychological pain.
It is with this mindset that I embarked on my first solo trip with Ecuador as my destination. I had traveled before, but this time was different. I would be staying in hostels, meeting other travelers from all over the world, and I would be totally alone, carefree, getting my Kerouac on. Around nobody I knew, I could be anybody I wanted. I was about to break free of the confines of college and escape my chronic boredom. As I sat through my flights and layovers my excitement and anticipation only grew.
Shortly after landing in Cuenca, I realized how far out of my depth I was. My experience with the Spanish language was limited to two years in an American public high school and attempts to talk to my co-workers in the warehouse I worked in. To make matters worse, I had just been dropped in a city as unfamiliar as the language, and I didn’t know anyone who could help me. I tried to put off my feelings of discomfort and have some fun.
Throughout my hikes to waterfalls, bicycle rides through the Amazon, and tours of chocolate factories, I oscillated between feelings of pleasant solitude and aching loneliness. Without old friends, homework, and the internet to distract me, I was forced to be with my own thoughts 100% of the time. I had the feeling that many travelers have; that somehow, a year’s worth of experiences are crammed into a few weeks — the good and the bad. And though I found new friends, great food, and beautiful scenery, I never found the easy, carefree life that existed in my head. The life I did find was much more nuanced.
Perhaps more surprising were the other backpackers I met. They came from all over the world — the United States, Europe, Central America. Some were energetic, class clown-types, and some depressed. Some knew what they wanted to do with their lives, some didn’t. Some were party animals, others were outdoorsy. In other words, they were much like the people I knew back home. While they were certainly having fun on their adventures, the meaningful psychological benefit apparently had yet to kick in, and most of these travelers had been out for six or eight months, long after the expected cure should have taken effect.
And the locals — the farmers, shop owners, and hostel workers that I met. They didn’t have the luxury to leave their jobs and responsibilities (activities I’ve heard writers, influencers, and YouTube advertisers describe as “prisons”). Travel is a privilege, and if it is the cure for the ailments of the soul, then only the wealthy can truly find freedom and happiness. A dismal world, indeed. Gladly, this was not the case. The locals often seemed happier and more content than the travelers.
None of this is to say that travel is without value. My journeys have been a major source of self-growth and self-discovery. I have broadened my mind by learning about new cultures, and my taste buds by trying new cuisine. Mark Twain said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness [. . .] Broad, wholesome, charitable view of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” Travel has made my life more interesting.
And yet for me (and most other travelers) the trip always ends, and I am back in the airport I departed from. Often, as I return to study, work, or go about other mundane elements of my daily schedule, my mind wanders to my adventure in Ecuador and the other places I’ve gone. Those trips seem like brief escapes from my boxed-up life, memories are separated by time and space from the everyday. It’s as if my travel memories are stolen from some interdimensional version of myself.
Like my Instagram profile, travel takes up a disproportionate amount of my mental space. My memories offer a respite from the monotony of everyday life. I feel about travel how William Wordsworth felt of a place near Tintern Abbey:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration: — feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure
Memories of travel help reframe my daily life. My loneliness in Ecuador helped me realize how much I value my friends. Hearing media reports of countries I’ve visited made me realize how much of what we are told is false. Perhaps most importantly, I realized that most things that promise a carefree life are probably wrong.
In other words, even after learning that the idea of travel as an antidote for all my problems is a delusion, the possibility of a fulfilled, adventurous life remains. But I’ve learned that travel is neither necessary nor sufficient for a happy, exciting life. I just can’t help but think that we’ve made travel into something it’s not, an impossible standard that it will never be able to live up to. With a more realistic outlook, we can see travel for what it truly is: culturally enriching, character-building, overwhelming, and full of positives and negatives.
At first, the realization that the life I dreamed of didn’t truly exist was a gloomy one. It still is, to some degree. But this realization has also helped me focus on improving the mundane aspects of my day-to-day life. Contrary to the Instagram post, I don’t want to enjoy Mondays because I have a holiday booked. I want to enjoy Mondays because I enjoy Mondays (though I want to have a holiday booked, too).
As has happened many times, it seems I had to learn the hard way what has been known for centuries. Seneca said, “Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene, you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.” It was also put aptly more recently by Lana Del Rey, who said, “So I moved to California, but it’s just a state of mind. It turns out everywhere you go, you take yourself, that’s not a lie.”
I love to travel. I will certainly continue to do it. But my experience with it has proved that it is not, in fact, the cure for everything.
Thanks for reading! I would love to hear your thoughts.
