Catching a Case of Vagabond Neurosis
On my first draft of this article I was writing in a Houston coffee shop, having been deposited here by my friend I’m staying with as she spends the rest of her afternoon at her Opera rehearsal, a contemporary piece on the assassination of a famous Argentinian painter, it’s all very artistic, or so I am told. This trip is the latest in a stint of small trips I had planned between my two trips to the British Isles, the first being in September of 2022 and a week in Ireland and my upcoming trip to London in the middle of March. Travel to me is something I’ve become accustomed to, something that feels second nature. I recognize the privilege at being a child raised around travel, with a mother who used to wake me and my siblings up at four in the morning to hoist our sleepy bodies into the backseat of my parents’ Honda Odyssey and we’d speed towards some relatively close landmark, the Indiana dunes perhaps, or the Wisconsin Dells. I remember my mom and I going on a bike ride around my neighborhood one summer day and at the stop sign near my house her bike tires screeched, gravel kicking up everywhere. “Do you want to go to Canada tomorrow?”
I saw half the country in the back back seat of the three row-ed Odyssey. I took my first pill in the parking lot of an urgent care outside Mobile, Alabama when I got strep four days before we were due on a cruise to Mexico. I remember my dad building a TV holder and installing a power strip into that minivan so my antsy brothers, no more than eight and six at the time, and I could play Playstation on our three week drive across the East Coast. When we were too young for even this, I used to lay on the floor while my mom flipped through the soft handmade paper pages of her photo album of pictures from my dad and her trip to Costa Rica in their late 20’s. My parents led a lifestyle I could only dream of, holding down stable jobs with a good income while taking weeks off at a time to travel the Caribbean in search of the next best dive. Their most frequent haunt was the island of Cozumel in Mexico, and my favorite pictures of my parents are from this era, cheeks streaked with red from sunburn, blissfully unencumbered by life, baking in the hot son on the deck of a dive boat.
Perhaps my insatiable lust for movement is a result of my parents exceptionally fun lifestyle, perhaps I am simply the most impulsive blend of the two of them, but what if there’s something else, something chemical in my brain that extends beyond the Instagram-washed “wanderlust.”
Merriam-Webster defines dromomania as an “an exaggerated desire to wander,” but quirky publisher Gulf News simplifies it more, calling it simply an “addiction to travel.” But is that really quite possible? My parents have spent the past 10 years near neglecting their wanderlust in favor of my brothers’ hockey fees and my college tuition, save for a trip to Disney World when I was 12 and my dad and I’s trip to Paris when I turned 16. In fact, it was my dad’s experience in Europe that reignited his passion to travel, and my mom and him went to Europe for the first time three years ago. Even now, when I asked if she would give it all up to go travel for a month, all expenses paid, her answer was starkly different from what I imagined she’d say thirty years ago,“No, at this point in my life the responsibilities that I have in my life do not allow me to abandon my family, my home or my work.”
I have a friend named Greg, who shares my passion for travel almost equally if not more. I remember sitting in the kitchen of my parents house one day, fresh off of our recent trip to Mexico, when he looked at me and said, “We need to have a flight booked every four months, just to have something to look forward to, you know?” Greg’s philosophy: every four months have a flight, and alternate between something cheap, and something grand, you know, to give the bank account some time to recover. I admit that while I laughed at the idea at the time, Greg’s thoughts unfortunately had a point. I went to Mexico in December 2021, Alabama in January 2022, the Ozarks in May, Ireland in September, and Louisville in November. I’m quite carefully following his prescribed plan for travel success, avoiding burnout and getting to explore all in one. Perhaps the bigger issue in travel addiction isn’t the when we travel, but the why.
“Hahahahahaha. Escapism, romanticizing it. Yuuuup.” Was Greg’s actual response when I asked if he traveled to escape the world, and I can’t particularly argue with this, my most recent trip to Ireland was booked nearly solely out of spite following a last-minute canceled trip to Paris. What was I running from then, the anxieties of my upcoming school year, a mostly resolved disagreement about fiscal responsibility? What about my first trip to Mexico, after my undergraduate graduation? I can tell you now, as I sit in this ancient Greece themed coffee shop and alternate between writing this and playing Stardew Valley (my version of the Pomodoro Method) I came to Houston to see my childhood best friend, bake in the warm Texas sun like a lizard on a rock, and ignore the ever looming fact that I’ve decided to graduate in an economic downturn.
That recession, she’s really sticking around huh?
Dromomania was first prescribed to French legend Jean-Albert Dada in the 1800’s, when after leaving his job as a gas fitter took off on a five year long odyssey around Europe on foot, before collapsing into a hospital in Bordeaux, where they promptly diagnosed him with the affliction, shortly before his death from exhaustion. Dromomania has its roots in legend but is a real, afflicted mental disorder. As Conde Nast Traveler writer Eliot Stein puts it,“‘vagabond neurosis’ the term was officially added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as an “impulse-control disorder” and “psychiatric problem” in 2000.” Clearly, to some medical researches, the wanderlust lifestyle has real ramifications for those who don’t know when to stop. How does this happen? Social psychologist Dr. Michael Brein in conversation with Traveler argues that, “Well, once you realize that the experience of travel is extremely rewarding and unlike anything else, the more you want to keep doing it,” Dr. Brein says. “It’s a kaleidoscope of new sights, sounds, and experiences at every turn, and successfully navigating these unfamiliar situations is the best way for a person to achieve the higher-level needs found in Maslow’s pyramid.”
Think about it this way. There’s the practical negatives, the lack of stable housing, the touch and go finances, but I wonder about the emotional downfalls. Consider the missed birthdays, the lack of meaningful long term connection. Or worse, imagine becoming the van-life family that squeezes four kids into a privacy-free spare bedroom. I shudder at the thought. But the average traveler need not fear that they are enroute to becoming the next Dada, as the standard dromomaniac takes travel to a new extent, collecting countries like postcards and effectively speed-running the entire world. Perhaps fuelled by the 21st century currency of choice, social media content, travelers are no longer traveling to see the world or experience things at their own pace, rather to be the first to check off an obscure country or see a unique natural landmark. Stein argues, “If you make it your life’s mission to go to obscure towns and territories like Aargau, Zug, and everywhere in between, does that bring you closer to knowing the world or take you further from reality?” So how does that differ from the average tourist, or even slightly advanced traveler? In all honesty, I think back to my mom.
“It makes perfect sense. So much of why travel is rewarding and special is because it’s a physical and psychological escape from your routine. But once travel becomes routine, the less exciting each trip feels and the more you may long to return home.” (Stein)
Jennifer (and my dad, Jason) have been to nearly every Caribbean island, with the exception of Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba which at the time of their travels was not yet open to American tourists. As master divers, they spent their 20’s in search of the best reef, and the best margaritas. Still, the goal was never to complete the Caribbean, or use it as a checklist. In fact, she has no urgent intention of going to Jamaica, leaving one box never filled in. Her philosophy on travel? Simple. “Step out of your comfort zone and embrace everything this new culture and space has to offer. Reinvent yourself each time you experience a new culture.”
So we’re back to the why. Why do we travel, what compels us to go? Travel is unexpected and freeing, but it’s also being used as an escape. Stein cautions against this, and travel becoming monotony, “It makes perfect sense. So much of why travel is rewarding and special is because it’s a physical and psychological escape from your routine. But once travel becomes routine, the less exciting each trip feels and the more you may long to return home.” And there’s the truth. Maybe the secret to avoiding travel addiction is as simple as not traveling as much as possible.
The Gulf News article warns of the concept of the “pathological tourist,” someone who can never stop wandering or find content in their own location. I’ve spent part of my work time on this trip applying to jobs, some in Chicago and some as far as Sydney, Australia. I am driven by a desire to experience something, to touch all the oceans or continents or see a real life zebra or walk the roads of literary icons (true.) I also just really like the smell of hotels and laying on a beach and drinking coffee out of tiny cups in European countries (truer.) I agree that using travel to escape reality is not a great coping mechanism, something I try to remind Greg (and myself) frequently, and that the concept of “catch flights, not feelings” could maybe be reworked to “catch flights and feelings.” Maybe I travel because it’s in my blood, because instead of spending my 20’s folding pants at a retail store, I want to be exploring the coves of Mexico like my mom.
