Mental time travel: The singular reason why you must invest in experiences, not things
With one singular exception, time is a straight arrow. While our consciousness may experience time more slowly, as Einstein famously remarked ‘Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.’ The linearity of time governs our complete understanding of the universe.
This notable singular exception is our ability to undergo mental time travel. The ability to go back in time, to a place and relive the moments, the smells, sights, new sounds, language, tastes, sensations, and sights that spark different synapses in the brain and may have the potential to revitalize the mind. As neurosciences chips away at the frontiers of what we know, we are beginning to unravel how travel affects not only our mind but also our brain. Each new experience increases both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought - the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms.
And this experience does not only kick in when we travel, it starts much earlier. A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable. And as I sit down, over a month after returning from Argentina, I see the symptoms of my disease, as from the deepest labyrinths of my mind, I am gripped with a fervour, which gnaws at me from within. This love affair with the disease involves bouts of mental time travel, oscillating between fernweh and the reality of making a living. The afflicted me seeks solace in replaying the film of memory.
In 1872, a young, enterprising man who went by the name of Francisco Moreno, embarked on the first of the series of scientific expeditions that made him well known: a survey of Río Negro Territory, largely uncharted territory which had recently been made accessible by Argentina’s Conquest of the Desert campaign in Patagonia.
In January 1876, he reached Lake Nahuel-Huapi in the southern Andes, and on February 15, 1877, he discovered this large natural water body adjacent to the lake and remarked
“Inland Sea, son of the nations’ cloak, that covers the mountains in this great solitude, nature did not name you: from today, your name will be Lago Argentino” and thereby baptized Lake Argentino.”
But the source of the lake is the Glacier Perito Moreno, named after the man himself, and the title Perito (meaning specialist/expert) accorded to him. It’s a 250 sq. km ice formation, and 30 km in length, with its terminus being 5 kilometres (3 mi) wide, with an average height of 74 m (240 ft) above the surface of the water of Argentino Lake.
As I trekked the glacier, jumped over ravines and drank from the streams as the people who first touched Patagonia 9000 years ago must have done, I realised why the Argentines have the word ‘Duende’ in their vocabulary. Every single immersion with nature in Argentina has left me with this feeling best captured by the word.
Duende — The feeling of awe and inspiration had, especially when standing in nature. The overwhelming sense of beauty and magic.
This very sense is what makes us consider why in the tussle to live a good life, we must choose experiences which overwhelm us, and not things which only provide fleeting happiness.
Why you should invest in experiences, and not things
Experiences are stored in our episodic memories, which is different from our semantic memory which helps us perform everyday actions. Episodic memory is flexible, as it is not about regularities, but about peculiarities. The peculiarities which make our travel memorable — because unlike things, peculiarities cannot be mass produced, they are intensely personal. The personal nature of experience and the impersonal nature of things are akin to what Milan Kundera says when he speaks of loving a woman
“Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”
These peculiarities, are the shared bond between us and our experiences of places we travel. Our desire for things is a desire for copulation, our desire for experiences has the beauty of the shared sleep. Things pleasure us for today, experiences nurture us forever.
This nurturing is critical as it contributes to future survival. Mental time travel into the past shares cognitive resources with mental construction of potential future episodes. Brain imaging has shown that both remembering the past and imagining the future are associated with frontal and temporal lobe activity. As we tap into our episodic memories, we re-tell the stories of our travels to ourselves and our loved ones. This retelling is the lynch-pin on which we tame our wanderlust, and as we pivot through the flood of memories, our travel experiences give us disproportionate returns.
And this is why, in our world where consumerism is the opium of the masses, in the dichotomy between experiences and things, we need to consistently choose experiences. Experiences can be propelled with mental time travel. It took biological evolution a long time to build a time machine in the brain — it has managed to do it only once, and it is difficult to imagine a marvel of nature greater than that. Human time does not turn in a circle; it shoots like a straight arrow. Happiness is the longing for repetition, and our travel experiences are our easiest routes to repetition.
And as I have said a million times, this is Why We Travel.
