We Were Born To Roam — So Why Did We Stop?
Travel is essential to the human experience. We need regular changes of scenery, or we will grow numb to life.
You can see this when friends from a different place come to visit you. Where you are blind to your surroundings, they get excited about every detail.
Vice versa, when you get to visit them, you suddenly wake up to your surroundings. It feels like someone turned on the color in your life.
To travel is to feel alive.
Yet, in modern society, travel is treated as a luxury item. It is an afterthought — something we are allowed to do once a year if we have been good working bees.
Worse, when we finally do get to go on vacation, we mess it up. We travel in a way that is not happiness-inducing but akin to a binge-drinking session.
So, how do you get traveling right?
The Status Quo
The reality of most people alive in the West today is this — we are prisoners of our 9-to-5 jobs. For most of the year, we have to stay put in the same geographical location.
On top of that, for eight hours a day, we are required to do things that we couldn't care less about. We have to commute to an office, sit down in a cubicle, stare at a screen, and take orders from incompetent superiors.
It is not exactly the same as prison or slavery, but it is not too far off.
Now, once a year or so, the gate to the golden cage is opened. This short period of freedom is referred to as vacation time. For a few precious weeks, we are permitted to live as we please.
Predictably, we go overboard.
We fly to an expensive resort at some tropical beach, bake ourselves in the sun, gorge ourselves at the buffet, and drink ourselves into a stupor.
Or we try to do Europe in 10 days, hopping from Rome to Paris to London as if they were themed areas in an amusement park.
And just like after every other excess, we come back with a hangover. We crammed too much into too little time, and now we feel bloated. We are almost happy to go back to our golden cage, where at least things are orderly and make sense.
What Travel Used To Look Like
Like most things modern humans do, the way we travel is highly unnatural. We rarely do it, but when we do, we grotesquely overdo it.
This was not always the case. For the longest time, traveling was an essential, built-in aspect of the human experience.
As hunter-gatherers, every couple of months or so, we would move.
We could go to a lake where we knew the fishing was good this time of the year. Or we would follow a herd of migrating reindeer. Or we would move to rocky shelters during the rainy season.
We had regular changes of scenery throughout the year. But these changes occurred sensibly. We didn't try to squeeze eight European capitals into ten days of vacation time. We stayed in places long enough to get to know them.
As far as anthropologists can tell, we also kept returning to the same few places. If we found a nice campsite, a rich hunting ground, or a “sacred” forest, it made sense to return to it next year.
So, there was both variety and regularity in our travels.
Modern-Day Digital Nomads
These days, thanks to the internet, we can mimic our prehistoric ancestors. We can become digital nomads. When you work online, all you need is a laptop and an internet connection. Otherwise, you are as free as a bird.
However, most digital nomads, including myself in the beginning, make the same mistake — they indulge in Euro hopping, just on a grander scale.
They’ll spend two weeks in Bali chasing waves, a week in Thailand chasing parties, a month in India chasing inner peace, and two weeks in Italy chasing the perfect ravioli.
It sounds very exciting on paper — constant stimulation. However, this way, you never build a connection with your host culture. You always stay in your digital nomad bubble, surrounded by other thrill-seeking dopamine junkies.
Not surprisingly, many digital nomads burn out after a year or two and go back to the corporate world — the same dullness they originally fled from.
They swap one extreme for another, never finding center.
The Dating Analogy
I like to compare traveling to dating.
The 9-to-5 existence is similar to a long-term relationship. In both instances, it feels like you are stuck in a routine. Once that situation has gone on too long, your mind starts to wander. You crave some variety — new places, new sexual partners.
Of course, there are coping mechanisms. With your 9 to 5, it’s consumerism and drunk weekends. With your marriage, it’s porn and cheating. But these are temporary escapes. Eventually, the routine catches up to us. We grow numb to life.
Some people will choose the opposite extreme. In dating, they will refuse any kind of connection. They keep playing the field, a never-ending series of hook-ups.
This is equivalent to digital nomading, as most people go about it. They jump around from place to place, collecting countries and cities, but never really experiencing what a place is like. They are only concerned with notches on their bedpost, so to speak.
In both instances — the hook-up life and the digital nomad life — the thrills eventually grow weaker. You have overdone it.
“Polyamorous” Travel
It doesn't have to be either-or. It doesn't have to be eternal prison or crazy over-stimulation.
There is a healthy middle ground.
Just like our pre-agricultural ancestors made travel an essential yet sustainable part of their lives, so can we. Staying with our travel analogy, we might call this “polyamorous travel.”
You go to one place that you enjoy, and you stay there for a while, typically for a season. After three or four months, you move to another place.
Now, in place B, you get to experience a different way of life. Perhaps before, you were staying in a big city; now you are staying at a mountain hut. Where before it was all about culture and people, now it’s about nature and introspection.
After three or four months, you again change places. Now you might head to a great scuba diving spot, as that is one of your passions in life.
The key here is that you are giving yourself enough time to experience each of these places in full. You are not trying to work through a bucket list in record time.
The rule of thumb: As long as the place keeps giving, you stay. But once you start growing numb to it, you move on.
At the same time, it is not a goodbye forever. If a place spoke to you once, it will speak to you again. It is not “checked off”. You just need a break from it before you can enjoy it again.
That’s why I refer to this model as “polyamorous” travel. In a poly relationship, you also take breaks from each other. You go see other people who offer qualities different from your primary partner’s. But it doesn’t lead to alienation. On the contrary, it makes you appreciate them more.
It’s the same with places.
Why This Is Serious
Now, I realize how incredibly entitled all of this will sound to many people.
Obsessing over ideal travel lengths and travel periodization — don’t you have any real problems to deal with?
But that’s the thing — most of the “real” problems we face go back to our unnatural modern way of life.
We were never meant to settle down in one place forever. Homo sapiens moved around for 300,000 years. Only in the last 10,000 years — with the advent of agriculture — did that change.
10,000 years vs. 300,000 years — what we consider “normal” is in fact a very recent deviation from the norm. And arguably one with devastating effects. Because now, we live the life of zombies:
We get the same sensory input every day, until we stop feeling.
We do the same monotonous work every day, until we stop caring.
We sit in a chair all day, until we stop moving altogether.
We keep having sex with the same person, until we stop desiring them.
That is what you get when you stop roaming. By trading aliveness for security, you effectively kill yourself from the inside. The mental health epidemic in the West is an expression of that.
Traveling is not some vice for entitled digital nomads — it is your genetic obligation. You were meant to explore. You were meant to feel alive.
Learning How To Travel
We think of traveling as something effortless. You just fly to some nice place and kick back. Beaches and booze.
But in truth, traveling is a skill set, and a highly complex one at that. To travel sustainably and healthily, you have to revamp your whole life.
First, you need to figure out how you can work online. That’s a major life project in itself. If you need some pointers, check out my video How To Quit Your 9–5 & Travel the World.
Next, you have to address consumerism. Each of us owns thousands of physical items. You can’t schlep those around. You need to cut back to the essentials, i.e., become an extreme minimalist (for details, check out my video on extreme minimalism).
Third, you need to rethink your relationships, sexual and non-sexual. If your family, friends, and lovers subscribe to a stationary lifestyle, it will be hard to stay connected. There are ways around that which I will discuss in a future article. But it’s yet another major problem to solve.
When you look at it like this, there is nothing easy about traveling. It’s downright intimidating. That’s why most people would rather stay put in one place.
Don’t let this scare you. Just like you can learn a language or an instrument, you can master the art of traveling. With consistency and patience, you will get the hang of it.
And once you start to experience the benefits, you will wonder how you could ever have lived otherwise. Where most people’s lives get more boring as they go on, yours will become more and more exciting. Each place will teach you something new.
Traveling — if done right — is like waking from a dream. By leaving your home behind, you arrive at yourself.
I suspect that many of my readers are already into travel, perhaps even slow or seasonal roaming. Still, I’m curious: What’s your relationship with travel? Is it already part of your life, or are you taking steps to make it one? Would love to hear from you.
Talk soon!
Niels