The Wanderer’s Insatiable Appetite: Why Do I Always Want More Out of My Travels?
Many of us seem to be content when we are granted our annual vacations. Am I being greedy or lacking appreciation by wanting more when I travel?
If I were immortal with unlimited funds and zero responsibilities, I am confident I would travel every square inch of our globe—and once I was done globetrotting, I’d begin the project all over again. Alas, I am but a mere romantic mortal with bills to pay, a child to raise, and endless tasks on my to-do list piling up as the years go by. Nonetheless, I am still suffering from an insatiable appetite to wander. Why do I feel this way?
My wife often observes that I don’t seem to be fully content with the days allotted to many of our excursions—that I can’t seem to appreciate the time granted to a weeklong vacation. And she’s right. I am often bothered that our travels couldn’t be extended another week or two. At some point, I’m rambling on about how next time we visit we’ll have to do x, y, and z too…and spend more time doing those other things we already did. That isn’t to say I didn’t thoroughly enjoy my time. I almost always do. And deep down I realize there likely won't be a “next time” either.
Then there are times I can’t wait to get home and go back to my cherished routines because I often love playing the role of a homebody almost as much as wandering if such a seemingly contradictory thing is possible. But then there are certain times when the places I travel to instill a deep feeling in me to want to inhabit them longer.
Lately, I’ve tried to reflect on this question of why I always seem to want more out of my travels and adventures. Am I perhaps just being greedy and not able to simply appreciate the time allotted to me? I should be grateful I get to travel as much as I do. Many people don’t have such luxury. Perhaps I’m just naturally restless and being too idealistic. Should I try to adopt a more stoic attitude to overcome this malady?
However, I believe this powerful feeling of wanting more out of a trip arises because some places feel like therapy to me, or that I’ve only just scratched the surface of a place that is destined to satiate some curiosity I have. There’s always a heart-pumping feeling that just around that corner through that brick-ladened alleyway I’ll discover another piece of the puzzle or understand another small riddle about this world.
There are many places we come to discover, often in nature, that strike us as so special that we instantly feel a pang of regret that we cannot venture further within them because we are somehow restricted from doing so. Time isn’t often on our side. From the moment we arrive in a place, the nagging countdown of a stopwatch somewhere hovering around our head starts to tick. On top of this, we know that we can’t be healed or discover what a place has to fully offer us in a mere handful of days. To truly reap the benefits of these special places, we know we’d have to be immersed within them much longer.
The author Alain de Botton observed in The Art of Travel that
Even if we allow how beneficial contact with nature may be, we recognize that its effects must surely be of limited duration. Three days in nature can scarcely be expected to work a psychological effect lasting longer than a few hours.
I view a lot of the places I travel to like great works of art or films. One wouldn’t go to an art gallery for ten minutes or only watch a half hour of a renowned film and report that they were nourished by that experience. It would feel rushed and disappointing—an insult to both ourselves and those who designed and choreographed this artwork to be appreciated in a moment of timelessness. You have to see it through. But unlike art galleries and films, there is no distinct ending to a place and one could be lost in them forever. Sometimes I yearn to be lost in them forever.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, here and here, this is what I mean when I say the structure of our society is not fully conducive to how we’ve been psychologically and physically primed in our long evolution as humans. We’re often too far removed from the natural environments we evolved in. Being out in the world with no deadlines and fewer responsibilities allows for something restorative to happen. We evolved as wanderers and yet have boxed ourselves in with the many demands of modernity. Our society’s obsession with time and being punctual unsuspectingly slips over us like a straitjacket, creating a suffocating feeling for many of us. And we wonder why so many of us report feeling anxious, depressed, and lacking meaning. I feel this most acutely while on a trip because I know it must soon end and I must get back to “regular” life like a responsible adult should.
As much as I appreciate many of the things our modern society allows—and I do indeed live a moderately cushy existence that I wouldn’t easily trade away—the anthropologist in me knows deep down that we still have a long way to go until society comes to terms with who we are and who we’ve been as a species. There is a vast amount of knowledge, meaning, and depth we have yet to rekindle from our past and I do not believe it will be acquired while in the midst of working a frantic 9 to 5 schedule for 40 years. Can we learn to balance our preferred mode of being—individual autonomy and desire to slow down—with a society and economy premised on ever-demanding efficiency, growth, and productivity?
And perhaps I may be asking myself the wrong question. Maybe it is not that I necessarily want more out of my travels after all. When I reflect further, I simply want things to slow down. As I pondered in an excerpt from my book The Case for Slow Travel and Slow Reading in a Fast-Paced Society,
Our society places a premium on efficiency. Whether it’s coffee in the morning to get us going, Amazon packages arriving at our door in a single day, or getting to work “on time,” we value expediency a lot in our society. We even now demand this of our information. Until recently, news cycles were not 24/7 but we have rapidly transitioned into an information and knowledge economy that requires constant processing. Efficiency and expediency have obvious benefits, but seldom do we ask whether efficiency is an intrinsic good. What might we be trading off for its sake? Is technology truly liberating us or are there unforeseen restraints being placed on us? And how do we better slow down in our world? Do we even have a choice in the matter?
The only time I was truly allowed to wander unencumbered was backpacking the Appalachian Trail in 2014 and I think ever since those days I’ve been wondering how I can get back to that sense of liberation and timelessness I felt—how we all can learn to better structure our lives and society to allow more opportunities to slow down and ignore all the stopwatches hovering around our heads. Being human in today’s world means we have to confront the tyranny of time. How do we reconcile our limited time with our innate yearning to wander?
For consideration:
Do you struggle with the limited time you have while traveling? How have you learned to cope?
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Cheers!
-JSB
My partner and I find that if we focus on living as those where we are traveling do, we find a sense of place rather than a sense of restlessness. We aren’t focused on the things to see as much as on how we soak in the culture. In return, we truly experience a depth that makes up for an endless search.
I think it helps when you’re able to disconnect. On my last 6 day rafting trip with no signal it felt like 2 weeks instead of 1. I left feeling quite restored. Of course, then I missed it.