Those Who Wander Open Debate #7
Can Travel Be a Tonic for Self-Loathing and General Miserableness?
Greetings fellow wanderers,
In August 2024, I introduced a new feature at Those Who Wander—a Those Who Wander Open Debate. In place of a usual weekly post, I’m posting a monthly debate question, focused on various travel and adventure topics.
The format is simple. I will post a question for debate and pose a prompt about it. Then, there will be a poll and an opportunity to leave a comment to expand on your answer. Please feel free to respond at any length you like.
I will also repost the stats from the previous month’s poll. Last month, I asked, ‘Would life improve if we abandoned the internet and the rest of the digital world? ‘ with 24% saying ‘Yes’, 10% saying ‘No’, and 67% answering ‘There is a healthy middle ground.’ Thank you to everyone who participated and shared your thoughts!
Now onto today’s question and prompt:
Can travel be a tonic for self-loathing and general miserableness?
"Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it."
-Confucius
If we could run an experiment and magically grant everyone the full means to travel—unlimited time and funds, and even throw in a hassle-free way of getting there with first-class direct flights—would we all make the most of it? Would we lay aside our usual baggage and general miserableness to become, if only momentarily, better versions of ourselves, or would some of us still take it all for granted? Temperamentally, some of us do not seem to be in the right headspace for travel. And yet, might travel be exactly what we need to alleviate some of our mental and emotional ailments?
I’ve been watching the latest season of White Lotus. While all the main cast are, once again, a predictably awful bunch of spoiled vacationers with a buffet of insufferable character flaws, there is one that stands out in this third season as more intolerable than the rest—Walton Goggins’ bummer of a character, Rick. He is the Eeyore of the group, a wearied, moody, self-absorbed guy who makes everyone around him especially miserable—an archetype of the unfulfilled, ruminating, and volatile ego. His performance is so wonderful that I get instantly depressed whenever the camera pans to him. If there were ever someone who could personify a deep sigh, it would be this man. No one wants someone like this on their travels. As Dr. Seuss may have put it, I do not like a prick like Rick. Not on a plane, not on a boat, and certainly not at my wellness resort in Thailand!
While this group of entitled characters is fictional, it grants us the plausible thought experiment we’re searching for and a subset of travelers we all know are out there: These are people who are money-rich, but life-poor. I am not one of those that is prejudiced and spiteful against people with money. On the contrary, my wish is for all of us to see the joy in this world from travel and adventure. Despite all the pain and suffering we know is endemic around the globe, I want us all to eventually reach a well-deserved state of equanimity.
It’s perfectly justified to be cranky with jet lag or recovering from a terrible series of unfortunate events while traveling. I must admit I’ve been intolerable to my wife during several of our past excursions and have vowed to try my best to make up for it. But we typically forgive someone who’s entered this temporary state of crankiness and realize it isn’t representative of our personality as a whole. Most of us usually cheer up once we’ve reached our destination and often feel overjoyed to be in a new place experiencing new things. Not Rick.
What’s it going to take for someone like this to lighten up–someone perpetually angry and full of self-loathing? If being at a wellness center in a beautiful country isn’t going to make a dent in someone’s bad attitude, what will? I like to believe travel can fix our bad attitudes, but can it sincerely help cure things like shallowness and self-pity?
It’s still a mystery as to what things in life change us to be better, but many have claimed to be significantly transformed somewhere along their travels. Where precisely does that epiphany occur in someone’s consciousness, and why? Travel can sometimes serve as a kind of black box for the weary and restless, where we enter in one miserable form and magically come out renewed. I’ve heard tales of this transformation occurring, but it’s astonishing we know so little about how this happens. Where does that moment of clarity and tranquility come from that suddenly causes them to snap out of their brooding state of mind?
Life is complicated, and many people get dealt severely bad hands in life. Some of us need genuine psychiatric help for our trauma and life problems, so I am not so naive as to think travel serves as a panacea for all our ailments. However, to be perpetually aggrieved and resentful–to walk through all of life with a chip on your shoulder as Rick does–at some point is a choice we make. I take the Stoics’ or Buddhists’ attitude about all this and agree that, though we have little control over a lot of what happens to us, we make the final call on how we will respond to the misery and suffering that we know will inevitably come our way in this life.
It’s common to hear that we need to “find something larger than ourselves” to gain meaning and purpose. Well, what about the world itself? Might venturing out into the world make more of us realize we’re already a part of something larger than ourselves? That we’re spinning on a sphere amidst a cosmos of infinite complexity and alive to momentarily enjoy a world teeming with life and endless activities should give all of us pause for awe and wonderment. Make something wonderful happen with the finite time we have here.
I typically land on the side of my idealism and argue that there is a place on this planet that can change us, despite those who argue against travel. There is somewhere out there for everyone that we would all benefit from visiting. For some, that is found in mountaineering in the Himalayas, while for others, it is at a tropical jungle resort–whatever place gets us to glance out at the landscape or culture, take a deep breath, and realize that we don’t have to be perpetually miserable. There is peace of mind that can be discovered for each of us.
As I’ve argued before, travel and adventure provide us with many benefits, from increasing our physical and psychological well-being and serving as a form of therapy to becoming more self-reliant and expanding our understanding and empathy for other cultures and peoples around the world:
“It’s not only in our individual interest to know a wide array of our physical and intellectual world, but it is deeply critical to our collective interests as well…we must keep moving, learning, and wandering even if it appears as if we’ve already explored the entire globe. There is always something our minds are yet to encounter.”
So what if travel ended up being precisely what someone like Rick Hatchet needed to overcome whatever was ailing them? That they needed to escape somewhere for a while and needed a push to overcome whatever feelings of restlessness or despair they were suffering from? They needed to find something “out there” they’d been looking for their whole life and had yet to experience a radical self-transformation. I share Rick Steves’s belief that travel has the power to transform us because, as he observes,
“[Y]ou learn about yourself by leaving your home and looking at it from a distance.
A part of me feels like everyone should experience travel and adventure because of this very thing–that it is a form of lasting therapy, education, and a bridge to overcoming a lot of our personal issues and maybe even some larger societal problems. For the life-poor, then, whether we are money-rich or not, travel could mean nothing or could mean everything. If travel can change and redeem us, we must allow for the possibility it will change and redeem someone like Rick…or perhaps he will just continue getting high, releasing venomous snakes, and remain on the cranky path of self-loathing.
What are your thoughts? Can travel be a tonic for self-loathing and general miserableness?
Expand on your answer in the comments:
Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me and participating in the discussion. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.
Cheers!
-JSB
Travel does not change your approach to life unless you allow it to.
In most cases, if you are unhappy at home, you'll be unhappy while traveling. The attraction will be too crowded, the food won't taste right, and people overseas will be just as annoying as people at home. One exception is if your unhappiness stems from your work. In that case, any vacation time, regardless of where it is spent, can be a happy experience.