Why Travel and Adventure are Existential Concerns

Most of us view travel and adventure as fun, leisurely activities in which we occasionally participate. However, they may be more essential to our well-being than they first appear.

Photo by prottoy hassan on Unsplash

Existentialism is about wrestling with human existence. Many of us today report that we feel our existence is hollow—that we don’t fit in or are unfulfilled by our current work and lifestyle regimes. Changing course and transitioning to a new career or lifestyle is often filled with many impediments and riddled with so much anxiety and dread that we have a hard time reorienting our lives even when we know how critical it may be for our well-being. 

We all crave meaning while wondering if what we’re doing with our lives is worthwhile. We participate in many activities out of necessity to pay bills and provide for our families, but it almost feels at times like someone else is pulling the strings to most of our daily actions. Many of us fail to acknowledge just how deep a crisis this is and how painful it can be to inhabit such a mental state. Asking ourselves what travel and adventure are for is an existential question because the answers often relate to seeking some deeper meaning of life “out there” that we just can’t seem to find from where we’re presently standing.

What adventure and travel have the potential to offer us is of existential concern to this crisis of meaning—in sum, wandering is an invitation and possible deliverance of the time, space, and place to think, be momentarily free, and chase the pursuit of self-discovery. With it, we can step outside our regular ruts and routines to pause, breathe, and reevaluate. These are no small matters for we all ought to demand a right to slow down from time to time, as I reflected on previously in Wandering and Mindfulness: On the Right to Slow Down.

Perhaps we’ll chance upon a stray thought while on our ventures that may dramatically change our lives in unfathomable ways. All of us sincerely need these extended moments of wandering for contemplation and rejuvenation, not just to recharge so we can get back to work or raise our families, which can be noble acts, but for our well-being and sanity. As I argue,

Many of us experience burnout and want— no, deserve— to seek greater meaning and purpose at many stages of our lives. Life is hard and we all eventually reach moments of major transition at various phases of our lives—whether we’re about to have children, find ourselves between jobs, have recently gone through a divorce, or have sadly suffered the loss of a loved one. These are times of great stress and change—if only we had a Monopoly-like “get out of jail free card”, or a “get out of town card”, these are the moments we’d be using that card.

However, wandering is also about much more than pure self-interest. It’s also about human connection and a deeper understanding of our world. Here is an insight I had while backpacking the Appalachian Trail, years ago: people tend to come to appreciate concepts more intuitively and empirically through experience than through regimented forms of learning, like being told to learn facts and read dense books for instance; getting people to travel and have their adventures is about getting more minds into diverse realms of experience. If we can find a way to get more of us engaged with the real world in all its complexities, I sense we’ll be on firmer ground, building a better, brighter world where fewer of our vices of prejudice and tribalism exist and more virtues of cooperation and sympathy flourish. That is the hope anyway.

Any writer aspires to find a way to motivate people to DO something. For me that something is encouraging more of us to travel and explore our world with the hope that by doing so we obtain some useful nugget of wisdom about ourselves and others that can be applied to enhancing the time we have left on this planet. But all of us are required to also think ahead and keep doctoring this spirit of adventure for our youth, handing down some kind of “wandering ethos,” we may label it, to the next generation, like a torch in an unending relay race where the goal isn’t to outcompete anyone, but simply to keep forging ahead wiser and stronger. 

We don’t always travel and enact our adventure in the smartest or most compassionate of ways, but I believe, if done right, travel may be the key for more of us to overcome many fears and prejudices—with time we may come to promote empathy and understanding in other people, cultures, and ideas. In short, seeing isn’t just believing, it’s empathizing with the rest of humanity. The act of wandering out in the real world has the potential to nudge us closer to compassion.

Maybe a lot of what I’m attempting to describe here isn’t exclusive to travel and adventure but what matters most is learning how we open our eyes to the complexities of the world and fight off the tendency to have our minds become rigid, bored, or cynical with life. Every one of us is suffering in some capacity—some more, some less. But there is something valuable in coming to terms with the nature of our reality. As Anthony Bourdain once somberly put it,

Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts. It even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you. It SHOULD change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, in your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.

Thus, travel and adventure are existential concerns when our journeys make us think and care. I believe there is a lot of power in seeing the world as it really is because in seeing the truths of this world, we gain a better sense of what we and it can become.

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB