Why travel?

Monotony shrinks our perception of time — the more days we spend doing the same routine, the more our brain compresses each day and experience into a single memory. An unexamined, repeated routine may lead us down a path where we one day wake up and say “how did all that time go by?”.

Travel offers an expansion of time and the mind. The more novel experiences with have, the longer the time seems. Have you ever had the experience where a single day felt like an entire week? Or a week vacation traveling around a new place felt like a month?

As I prepare for my first road trip in a converted van, this mind-expanding nature of travel comes to mind. Traveling by road is longer, more exhausting, and requires more choices than traveling by plane. My mind has compressed so many flights into a blurred recollection — there are few flights that remain unique in my mind, mostly those where I met someone new.

When we travel by road, we see more landscape. We have to make decisions of where to stop for gas, for food, for a stretch break. We also have opportunities to go off-course, to take a detour, a path that risks our convenience for a novel vista or attraction.

Travel is also the social capital of millennials and gen-Zs alike — fodder for IG and other social media to draw attention to you. There's value in sharing, no doubt, but I have some sense of caution with the social media vortex and how easily it can pervert the motivations and joys of travel.

I want to travel to expand my mind, to have a feast of memories to look back on at the end of my life.