It’s travel season. I know this because my Facebook newsfeed has been blowing up with pictures for the past month.
I have mixed feelings about travel. Which is why I’m writing this. Travel and I go back a ways and have a bit of a dark history.
Part 1: The Past
When I was a kid, our family took small vacations. One year it was to South Dakota, another year it was Branson, Missouri. I remember these being fun vacations. Then we vacationed to Colorado. Then we vacationed to Colorado again. Then we moved to Colorado. Then we stopped taking vacations.
You see, my parents didn’t make much money. But we were always comfortable. At least I always was. We ate out, we had modest Christmas celebrations. We drove out and saw family. But when we moved to Colorado, prices were higher. The recession was brewing behind the scenes, my sister and I were growing up and participating in more activities. There were setbacks. Massive car repairs, a layoff or two. Vacations, well, we just didn’t have them. Traveling to see family seemed good enough.
My sister went on a missions trip to the Bahamas. She also got a trip to DC before we moved to Colorado. She also got to do a brief tour of Europe. And I think I’m missing another trip. But by the time I was old enough to start doing this travel, the money was gone. And I went much of high school complaining about it. Where was my travel, how was I going to see the world? Then, my senior year, my parents told us they were broke. There’s a lot to this story that I won’t be writing about. But I had the, uh, distinct privilege of looking myself in the mirror and realizing how much of a whiny little bitch I had been. For all of the stress my parents had gone through behind the scenes, all I had thought about was me, me, me.
And to be fair, I did go on missions trips, they were just more local. In fact, the summer before my senior year I even went to my denomination’s annual youth conference. But by that age I was so bitterly disappointed with the church I could barely appreciate the conference. Nobody could answer the deeper questions about my faith, and I had buried myself in study to find answers. But it meant seeing all of the gimmicks, hearing these speakers rehash the poetic and often misleading language of Christianese. I just couldn’t take it seriously. I was borderline-agnostic and hurting. I spent most of my time curled up on a bench on the second floor of the convention center, alone. I can home feeling I had wasted my parent’s money.
Growing up in church, there was always this game, if you could call it that. How many states have you been to? Some had been to 30, some 20. They could rattle them all off with pride. Me? Maybe five. This game basically taught me that people use travel as a status symbol. “See look, I’ve been to more states than you!” I knew very well that it takes money to travel. We didn’t have money, so I hadn’t traveled much. Travel was just an extension of classism. The wealthy had done it. You had not.
Travel, in a lot of ways, came to represent my own envy, and I resented it for that. It wasn’t really that I wanted to go to the Bahamas, or Europe, or any place my sister went. It was that I wanted to be the person who had been to those places. I wanted to be cool. Not too many years ago I apologized to my mom for my behavior back in high school. I told them they had more than made up for it all afterward when they let me live at home rent free for some seven years. Not that they owed me either of those things. I just wanted to say thanks. They’re pretty great parents, and I wouldn’t trade that for the world.
Part 2: The Present
So now that you know where I’m coming from, what do I think about travel?
I don’t know. I’ve seen my friends go to some really cool places. Are they places I would pay to go to? Probably not. Again, I’ve realized that at least for me, the appeal isn’t so much the travel itself as it is that status that comes with being a person who has traveled. Makes sense? So in many ways I’ve deliberately put travel on the back burner. I just don’t want to be that asshole who wants to rub it in everyone’s face where he’s gone. I wouldn’t want to assume this is why others travel, but I think it would be foolish to say it isn’t a predominant motivation. It makes you cool, sexy. If it presumably didn’t, why do we all post massive amount of photos on social media documenting our outings? Our hipster generation just loves the “freedom” of it, despite being slaves to a social media system that greedily demands us present ourselves as great. Hence the blowing up of the newsfeed.
Let me interject a few very personal thoughts here. Maybe this is part of my being a 6 in the Enneagram, but I love feeling supported. So I love likes on Facebook. More than I should. So maybe it’s part of God’s providence that my closest friends don’t do anything on Facebook and certainly never like anything I put up, because I shouldn’t be feeding that monster via social media. Fair enough. But it kills me how, as an introvert, I may get one or two likes, then an extrovert can post the exact same thing and get 50+ likes. This actually happened to me recently. It nearly ripped me to shreds. And it also put one more nail in the coffin of my insecurities as I realized, “Wow. Facebook is really bad for me”. So I unsubscribed from a ton of friends’ feeds, have stopped posting “cool” nature pics and shit like that. It’s just not good for me. I want so desperately for people to tell me I’m cool, accepted, and I can’t even tell you how pressured I feel to be a peak-bagger because that shit fills my feed on a near daily basis. Be outdoorsy and cool! No, fuck you. I need to believe in myself. I need to see myself the way God sees me. So anyway, I’ve kind of exited the narrative entirely. I take lake hikes alone. I went snowshoeing 11 times this past season and only posted pics from three or four. I just can’t handle that stuff. It’s really hard for me.
So. Travel.
Part of the reason I don’t travel is that it’s an expectation. You see, travel is formulaic in the West. Work hard all year, set aside money, take a huge-ass, expensive vacation away from your shitty job. Right? The problem is that my job’s not that bad, I love exploring neighborhoods around here (if only I had more friends to do this with), and I’m socking loads of money away from semi-financial independence. For example, I don’t know that I would want to blow $2,000+ on a two week trip, that’s just low ROI, and I’d probably only being doing it to try to prove something about myself. What if I hadn’t put anything in my 401k this past year? Well, I could probably have traveled all over the world, but then I wouldn’t be working toward my bigger goal, which is to someday, maybe, spend years at a time in different countries. I have contemplated a short trip to Nepal, or maybe some other country in Asia. But still, the ROI on airfare is low. Sure, I guess you maybe get two weeks’ worth of memories to last a lifetime, but again, why not live in Nepal for a year or two instead? That sounds like adventure.
I have a friend who wanted to go on a missions trip to Thailand. She did get to go, but there was a weather delay that reduced the originally-planned two weeks of the missions trip down to just over one week The price was still the same. And one week can fly by. Sure, you get to say you went to Thailand, but how much did you really get out of it?
Now, to be clear, I’m not attacking short term missions. This girl really had a heart to make a difference on that trip, and one friend has a great story of carrying a crippled little boy around an orphanage and seeing life just fill him again. God moves in short term missions. But I personally don’t see much appeal in them as I’m more naturally drawn toward longer stints. This is personal preference.
What I’m currently doing is forcing myself to save money for travel. Yup. I think doing some travel would be life-changing, and if I can save that $2-3k slowly over time and have it ear-marked for travel, I might be able to push myself and will very likely be glad that I did. This is my compromise.
So what are my final thoughts on all this?
- Don’t travel to fit in. I don’t think I ever truly understood who the “Joneses” were until all my friends started traveling. I thought I was hot stuff for being immune to gadget purchases and whatnot, but it turns out I’m no different when it comes to certain things.
- Flying overseas for two weeks typically has low ROI compared to flying overseas for several months.
- How can you expect to explore the world if you haven’t explored your own backyard?
- There’s nothing wrong with being excited to share pictures of your adventures. Just never forget that at some deep level, we all want to prove something about ourselves, and for many people this is done by putting on an image of adventure. And as per #1, if you travel JUST to prove something about yourself, you are making a very poor financial decision.
- Someone’s probably going to hate me for writing this. Bite me. You’re still my friend.