I read this great article in The New Yorker about travel and I kept thinking, yes! I totally agree! I had actually just been thinking about travel. I’m 31, and planning my third trip to Europe. I went to Italy at 22 (so yooooung), Spain at 25, and now be”H Austria at 31. Meanwhile many people my age have been to 10+ countries, and I even know someone who went to 30 by 30. Of course, many many more have not traveled at all, or very little — which I think is perfectly fine! I am so grateful for the experiences I’ve had, but I think there are endless ways to experience the richness and diversity of life, and they mostly do not require a plane ticket.
Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue.
When people tell me about a guy who “loves to travel,” or ask me if I “love to travel,” I am not sure what to make of it. What does “love to travel” mean? And why does it feel like there is only one right answer? Does it mean to actually go to different places, or to experience them, in which case the question really is a stand-in for, “Do you love being alive?” Which I do, but that’s not synonymous with travel. Each of my trips has been — what I would call lovingly — researched and planned, and honestly it would take a lot out of me to do that with any frequency. And travel is very expensive, can we not pretend otherwise? Sure I have a bucket list, sure there are places I want to visit, but if I’m being asked this as a yes or no question…sorry, I don’t love to travel.
