SF

On dromomania

I think most everybody thinks their travels are more interesting than they really are and that they are more well-traveled than they really are. I fall into both of these categories, and here are some musings on why.

Stats

• In 2021: 77 hotels and apartments (62 unique places), across 34 cities in 12 countries on 4 continents, by 39 flights, which is an average of 4.7 nights per place and a flight every 9.4 days.
• In 2022: 129 hotels and apartments (74 unique places), across 33 cities in 15 countries on 5 continents, by 63 flights, which is an average of 2.8 nights per place and a flight every 5.8 days.
• In 2023: 140 hotels and apartments (78 unique places), across 57 cities in 22 countries on 3 continents, by 104 flights, which is an average of 2.6 nights per place and a flight every 3.5 days.
• In 2024 (to date): 111 hotels and apartments (92 unique places), across 70 cities in 34 countries on 7 continents, by 70 flights, which is an average of 1.8 nights per place and a flight every 2.9 days.

In reflection, I always tell people that I no longer travel, but simply do not know what it means to stay still and so default to moving. I also really like hotels and hate the idea of a home. There is a clear progression of my behaviour over the years: I think that 2021 is pretty normal in terms of flying once every 9.4 days for an average person. I spent the first few months staying put, more in the digital nomad style, in Peru and Mexico. May 2021 was when I became homeless and hard launched into perma-travel. Since then, I have averaged 2.7 nights per place. In 2022, I spent 44% of the year in the UK. In 2023, I started to fly a lot more but domestically, spending 54% of the year in the US. In 2024, I have probably reached an all time low of nights per place and forecast that this will go up by EOY.

The Case Against Travel

Note: some of this is about the case for not loafing, which to me is core to travel.

• It is a distraction.
• My friends who hate traveling also tell me that if you live in the right place, everyone worth knowing will come to you anyways. This is mostly true.
• Novelty for novelty’s sake is addictive and makes one insufferable.
• You lose the notion of a vacation, and need to seek this in more deranged ways.
• One develops a bias towards moving, instead of a bias towards action. Moving is the most passive thing that feels active.
• One is left with a very limited amount of ability to do high-functioning tasks, like making consequential decisions.
• There are diminishing returns to awe.
• The book Tourists recounts how tourism took off in England. It concludes with the evolution of tourism from travel “regulating imagination with reality” to “regulating reality with artifice”.
• The default state for people on vacation is not necessarily happiness. Anticipating travel is actually more happiness-inducing than the vacation itself. I think this is escapism, where the idea of what you want to achieve by traveling is more exciting that the actual result.
• What you read or consume is not a passive, unrelated pastime. The first time I went to India, I started reading The Brothers Karamazov. I was so captivated that I found myself in Eastern Europe instead. The second time I went to India, I read Midnight’s Children and wouldn’t leave the country until I’d finished. It limits the scope of what it is productive to think about in order to be immersed in environment, not content.
• Most foreign things are romanticised to be better, they are not actually better. A prime example of this is with food, where the best ingredients are no longer consumed where they are produced. For example, Alba is the white truffle capital, but the best truffles get shipped to NYC/London/Hong Kong. 
• It is very easy to make yourself like somewhere more than the next place. For example, whenever I stay at destination hotels or travel with someone I particularly like, I always have more fond memories of a certain place. I do not advocate for the standardization of travel, but it is easy to make yourself have a better experience in a certain place because of some misguided experience you had.
• If you know too much about what you want to seek, you will only engineer the illusion of it. 
• Reporting back on your travels to anyone frequently will make you do different things and more than you would otherwise. 
• You have to let go of wanting to do anything existentially and focus on shortest term pleasure. Optimization of time and energy is the complete antithesis of loafing.
• You must learn to be idle, which is the opposite of leisure. Idleness means accepting inefficiency. It becomes hard to revert back to civilization.

Developing Thoughts

• “Building roots” is a phrase I hear thrown around a lot, and people want it too much. Once you start traveling, you can begin to get a routine anywhere, but this is an illusion. You will have no roots beyond what you have kept up from before. Maybe this is good though.
• I recently spoke to some travelers who were complaining about how it was so tiring to run from place to place, as if they had some kind of quotas they needed to fulfill in places visited. When doing short trips, making sure you “do” enough is usually top of mind, but in indefinite travel, it is the opposite. I believe that treating the aggregation of hotels you stay at as a single home is the only way to obtain this ultimate state. Making itineraries and doing too much research infringes on clarity of mind. Being informed is good, but only if it makes you more decisive and empowered to do what you feel. I’d broadly characterise this mindset as feeling over wanting.
• People do not ever give you accurate travel tips. Memories are crafted around subjective more than objective experiences. People will tell you what they had a good time doing, which most of the time is about external factors, like people and timing. The only time it is more credible is when the place is famous, because then we see the convergence of enough objectivity to overrule the subjectivity. I think many famous places are not worthy of their fame, but most really great things have fame to some degree. Instead, I think the non-repeatable experiences are the only ones worth sharing because it creates no false sense of hope to replicate a good experience.

Great quotes on travel:

• People settle by acquiring a first-person plural – a place, a community and a way of life that is ‘ours’ - Roger Scruton
• Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel - Fernando Pessoa
• Travel is a vanishing act. An explanation which is its own excuse for the gathering up and the going. - Paul Theroux
• The things seen enter into us. - Joseph Pieper
• Beauty is meaningless until it is shared. - George Orwell (thanks to the Hacker News commenter for this addition)