Why do we consider travelling as “living” when it’s the opposite?

Examining my relationship with home for 2025.

I was stressed in four different countries last year. Five if you include England. I travelled halfway across the world to take part in a boxing camp while juggling a masters course and a job without any days off; I held up a plane on the runway in Vietnam while the airline staff had to search for my suitcase because I had left a power bank in there; I showed up in New York with a list of travel recommendations that could only be achieved with several free months, rather than seven free days. Really, I only have myself to blame.

I don’t say this to brag or to moan about visiting other places. In fact, I only bring it up because I’ve been doing the thing we all do in January and reflecting on the year just gone. Last year I travelled more than I ever have done in my life, which should have been my high. I had many moments that were magic and special and felt like I needed to pinch myself; I also had moments where I was miserable and questioning if it was all really worth it. When I reflected on my year, I realised that my happiest period of 2024 by far actually happened somewhere familiar, at home.

It’s a little-discussed fact that travel is not always what we dream it to be. It can be stressful, scary, underwhelming, overwhelming, anxiety-inducing, and dare I say it, sometimes even boring. Talking about the lows of travel feels like a sin because it is such a privilege (and privilege is the ultimate guilt trip of all). Well forgive me travel father (Bourdain?!), but I want to address the collective belief that travel = happiness, the best time of our lives, and to be able to travel frequently is the measure of a good or meaningful life.

If you’re someone who has a healthy attitude towards travel, you likely already know these beliefs are nonsense. Well done. You probably have a better bank balance than mine (or you search for happiness in other vices such as shopping or drinking). But for those of us - and I believe there are many of us - who are convinced that happiness is found elsewhere, the revelation can come as a nasty surprise.

Just look at the response to the death of Bourdain. If there is anyone who has yet to discover Anthony Bourdain, he’s the guy who had everyone’s dream job. A celebrity writer and chef paid to travel the world and eat good food with interesting people for his own TV show. He got to enjoy beer and bun cha in a casual Hanoi eatery with President Obama. He ate with rockstars, writers, chefs, political figures, and cultural leaders in pretty much every place you can think of. He got to recreate his favourite movies and books from the places he visited; a Tokyo episode recreates a scene from Lost in Translation, a black and white Rome episode paid homage to Italian cinema, and in Hong Kong, he got to reference the legendary director, Wong Kar-wai, the creator of his favourite film In the Mood for Love. And he was genuinely cool in a way that seems rare these days. In 2018, during filming, he hung himself in a hotel. It was, and is, shocking and upsetting for many reasons. But a lot of the commentary boiled down to this: how could someone who travels the world for a living, be so unhappy?

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Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about home and how it plays into our relationship with travel. If our desire to be away can also be positioned as a desire to escape home, what is it that we’re all trying to escape? Travel academic, Jost Krippendorf believed it to be our overworked, industrial societies. Capitalism, of course, plays a huge role in mass tourism and conversations around unsustainable travel. Think cheap airlines, international hotel chains, cultural sites turning into tourist attractions, and social media all fueling the consumerist attitude we’ve attached to going away.

But something that’s often left out of the conversation, are the conditions capitalism has created in our home lives. In a society that has prioritised profit over all else, many of us have lost the basic things that are essential to human wellbeing - affordable housing, meaningful leisure time, quality healthcare and education, community and social networks, and access to clean nature and environments. According to his theory, our hometowns have solely become places to work, which is why we believe we can only find pleasure, excitement, peace, inspiration, or recuperation by going away. I know people who use all of their PTO to travel abroad; the idea of booking time off to spend a week at home would be absurd to them. According to Krippendorf, if the right conditions were available, then we could rest and relax at home. “But this possibility is ignored because people have abandoned the fight for more habitable towns and more humane [working] conditions.” Rather than seeking to improve our lives and our own societies (think grassroots movements for affordable housing, four-day work weeks, livable wages, collective action to improve public spaces, volunteering in our local neighbourhoods, or demanding better healthcare), we seek to escape what we’re unhappy with elsewhere.

When I travelled to The Gambia, I stayed with a family in their compound. It was a collection of several separate apartments, all connected together. The parents had one house, the adjoining apartment next door belonged to the daughter and her husband, around the corner was her sister's house where she lived with her husband and children, and so on. The school was within walking distance. They had good relationships with their neighbours in the surrounding compounds who they could rely on if they needed anything. There was a sense of community I had never experienced as an adult. The closest I’ve come to it was at university where my friends all lived within a few minute's walking distance. I’m convinced the loss of that is partly why so many graduates suffer from post-university depression.

I bring this up because it’s the best example of what I feel we’re missing in the UK. Even if we can afford a high standard of living, hustle culture, individualism and technology have made us more isolated, divided and lonely than ever. (Side note: writer Johann Hari wrote an amazing book exploring whether this lack of connection is actually the cause of depression as opposed to low serotonin levels as we’re so often told. Highly recommend.) I find this interesting because I’m convinced that what we’re really looking for when we travel is some form of connection, whether that be connecting with another culture, nature, a partner or friends, or reconnecting with ourselves. If all of our needs were met in our home cities, would our relationship with travel change? Would it switch our perspective so that instead of idolising frequent travellers, we would actually wonder, how could someone who is constantly on the move, without a stable home foundation and consistent community, ever truly be happy?

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Of course, these are just hypothetical musings and I know that there are many reasons for wanting to travel. In fact, I think a lot of us in the U.K. travel simply for the sun. But I do think that collectively, there’s an association between travel equalling success. We see digital nomads and people who are somehow constantly away and our lives can seem small in comparison. We hear that ‘experiences over things’ is the key to a meaningful life and see cliche travel quotes making bold claims such as ‘to travel is to live’ and think that we’re missing out or not truly fulfilling our life potential if we don’t see the world’s (mostly overhyped) iconic sites.

I hate this assumption because it belittles life at home and people who can’t, or don’t want to, travel. It adds to the notion that the best parts of life are found somewhere else and puts frequent travellers on a pedestal. Recently, I’ve been feeling more inspired by people who try and make their hometowns a better place, rather than jetsetters. People like fashion designer Dapper Dan, born and raised in Harlem. When he opened his first shop, he used the space not just to sell clothes but to nurture the community by allowing children to play there, sharing spiritual lessons, and creating a space for people to connect and be themselves. People like my friend who volunteers at a women’s shelter where she lives, a neighbour who arranges community events and puts chocolates out for the postman, and women in my life who have helped to raise and support their own and eachothers families. Why do we consider travelling as “living” when it’s the opposite? It’s not real life, it’s a fantasy. When I think about what really makes a meaningful life, it’s contributing to society in some way, whether that’s building a family, growing a community, creating art or a business, or caring for other people and the environment.

I realised that I’ve been placing so much value on travelling because in my head, my ‘real life’ happens when I’m away. That’s when I wear the outfits I want to wear, when I make the effort to go out of my way to visit exhibitions and try new foods and explore new neighbourhoods. It’s when I feel most creative and consistently write and take photos. Then throughout the rest of the year when I’m at home, I spend all my time researching and planning my next trip. I miss out on social events and choose not to invest in my house, my development and my wardrobe so that I can save up money to go away again. I’m not investing enough into my actual life, so of course that means that I assume happiness must be elsewhere. As someone who is obsessed with travel, I’ve neglected building a home because the focus has always been on escaping it. There’s a pressure for every trip to be the best week of my life because I’ve put so much of my life into it - my savings, my time spent researching and planning, my creative output. That pressure is probably the reason I was stressed throughout so many of my travels last year.

As I said at the beginning, despite travelling more than I ever have before, my happiest period of 2024 took place at home. During that time, I managed to achieve the impossible: a healthy work-life balance that involved consistently exercising, swimming in the sea, doing sunrise walks, eating unprocessed foods, seeing friends, and sticking to morning meditations and positive journaling. The presence and positivity I felt throughout that time was immense. My anxiety levels went down. Simple morning walks filled me with intense gratitude and appreciation. I remember walking down my regular streets and looking at them as though I were watching a movie. I hadn’t gone anywhere different, yet I had achieved the feeling that we often associate with being in a new place. It provided one of those lessons we can only get with age and experience - that happiness isn’t really the things that look big and glamorous. It’s the small things that sound boring such as consistency, stability, finances, and relationships.

For 2025 I’ll be measuring the quality of my life not by how many countries I visit and holidays I can take, but by my mental and physical health, the quality of my relationships, the art I create, the participation in my community, time spent in nature, the books I’ve read, and the habits I develop to reach my personal goals. (And how consistent I am with this newsletter. This is my first post - if you enjoyed, please subscribe, share and say hello!)

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