This is the fantasy: you quit your day job, whatever that is. You chuck in that reliable nine-to-five, you pack up your belongings, you say goodbye to your family and friends, you get on a plane, and you go. You travel.
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And you never stop.
This is the dream. It's travelling the world in perpetuity, wandering the globe without stopping, spending your life flitting from place to place, seeing the sights, meeting the people, drinking in the world around you. The logic goes that if you love to travel, then you'll love to travel all of the time. Forever.
This is the fantasy that some people peddle. There's a breed of traveller, usually overly smiley bloggers in my experience, who use this as their selling point: that they're constantly travelling the world, and they're being paid for it.
They place themselves under enticing headlines like, "How I sold everything I own to travel the world", and encourage others to live the dream with them. Or at least live vicariously through them.
They don't have a house any more. They don't have a normal job. They don't have any of the constraints of Western life. They just wander. Sounds amazing, right?
Well, not really.
This is a completely personal preference, but to me a life of constant travel sounds horrible. Just because you love doing something doesn't mean you're going to love doing it all the time.
I've got about four months in me. Five, tops. That is the limit to my nomadic global wandering. That's the most time I want to spend living out of a backpack or suitcase, sleeping on floors and couches and bunks and hotel beds. That's how much time I've got before I've had enough. This is what the bloggers and the dedicated wanderers will never tell you: a life of constant travel isn't that much fun. It might sound freeing to give up all of your possessions and your house in favour of traipsing around the globe, but the reality doesn't come close to matching up with the dream.
It's a lonely existence, for starters. You'll often be doing this stuff by yourself, because it's rare to find someone else who's willing to give everything up and go with you. So you'll be doing this exploration solo – taking trains by yourself, riding buses by yourself, looking at monuments by yourself, eating at restaurants by yourself, drinking in bars by yourself.
You will meet people along the way. You'll end up with thousands of Facebook friends. But these will be fleeting relationships, gone as soon as they've begun. And then you're on your own again.
Travel is a constant battle, and it's one that will be exciting at first. All of those haggles with taxi drivers, those hit-and-miss hotels, those struggles to book tickets, that wrangling with a foreign language – that will be invigorating to begin with. But it wears you down.
Just as living out of a suitcase wears you down. Just as never having a space to truly call your own wears you down. Just as the constant search for a washing machine, or the constant craving for home-cooked food wears you down.
I have about four or five months before all of this stuff starts to matter. For four or five months I'm completely happy to wander on my own, to battle with language and locals, to wear stinky clothes, to take chances on restaurants and make fleeting friendships in hostel dorms. After that, I'm done.
This is not the dream existence. It's hard work. Travel is amazing, but it's something that should be done in manageable chunks. You need a base. You need a tiny amount of stability. You need time to recharge and remind yourself that all of these things you're doing are mind-boggling, and a privilege, and that they need to be appreciated in comparison to something else.
If there's a dream to be lived, it would come closer to what a friend of mine calls "travelling without moving". He likes to do his travel by moving to another country and living there for a while. You get the excitement of being in a foreign land, but with the comforts of a bedroom and a washing machine and a place to call home.
That, to me, sounds a lot more enjoyable than living the bloggers' dream, travelling to a new place every week, giving up everything you know. Just because you love to travel, doesn't mean you'll love to travel all of the time.
So don't envy those people spruiking their amazing lifestyle. Don't covet a life of being paid just enough to get by while constantly travelling the world.
Those people don't have everything. Most don't even have a washing machine.
