Should one travel as much as possible? Is it good for the soul?
Tourist vacations (what the vast majority of people mean when they say "travel") are fine but I think they're mostly for women. It's something your wife starts trying to do when your bank account hits 5 digits.
Travel as in "living abroad for a while" is cool.
Slow travel is great. Something about the speed of air travel disorients the soul, I truly believe.
Travelling is great but the way lots of people do it really misses the point in my opinion. It ends up couched in a sort of mastubatory self absorption, where the entire purpose of the trip, the forriners, the tourist attractions, is as a sort of validation of the self. Travel should be to some extent a destructive act, you should feel diminished and alienated...
Only if you're a bohemian on a vagrant holiday
my most vivid memories are of my travels. wish I didn't have motion sickness or fear of planes lol
>The plane is landing. To fly is the opposite of
traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not
being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then
you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and
the when in which you vanished. Meanwhile, what do you do? How do you
occupy this absence of yourself from the world and of the world from you?
You read; you do not raise your eyes from the book between one airport and
the other, because beyond the page there is the void, the anonymity of
stopovers, of the metallic uterus that contains you and nourishes you, of the
passing crowd always different and always the same. You might as well
stick with this other abstraction of travel, accomplished by the anonymous
uniformity of typographical characters: here, too, it is the evocative power
of the names that persuades you that you are flying over something and not
nothingness. You realize that it takes considerable heedlessness to entrust
yourself to unsure instruments, handled with approximation; or perhaps this
demonstrates an invincible tendency to passivity, to regression, to infantile
dependence. (But are you reflecting on the air journey or on reading?
You should travel. Not as much as possible though. Travel is good for the soul, until you do it too much, then it isn't.
I went on a road trip recently that helped me.
>be in “America is doomed, we have fallen” mood
>go on trip across a few states
>realize Americans are good, America is robust, and we will endure and thrive
There are only three reasons to travel: Business, food, and sex. All others proposed reasons can be attained from reading a book. If you think traveling could change you in ways reading can't, you are a consumerist goycattle slave.
It would've been very cool to travel through Europe in the 1500s and experience all the wide varieties of culture each country and region had to offer.
since making this thread, Ive been doing some mere long term traveling and gathering some thoughts on the subject. two of my take aways are thus: 1) traveling forces you to realize the difference and similarity in all things human, in ways both depressing and life affirming, and 2) being a tourist schmuck is annoying and cloying, and Ive never wanted more to simultaneously be either a productive member of society more or a wandering drop out.