Traveling is a mindset. The spirit of adventure exceeds responsibility to your daily affairs. You feel inspired to strip away possessions. You reduce your life to the bare essentials, and in doing so, you achieve a newfound clarity of your surroundings. Life recalibrates. It’s not the destination. It’s not the journey. It’s your perception of your reality. It’s like being five years old all over again. Foreign words on signs are strange hieroglyphics. You are dependent on the people around you to navigate the world. Traveling reminds you to live a life of wonder and vulnerability.

“Most people are on the world, not in it – having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them – undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.”

– John Muir, The Wilderness World of John Muir

Millennials embrace traveling as an essential part of a well-rounded life. You eat healthy most of the time. You workout when you can, and you travel to as many foreign lands as possible. All part of a balanced Millennial life.

“What dost thou think then of seeing the world? Can’t ye see the world where you stand?”

– Peleg, Moby-Dick

But one could argue, Millennials don’t travel as much as they escape. And they catalog their escape for fashionable contest of who’s escaped more. Passport are more of a trophy case than a tool for international freedom. Let’s make the distinction between escaping and traveling on this premise: when you go to a different location and repeat the same pattern of behavior as your original location? Are you really traveling?

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves.”

– Pico Iyer, Why We Travel