I lived for seven months in Singapore. A year in Perth. A month in Kuala Lumpur. I've visited cities large and small thanks to my work. For climbing, I've visited cobblestone villages in Italy. Remote towns of Wyoming, population 251. Jagged cliffs near concrete manufacturing plants in Eastern Mexico.
In the early 2000s, during the height of millennial travel culture, I started traveling the world. My journey was sparked by the University of California's Education Abroad Program which enabled me to study in Singapore for a semester. There, I met other students who were equally bitten by the travel bug.
We came of age alongside globalization, student airfares, and websites like couchsurfing.com. We were told by our peers and our environment to value experiences, not material possessions.
So, like good 18-24-year-olds, our group of forty University of California undergrads busied ourselves with ticking off every imaginable experience on our lists. Eating scorpions? Check! Weekend at an Indonesian resort island? Check! Drinking Singapore Slings at the Raffles Hotel? Check!
We did stuff. Then we did more stuff. Our lists of experiences grew longer each week. But did we become happier?
I don't think so.
It turns out that consuming experiences is really no different from consuming material goods. It's hard to get enough. In hindsight, the millennial ethos that valued doing more than having still failed in terms of fulfillment.
As a semi-retired rock climber, I still see the majority of my friends out there chasing experiences. And I get it. Those trips can be exciting and healing, exactly the thing you need to soothe your tired soul.
But the idea of gaining perspectives, rather than merely accumulating experiences, keeps coming back to me. We can chase experiences mindlessly. We can go to a million new places and tick off a lifetime's worth of climbs.
But will it make us any happier? Once we complete all the items on our bucket list, will we really go in peace?
Nearly twenty years after that first solo international flight, I look back on my time wandering and can clearly pick out the experiences that meant something and the ones that were simply novel. And the only ones that mean anything decades later are the ones that permanently changed how I saw the world.
Some of my groupmates from the Education Abroad Program never stopped traveling. Their bucket lists only grew longer as the decades went by, yet their hunger for new experiences can never be satiated.
Others reminisce about their travels like a wild night's hangover – a fleeting exclamation of "That was crazy!" before returning to their daily routines.
Well, I agree, but allow me to challenge a bit.
Comparing my home country Finland to the anglosphere, the major difference is the time when industrialisation took place. The separation was maybe about 200 years or so. What did this do - it caused the thinking styles and use of vocabulary to diverge. In the anglosphere, more maybes and perhapses came to be used compared to Finland, where everything is still a bit black and white.
I happen to prefer nuance. When I travel to the anglosphere, I become more exposed to nuance. It makes my body relax and produce a sigh of relief. A good reason to travel.
Can I get same from commenting your substack - thankfully yes to some extent. But travel puts more energy into it.
Why do I still live here in Finland? The big thing here is connection to nature. You don’t really feel it in the city, but it definitely is present in the country. I think it’s that countryside straightforwardness which made the place such a good opponent against Russia back in the day. That’s why I’m here.
The impulse to collect key chains, snow globes, and stamps in a passport has always been there. Now it’s replaced by instagram photo-proof-of-experience. I’m old enough to remember being one of a dozen people at places that now have 1,000 per hour. My recurring perspective is how much mystery and opportunities for exploration we’ve lost