Just came back from a 2-week vacation in Italy and wanted to take a break from grinding out book summaries. So I thought it’d be fun to have a more personal, less robotic post about why you should travel (and why I love traveling).

Without further ado, here’s 3 reasons why you absolutely must travel.

Experiences > Things

You buy a Gucci bag to flex. And you get the hedonistic high for a little while. After some time though, you need a new bag. This is the fatal flaw with the materialistic hamster wheel: your pleasure from new & expensive items you buy decays exponentially, rapidly. Thus, you’re buying an investment that not only rapidly depreciates in monetary value, but nostalgic value.

In other words, most things just aren’t worth splurging money on.

Traveling, on the other hand is completely different.

With travel, the memories last with you for a lifetime. I remember I surprised my partner on their business trip a few years ago in Turkey. And I remember it like it was yesterday. And I’ll likely remember it forever.

I remember all the things we did that day. And I remember all the little details, like how I forgot my Nalgene bottle at the check-in counter at the gate and I was already on board. And how I had to ask the stewardess if I can go back out to grab my water bottle.

I remember visiting the Hagia Sophia, to getting a stomach ache after eating heavy chocolate + a delicious (very) spicy fish wrap.

These memories last forever, and the nostalgia for these memories intensify over time.

In other words, generating memories from awesome experiences is a much better way to spend money than just buying things.

Traveling gives you an arsenal of endless, happy memories.

Life’s About Adventure

Why just “go through” life, when you can enjoy it thoroughly?

There’s nothing I can think of to spark my adrenaline and dopamine than a good adventure.

Going to a new and foreign place, where they might not speak your language is a huge adventure that you won’t get going through everyday life.

Absorbing different country’s culture, history, and experiencing new foods/cuisines/fruits/vegetables that you’ve never tasted before: that’s adventure.

Understanding just how different people in other countries are, yet how much they’re exactly the same as you gives you a much better appreciation and understanding of other people’s points of view. In other words: traveling gives you the gift of genuine empathy that’s much easier to internalize with experience than it is to conjure out of thin air.

At the end of the day: you should travel because it’s fun.

And if there’s no fun in your life, you’re merely existing, not living.

Why Travel Helps Motivate Me To Quit My 9-5 Wage Slavery Job

The biggest upside I see in travel for me is counterintuitive. See, traveling is very expensive unless you use credit card points, but with that expense is motivation for me to earn more money and freedom.

You see, I’ve just come back from a 2-week vacation in Italy. First time to Europe. And it’s my first time to see and enjoy enormous buildings and artifacts built by people centuries ago. And it’s my first time seeing what “service” actually is: waiters actually serve you and will help you translate the menu if you’re stuck. Waiters that actually check their silverware and will remove it for you, without asking, if they find a minor imperfection – and this type of elite services exists even in the most humble restaurants in Italy. Compare that to “service” in the USA, where they miss taking an order and expect you to tip 18%. In Italy, you just pay a fixed cost for service of about 1-4 Euros per person.

Being able to enjoy a new country and adventures, and being able to take a step back and completely forget about work is enlightening.

When I came back to work, I felt a huge sense of calm and clarity I’ve never felt before, and that clarity says that I absolutely must stop working ASAP.

The ability to go anywhere and truly be present and enjoy life and the immense adventures it has to offer is how life is meant to be lived.

The wage slavery of having to “go back to work” after you’ve run out of vacation day is a perverse arrangement. Even though it’s commonplace, it’s not normal.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m an overachiever and I would hate to just sit around and vacation indefinitely. But I need a life where I can have the option to just sit and do nothing for 2 months, if I’d like.

I currently have no such option.

This trip has given me the intense motivation of double down on my side hustles and make a shit ton more money in the long run. Ergo, my hope is that the expense of travel pays for itself via motivating me towards actions that’ll make more than enough money to cover the trip.

To end, I’ll leave you with a case study. There’s this one guy I met at a wine tasting – he has a consulting business and runs a podcast that’s been going on for 8 years. He wears a Panerai and seems to be in complete control of his life, and his work schedule. He’s been in Italy for 2 months and flew his mom out to join him, because he can (and also because his fiancé was busy with other stuff).

That’s the type of life I want: absolute freedom.

Maybe except the Panerai, I have more of a thing for AP.