What Travel Can, and Cannot, Teach Us

There are many hopes to travel but perhaps my greatest hope is that it will always serve as a reminder that we live in a vast universe of the unknown with limited minds, that we should always be humbled by our ignorance, and that travel will always possess the capacity to restore us and nudge us to be less presumptuous and more generous and kind to... See more

I know that travel is valuable because most knowledge can’t be written down. The most crucial info about a society is how it feels to be there—the rhythms of street life, where and when people eat meals, how gender works. You can read a million things about Japan without knowing the bodily experience of walking around in a truly high-trust society,... See more

We tend to grossly overestimate the pleasure brought forth by new experiences and underestimate the power of finding meaning in current ones. While travel is a fantastic way to gain insight into unfamiliar cultures and illuminating ways of life, it is not a cure for discontentment of the mind.