Travel More
It can make you smarter, kinder, and ...
I am always surprised when a young1 Portuguese person tells me they have been to Paris, and Munich, and Warsaw, and, and, and….These are not rich people. These are folks often earning less than €1000/month. Why does it seem to me that Americans, who have far more disposable income, travel less?
Relative Size
Okay, I know one has to consider size. I realize you can fit Europe into the continental United States. And I don’t mean to minimize the beauty and diversity of the US. For a
number of years we owned a motorhome (her name was Olga).2 We were fortunate to travel to nearly every state in Olga. We traveled backroads in Mississippi, visited a palace “made” of corn in South Dakota, and spent more hours than I wish to recall on I-10. However, we were always in an English-speaking country under a fairly uniform educational system and government.
Outbound Trips
As the chart above shows, Americans rank second in trips taken, but the majority of that travel is domestic.
Of course, it is quicker to jump across a state line than across an ocean. Driving to Spain today reminds me of driving to New Jersey as a teenager.
Perhaps it reflects the lack of work-life balance many Americans experience. When I had earned 6 weeks of vacation I recall co-workers and managers suggesting I couldn't take 4 of those weeks consecutively.
I know I was raised to believe in American exceptionalism…perhaps some believe there is nothing “better” to see “over there”.
Regardless, the Pew Research Center recently studied this issue. They found that 26% of the Americans surveyed had visited 5 or more countries. Compare this to the adventurous Swedes with 88% having visited 5 or more countries. (Note: 23% of the Americans never traveled internationally.) Of course, travel options increase with age and income; which makes the young, Portuguese even more remarkable. But most interesting to me was this conclusion:
Americans who have traveled internationally are more interested in and knowledgeable about foreign affairs, feel closer to others around the world, and favor a more active foreign policy, according to the survey of 3,576 U.S. adults conducted in spring 2023. - PewResearch.org (emphasis added)
A Curious Mind
I have written before about traveling with an open, curious mind and last week I wrote about the value of experiences vs things. I also started writing this post but came back to re-write it after reading a post by Nolan Yuma, the author of Born Without Borders. If you can find the time I recommend you read his post Does Everyone Need to Travel? Below are a few of the things I learned by reading his well-researched piece:
“According to Biederman and Vessel, only hunger urges, harm avoidance, and the need to find a mate distract us from information-craving. We love to learn…
when taking a new track to travel out of curiosity, our brain simultaneously remembers the details of that route better than if we had taken it out of necessity or by command.”
“Another experiment by Madden and Galinsky shows that people who had spent time living outside their own countries were less fixed in their thinking and more able to accept and recombine novel ideas, as evidenced by the fact that they were more likely to solve the Duncker candle problem3”
“…many companies like Google, Goldman Sachs, Kraft, and Colgate were founded, in part, by immigrants. In fact, people born outside the US are more than twice as likely as Americans to start a business there.”
So it would seem that travel can feed your craving for knowledge, enhance your ability to solve problems, and possibly make you rich. Okay, perhaps I shouldn’t be so flippant. But in an increasingly chaotic world, (Russia has not yet been beaten back, children in the US are shot when they ring the wrong doorbell, babies are taken as hostages, and hospitals are bombed) we must find a way to co-exist. Nolan also quotes Mark Twain:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness… Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” — Mark Twain
Perhaps we should require everyone to be a foreign exchange student? If it were only that easy…
É de esperar, até à próxima semana, tchau
Nanc
Please be advised: I received a phishing email from a subscriber this week. After sending an email asking if I was available to respond to an email, I got the “can you help me buy an Apple gift card for a sick friend” request. I immediately deleted the email address from the subscriber list and contacted Substack support. I will watch my subscriber sign-up activity, though so far this seems like a random event…but I thought you should know. BTW: I don’t need an Apple gift card but a 1 month all-expense paid trip to Australia and New Zealand would be lovely.
Final Note: Over the next year we intend to increase our travel budget4 and endeavour to take a trip every month. Denise is heading back to the US for a wedding in January…but other than that, that’s the plan. So expect me to include at least one post a month on our travels, and of course how it has changed the way we think.
Remember, I am about to turn 70…so I am referring to anyone under 40.
Olga stood for Old Ladies Get Around.
The subject is given only a box of thumbtacks and a candle and told to fix the candle to a wall. The solution is to use the box as a shelf and affix it to the wall with the thumbtacks. Then place the candle on the shelf.
When we published our budget one reader commented that they thought our travel budget was extravagant. A friend, commented to me privately that it was far too low. We agree…it was too low and plan to start making up for it this year.
Hi Nancy,
Thanks for another post that made me think. (Sometimes hard to do on Monday mornings!) It's good to see some research that confirms what I had believed all along - that traveling and living internationally is good for you. Just the prescription we need to motivate us to finish planning our next trip.
Looking forward to your monthly reports.
Mike
I chuckled reading your post. I don't think I've ever met anyone else who has seen the corn palace. Three more states and I will have visited them all.
My parents were blue collar workers so my mother worked and took all the overtime she could get in order to pay for us to travel by car (in the 60's and 70's) all over our great nation, even dipping into Canada and Mexico. She ventured overseas to see my sister in Germany twice, flying alone and her only times on an airplane. She instilled in me my desire to travel, to read, to be aware of cultures other than our own and to always embrace experience over items. She grew up dirt poor and really did walk across a mountain to school with cardboard in her hand me down shoes, took lard laden biscuits for her lunch in a tin pail. Married off at barely 16 to a man she had seen only 2 times because she was one less mouth to feed my mother read voraciously and determined to give us a better life. Travel was of upmost importance to her and she would spend every year reading about our next 2 week vacations each summer. She made sure we saw the prairie dogs, The alamo, Mt Rushmore, Adobe huts, Black Hills and yes, the Corn Palace.
She would be so pleased that 2 of her 4 girls have seen a great deal of the world.
Books held the secrets of the world and we took advantage of our local library each and every week.