When I tell friends I plan to take a sabbatical later this year, their first question to me is almost always this one. (If it’s not their first one, then it’s definitely their second.)

And I get the feeling that my answer is a bit weird. What I want to do is kind of the opposite–I want to stay home, hunker down, and create. I jokingly liken it to grinding skill points in a video game. I have schemes I want to execute on. I want to write, mainly. Write and write and get my reps in. Git gud. See what patterns emerge, and then go from there.

I want to eventually publish 100 blog posts (you’re reading #18). I want to write some fanfic. I have a few more YouTube video ideas. I want to try tech career coaching, and some other solopreneur-type stuff. I want to play more music. I want to cook a ton of recipes I’ve saved from YouTube and Instagram.

I want to live 6 months at a time, because who knows where I’ll be 6 months from now. Maybe one thing takes off and I double-down on it, or maybe nothing does (yet). Maybe I decide to keep working at my personal projects and not return to work for another 6 months.

As for travel? Travel is its own entire activity. It’s planning, and transiting, and doing. Sometimes there’s Rest but oftentimes there isn’t. It’s taking a break and doing something different for a while, before going back to Doing the Thing. But what if I just want to Do the Thing, now? So I’ll be taking a 2-week trip to Tokyo from plane tickets I bought months ago, and then I’ll be on 👏 the 👏 grind 👏. (My true break from work will be being able to spend all of my time and energy on the creative projects I’ve been wanting to do for a while!)

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And this got me thinking: why the fixation with travel? Why do we love to travel, and love to see our friends go traveling?

We spend our lives establishing ourselves, getting settled, acquiring things, setting up our routines. And then we choose to uproot ourselves, just a bit, every now and then, and get away from our routines and our things and go somewhere where we don’t have any of that. But with a guaranteed way back.

Is it controlled escapism? A comfortable way to get uncomfortable, to experience novelty, for a limited time? Is it living out fantasies of a different life, in a place where no one knows you? Or to shake us out of being stuck on the treadmills of our lives? To come up for air before diving back down into the depths, the cold?

Is it because acquiring new experiences provides longer lasting joy than acquiring material possessions, or is it just more fashionable or high status in today’s day and age? (Might “acquiring new experiences” be masquerading as a modern-day instance of materialism, depending on the person?)

Is it just plain fun?

Do we travel to visit faraway friends, or do we visit faraway friends to travel? (Probably both.)

Is it the Travel Industrial Complex? (It’s definitely entrenched in all of this, yes.)

Just something I’ve been thinking about :)