Is travel good for us?

You may, like me, enjoy travel whenever you get the chance – whether it’s across the sea, across the continent, or just a change in scenery a few hours away. Or you may be a committed homebody who’s content to learn about the world from the comfort of your armchair (sometimes that’s also me).

We tend to talk about travel as a hobby, or a particular interest. Just as some people like pickleball or baking sourdough bread with homemade starter, others like travel. But is travel as innocuous as these other things, or is there a darker side we should be aware of?

Research has certainly found a trove of positive things to say about travel: the novelty of new places and experiences improves our brain circuitry, for one. In one study, 46 Dutch workers who took a 2-3 week vacation came home more creative and flexible at solving problems. ¹Travel helps us learn new skills, new ways of thinking, and greater confidence (I still remember my sister and I taking the chunnel to London in our teens. We managed to hail a cab afterward and somehow end up at the right destination).

Still, travel has its detractors – especially in our current age of climate anxiety and selfie sticks. The question “Is travel good for us” is too simple. Instead, we should ask, “In what way is travel good for us?”

Antidote to Prejudice, or Fool’s Paradise?

Two of the most famous American writers of the 19th century, Twain and Emerson, took different stances on travel. Somehow, both of their sentiments have also become well-known catchphrases.

“Travel is a fool’s paradise,” Emerson lamented:

“Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.” ²

On the other hand, in his signature bold and blustery style, Twain declared that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness…Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” ³

The question here is not “Which is right,” but, “Are these two statements talking about the same thing?” Our biases and life experiences tend to jump in and do the thinking for us: we identify with either Emerson or Twain (or both – or neither) because of what we’ve experienced.

The “Tourism vs. Travel” Debate

Discussions over the benefits and pitfalls of travel almost always involve the word “tourism” at some point. “Tourism” has become a dirty word, connoting a person in tennis shoes and a fanny pack who records everything they see and do behind a camera lens. A gawker and a spectator.

According to philosophy professor Agnes Callard, tourists aren’t interested in opening their minds or having any new kind of experience beyond the superficial:

“The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.” ⁴

So much for travel being “fatal to prejudice.”

Are all who travel tourists, though?  Many like to make the distinction between tourists and “travelers” – those who come to a new place not because they’re checking off a bucket list, but because they have some “deeper” reason to be there, like a business contract or an exchange program (as if you can’t be just as shallow and obnoxious doing these things).

I find the lines between “tourist” and “traveler” can become easily blurred. Whether you are in Montreal, Phnom Penh, or Bora Bora for one day or one year, your attitude and mentality are what determine how much you get out of it.

When Emerson complains about his “giant” lurking and following him to Naples and the Vatican, the problem is not travel per se but having some preconceived, narrow idea of what our travel experience will be like: “I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated,” he says. Anyone who has been to the Grand Canyon on a dark and cloudy day after having first seen it in sunny, glossy photos in National Geographic knows what I’m talking about.

G.K. Chesterton perhaps has the best explanation: “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” 

Leave Your Assumptions At Home

Pico Iyer, the eminent travel essayist, points out a dichotomy that many people fall into when they travel: either feeling uncomfortable with how different things are from home, or feeling upset that it’s not different in the way they’d hoped.

The problem with the former is not being able to try, taste, look at, or listen to things we’re not used to. The problem with the latter is having a romantic, exoticized notion of people in other parts of the world, when in fact they’re a lot more like us than we think.

The solution to both of these problems is the same, Iyer says:

“If a Mongolian restaurant seems exotic to us in Evanston, Ill., it only follows that a McDonald’s would seem equally exotic in Ulan Bataar — or, at least, equally far from everything expected. Though it’s fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveler,” perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don’t: Among those who don’t, a tourist is just someone who complains, “Nothing here is the way it is at home,” while a traveler is one who grumbles, ‘Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo — or Cuzco or Kathmandu.’ It’s all very much the same.”  ⁵

One of the biggest lessons I learned when I lived abroad for four and a half years was, “anywhere can be boring.” I actually found it strangely comforting. In downtown Seoul, or in the countryside of Cambodia, people lived out routines and ate the same type of food day after day. It was different from my life in Arizona, but it was still mundane. 

When we have fixed, romantic expectations of a place we’re going to, we end up like the character Adela Quested from A Passage of India who’s always going on about wanting to see “the real India,” when in fact no such thing exists: the inside of a MacDonald’s in Mumbai is every bit as “real” as the Taj Mahal. 

On the other hand, when we refuse to wander off a well-beaten path and maybe try kimchi or bugs on a stick, or stay in the home of a local, we also close ourselves off from the benefits of travel. Travel can turn us into the worst version of ourselves if we’re not humble or curious while doing it.

Leave your assumptions at home when you travel.

Are You Willing to Let Travel Make You a Better Person?

I have a friend who has visited over 100 countries, and I’m sure he’ll have been to many more by the time you read this.

He shared this analogy with me:

“I think of travel as being more like education than exercise. Exercise benefits pretty much everyone, even when they force themselves to do it and hate it. But education only benefits you if you want to learn in the first place – in fact, education (going to school or classes) can create resentment and hostility in people who aren’t interested in it to begin with.”

To benefit from travel, we first need the right attitude. When we do, the potential for growth and positive change is all but limitless. But if you have the wrong attitude? At best it’s a sunk cost of time and money with a few dust-collecting souvenirs, and at worst it feeds your ego and reinforces your worst qualities – not to mention the bad example you set for the unfortunate locals who are forced to interact with you.

And if travel is not an option for you any time soon?

Note that in his famous quote, Twain says that “broad wholesome charitable views” can’t be fostered by “vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime” – as opposed to “staying” in one little corner. Some of the greatest and least vegetative souls to ever live stayed within a few hundred (or less) mile radius of their home their entire lives.

We can be curious, charitable, better people both at home and abroad if we make up our minds to be, and commit to staying that way.

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Read Next: Should You Live a “Psychologically Rich Life?” →

1. de Bloom, J., Ritter, S., Kühnel, J., Reinders, J., & Geurts, S. (2014). Vacation from work: A ‘ticket to creativity’? The effects of recreational travel on cognitive flexibility and originality. Tourism Management, 44, 164-171.
2. From his essay, Self-Reliance.
3. From his travel book, The Innocents Abroad.
4. Callard, Agnes. “The Case Against Travel.” The New Yorker, 24 June 2023
5. Iyer, P. (2000, March 18). Why we travel. Pico Iyer Journeys.