Musings of a Reformed Road Warrior

Hong Kong.  Tel Aviv.  Seoul.  I would travel and travel, at one point I estimated I spent 1000 nights in hotel rooms.  Today I hardly want to leave the house, and I largely don’t. What happened?

Besides burn-out I think it takes someone unique to be a road warrior, and it’s something I lost.  Extreme travel I think takes someone searching, someone seeking. 

The movie 2009 “Up in the Air” I thought captured it perfectly. Every time I watch that movie I point at the screen and yell “that was me!”.  The George Clooney character in that movie is lost, doesn’t have a home life.  I had a wife and kid during my travel days, but my then-wife exclaimed that I wanted to be on the road to be away from her, which had an element of truth.

 

But the desire to be on be road was ultimately about searching, yearning, trying to find the Thing Out There when you can’t find in yourself.  

 

I’d try to find it in all the lonely haunts I went alone: back allies in Kyoto, quaint plazas in Barcelona, 300 year old pubs in Brussels.  When I found an interesting place alone, I'd think I’d be back one day with the One, the Ultimate Gratifier.  And the thought of The One, in The Place Again, One Day, and it would be enough to fill the empty hours of nothingness I’d feel for the days and hours I traveled alone in the far airports, the isolated hotel rooms.  The fantasy of Gatsby’s orgiastic future with Daisy would sustain me through the glum of the alone now.

 

But the yearning, the seeking, it was all an illusion, maybe a self-pacifying coping mechanism for the hours of boredom, days of loneliness.  There was no internet back then, CDs and paperbacks the only connection during weeks-long overseas trips. So it was on the Self that all that alone time focused on.

 

I eventually figured it out, captured myself.  I found I didn’t need to go out and try to find It outside of me.  By the mid 2010s I’d gotten promoted out of road warrior status, and by Covid I found myself content to be at home and focus inward on the new home life I’d established.

 

Today I don’t even like to travel domestically if not for vacation, not seeing the point of the effort.  What a change from when I’d eagerly grasp at any travel at all.  

 

I see young people and laugh when they claim they want to travel the world to “change who they are”.  World travel doesn’t change you, it makes you more of who you are.

 

Maybe a small part of me misses it,  but when I think of the hours and hours of trying to fill the hours, I change my mind.