Member-only story

The Real Reason You’re Happier When You Travel

It’s not about where you go, but what you leave behind

Eric Weiner
Forge
3 min readFeb 10, 2022

--

Photo by Olexandr Ignatov on Unsplash

It is a truism that travel broadens your horizons. Like most truisms, it is only partly true. Yes, travel expands your world, but it does so by shrinking it.

I was reminded of this delicious paradox recently when I did something I hadn’t done in a very long time: checked into a hotel. A DoubleTree, it wasn’t especially luxurious, and definitely not exotic, located less than a mile from my house near Washington, D.C. But as I swiped my key card and entered the room, sanitized for my convenience, I exhaled. I could think again.

It wasn’t what the hotel offered that explained my elation but what it lacked — namely a houseful of crap, literal as well as figurative, thanks to a sewage “situation” that, trust me, you don’t want to know about. This, I thought, is why I travel — not to expand my life but to shrink it. Contain it. At home, clutter — both the physical and mental variety — threatens to suffocate me. Not so in hotel rooms like this. Travel liberates me from…. well, from myself. Unencumbered, I can breathe again.

The traveler jettisons excess stuff for the same reason a hot-air balloonist jettisons ballast: to soar higher.

--

--

Forge
Forge

Published in Forge

A former publication from Medium on personal development. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Eric Weiner
Eric Weiner

Written by Eric Weiner

Philosophical Traveler. Recovering Malcontent. Author of five books. My latest,:"BEN & ME: In Search of a Founder's Formula for a Long and Useful Life."

Responses (39)