How often do you crave new experiences or novelty?
Do you grow bored with the familiar? Need a new living environment? Want to travel to exotic lands? More and more I am meeting people who need constant novelty in their lives. However, this craving for novelty has its cost. At some point, that novelty will end. Like an addict searching for a fix, the novelty seekers continue their search as well. I suffered from this affliction as well.
This balance between craving novelty and routine has been on my mind lately. I am now back in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. This is an area where I have spent the majority of my adult life. It is a place that I am intimately familiar with due the amount of time I lived here. I used to think I used up all my novel experiences years ago.
I've lost count of the times I told myself that I needed to leave this area. I had convinced myself that experiencing new places and meeting different people would negate my feelings of boredom and alienation. After all, it was because I didn't belong here, right?
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When I became a digital nomad last year in order to establish my online consultancy business and write my book The Grateful Pessimist, I was so excited that I would I discover many thoroughly unique experiences: see exotic places and meet diverse people. I did have some amazingly unique experiences along the way, like building a day of the dead altar to a deceased mentor.
However, I had some fundamental insights that I wasn't expecting. Some of these insights were external, such as people in Thailand weren't all that much different than many of the people I met in Mexico. They all worked hard in the belief that in the future their lives or the lives of their children would be better. I met people who were friendly and helpful and others who were rude and unhelpful. In short, just like the many people I met in my years in the greater Washington, DC area.
The internal insights, those insights about myself though were much more profound. For one, I discovered that traveling did not profoundly change my outlook on life. I still struggled with negative emotions at times. I experienced moments of alienation I never thought possible. Transiting through areas where I didn't speak the local language and no one around me spoke English was daunting and frustrating.
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At the same time, I had no Eat, Pray, Love moments. Or at least similar moments that I only could experience in an exotic place like Bali; guess Hollywood lied to me again. All the revelations I experienced could have easily been experienced in the United States, had my mind been opened and I wasn't wallowing in self-destructive misery. Again, I don't regret traveling at all but I have now learned that if I keep an open mind, a sense of wonderment if you will, I can have amazing and novel experiences in my own backyard as well.
I guess I too had fallen into the marketing trap of travel changes everything. Cue girl in a bikini by the beach…
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