If you prioritize travel in your life, many people will sit you down and point out the problems with your plan’s practicalities. They will try to tell you where you should “invest” your financial resources “for your own sake.” You may be constantly named, shamed and blamed for being irrational or for using travel to escape your reality. Contrary to those expressed sentiments, if you immerse yourself in a monotonous routine of work, sleep, eating, and weekends, life will escape you[1] because you will never experience the extraordinary. Instead, invest in a journey of a lifetime. You will have experiences money can’t buy.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.[2]
Many people are held back by the stifling belief that they need to be “money wise,” so they end up “settling” and never fulfilling their inner desires. These people sit back thinking about their dream getaway, but then they hold back on reaching for it.
When you have to work yourself into a state of excitement rather than naturally experiencing joy and passion, you’re probably settling.[3]
Travelling is a journey of the soul. The benefits are immeasurable. When you travel, you are awakened into self-discovery, you conquer fears, and you let go of burdensome stress. Numerous benefits come from taking journeys that are not just vacations or preplanned getaways but journeys of discovery.[4]
After years have passed, we look back and we regret what we did not do more than what we did wrong. What we did wrong just added to our life lessons. Our deepest regrets come from keeping ourselves locked down into practicalities, calculating time and money spent, and halting our own plans to break free. The love, the gratification, and the joy that embrace you when you travel will make sure you stop focusing on how much money or time you’ve spent on the endeavor.
We are all surrounded by a plethora of life difficulties, and we work hard to change this, that and the other. And, it takes effort and hard work to make big changes with persistence. No one has the mental energy to make all the changes that they should. We each create a long list of resolutions each New Year’s, but we end up overwhelmed by all we’d hoped to achieve.
All of us contemplate where we are heading. Then comes a new day, and another. All the things we desire to do pile up, and it seems we are always waiting for the right time. Taking the initiative to travel now can help you achieve many goals, such as:
When you find yourself in a foreign country, you learn how to communicate even if you don’t know the local languages. You figure out how to navigate, you make new friends, and you learn how to coexist with others and how to solve a stream of problems. The experience will boost your confidence in your ability to handle unexpected situations in a new setting.
“Most people assume that they suffer because of the negative aspects of themselves. But, the real reason they suffer is because they avoid those negative aspects of themselves, not the fact they have them.”[5]
[2] ^ Raw Story: Mark Twain said ‘travel is fatal to prejudice’ — and science has proven him right Mark Twain
We Travel Not To Escape Life, But For Life Not To Escape Us 7 Reasons Why You Should Find a Life Coach to Reach Your Full Potential Are You Too Lazy or Just Haven’t Found Your Passion Yet?
The research was conducted by Steers, Wickham and Acitelli at Houston and Paolo Alto Universities and was recently published under the title “Seeing Everyone Else’s Highlight Reels: How Facebook Usage is Linked to Depressive Symptoms” in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.
Steers and team carried out two studies which considered the association between time spent on Facebook and depressive symptoms.
Both studies provide evidence that people feel depressed after spending a great deal of time on Facebook.
One of they key links that Steer found between Facebook and depressive symptoms was as a result of the social comparison that we can undertake with such ease using tools like Facebook. We can easily see how our lives and achievements are stacking up against those of our friends and wider circles.
We’ve been comparing ourselves to others for years – there are studies going back as far as the 1950s looking at how we compare ourselves to other people in face-to-face situations:
“Although social comparison processes have been examined at length in traditional contexts, the literature is only beginning to explore social comparisons in online social networking settings,” says Steers.
Steers’ research indicates that Facebook is more likely to lower our mood and impact on our feelings of self-worth than traditional face-to-face comparisons. This may be because of the way in which we share our lives on Facebook and how easy it is spend many hours privately comparing ourselves with others.
“One danger is that Facebook often gives us information about our friends that we are not normally privy to, which gives us even more opportunities to socially compare,” Steers said.
Steers’ studies provided evidence that Facebook users felt depressed when comparing themselves to others. Perhaps because our friends are airbrushing their lives as well as their photos. We’re all guilty of thinking carefully about how we portray our lives on social media before we hit the publish button. Most people select only the best photos and the most positive status updates. The humdrum of day-to-day life might not seem worth a status update anyway, so we tend to just highlight and celebrate the good bits.
“If we’re comparing ourselves to our friends’ ‘highlight reels,’ this may lead us to think their lives are better than they actually are and conversely, make us feel worse about our own lives,” says Steer
Unused to assuming that those around us are airbrushing and sanitizing their lives before they share them (even though we all do it) we tend to compare our own lives, warts and all, to the positive online portrayal of other people’s lives and think we’re comparing like with like – which can be testing for even the most emotionally resilient of us.
According to Steers’ research, the impact of Facebook on people facing depression may be exacerbated compared to non-depressed controls because people with depressive symptoms spend more time comparing themselves to others on Facebook. More time spent socially comparing on Facebook was correlated with an increase in depressive symptoms – a bit of an unhappy catch 22.
Whilst the study was small so we shouldn’t be too hasty in drawing lasting wide reaching conclusions from it, we could think carefully about our own engagement with Facebook.
If we’re suffering from depression or are aware of spending a lot of time socially comparing on Facebook and this is bringing our mood down, we should perhaps make a conscious effort to spend less time doing so – or try to bear in mind that the highlight reels we read are just that – highlights – and that when we compare the total of our own lives with the highlights of others’ we are not comparing like with like.
If we think our friends, colleagues or children are finding their internal struggles harder as a result of comparing themselves with a distorted view of friends and family on Facebook, we should highlight to them the differences between Facebook and real life – perhaps using our own timeline as an example and try to encourage them to spend less time socially comparing via social media.
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