Travel Isn’t the Solution to Our Problems, We Are Just Escaping

The solution is to build a life you don’t need an escape from.

It’s summer, and everyone is counting the days to their vacation trip, or feeling blue since they came back from it.

We live all year dreaming about those summer weeks when we will finally leave for that amazing trip. And then it’s over before we know it, sending us back to the same place, sad that it’s over and dreaming about the next one. It’s an unending cycle.

But why do we dream so much about travelling?

When we go, it is rarely as we imagined it. We wait for hours for delayed flights in dirty airports. We land in unknown and stressful places crowded with other tourists. Not only that, but we get sunburn, foot blisters, and headaches trying to find confusing streets on foreign maps. And yes, we see something we hadn’t seen before. Except for the 357 pictures we saw on the internet while planning the trip.

“In person is not as beautiful as in the pictures” we think, “but I can edit my photos a little bit for my Instagram posts.”

“And it looks similar to that other city I visited last year.” Because there are very few places which are uniquely different when we travel. Especially within the same continent. For example, in Europe, in almost every city you will go, you will find a river, a parliament and a church.

I know what you’re thinking, that I’m missing the point here. Vacations are not about the place, they are about being free from responsibilities and enjoying the little things. They are about the morning croissant and watching the sunset. They are about the wind on your hair, the smell of nature, and the sweetness of doing nothing.

I couldn’t agree more. When we think back on any trip, these are the things we remember, and we miss. The little things, the simple things.

We want to be free to see, to touch, to taste, to hear, to smell something enjoyable. This is the antidote to working all day and feeling responsibilities on our shoulders.

What we forgot is that we don’t need to travel to have these little things.

We can start our days with something sweet and a few minutes of peace every single day if we choose to.

If we choose to, we can watch every sunrise and every sunset. They happen every single day in every place on earth, without a miss. When was the last time you caught one in your own town?

We can enjoy in our everyday life the wind, the sun, the rain, the smell of flowers, and the view of a sea, a river, a lake, a pond or even a fountain. Unless you live in a desert, I bet you have some sort of water accessible to go and sit nearby and do nothing.

Enjoying a sensory experience while doing nothing is the bliss point, and we can have it every day.

But we don’t. Every day, we don’t choose the little things. We choose to feel sluggish, annoyed and sad. We choose to focus on all the problems we have and wish for time to pass fast. Likewise, we hate our life, and we want to escape from it. And travel looks like the easiest way because it includes a real physical escape.

But as the many trips have shown us already, it is a fake escape. Because unless we hit our head on a cliff and get amnesia, our problems are still there with us on the trip, and will still be here when we are back.

The exotic food won’t stop us and our families from fighting over stupid things. That friend we miss is still busy with her newborn. The sickness of a parent is still there. The colleagues we dislike are filling our inboxes with tasks that will erase every vacation memory the second we get back to work. The Instagram likes won’t fix our self-confidence issues, and the sea won’t wash away our anxiety.

All our problems will continue to be there, until we decide to face them. Escaping won’t make them smaller, it might even make them bigger.

Maybe it’s time to face those problems, work on the ones we can change, and accept the ones we can’t.

Maybe it is time to finally gain that inner peace to choose the little things every day. Maybe it is time to build a life we don’t need an escape from.

We will still travel for work and discovery, but it won’t be to tick the box on a list of cities and the highlight of our year. It won’t be the thing we dream about or feel sad when it’s over. It won’t be the fake solution to our problems.

It will be just a small part of a life we love, where every day is filled with small moments of joy. As the French say:

La vie est faite de petits boheurs. ~ Life is made of small pleasures.