The Perplexing Paradox of Life

I’ve been ruminating on this in my head for some time, and now I need to discuss it. The basic point boils down to: What makes a person happy? That’s such a large question it’s hard to comprehend, or know where to begin.  But then again, this day in age, maybe we don’t ask it often enough. Since this blog discusses travel, I’ll take a slightly different tack and approach it through this lens.

If there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that people love to travel. Not everyone, but most people you meet or know will probably agree that traveling is one of the best things in life. If we break that down to consider why that is, I think it’s pretty clear. New people and new experiences. When you’re traveling you are able to experience new things all the time. Every place on earth has something unique to contribute. And in many cases, you can only experience some things in that one place on the globe. As far as people, you are always meeting others from the far corners of the globe and trading information and stories about where you’re from, what you’ve seen, and where you’re going.

I think given human nature it’s no surprise that travel makes us happy. Experiencing new and exciting things with new and exciting people is the best thing in life. The good news is that all of those things are cheap! When you’re backpacking, your basic expenses are very, very low. In essence all you really require is a roof over your head and food in your stomach. On top of that you can layer slightly more expensive travel “wants” including transportation (aside from hitching,) beer, and experience spending. Experience spending boils down to adventure & entertainment activities that allow you to experience a part of that culture that you would never be able to achieve any other way.

As I said, all (or most) of those things are cheap! The bad news is that they aren’t free. To travel, sadly, requires money. To gain money you need a job that, sadly, requires time. And therein lies what my sister Megan has aptly labeled “The Paradox of Life.” Most people can’t travel while they are working. The average holiday period in America is two weeks per year. I consider that to be semi-insulting. I understand that from a business perspective it may be necessary but from a human standpoint it is simply not enough.

Two weeks is enough for a “vacation” but not for traveling. To me there is a marked difference between the two. In my mind as soon as you begin a vacation, you’re worried about it ending. In fact, you could have all the money in the world at a high paying job but not have enough time to spend it all. In fact given your lack of time to spend the money on lasting experiences, you would probably be more likely to spend it on things. Expensive things. Some amount of nice or expensive things will, to an extent, make people happier. But in the long-run you will always treasure your experiences more, far more, than things. I know many people that would be willing to sacrifice pay for more time. The problem is, you’ll never get time back. None of us are getting any younger, and you’re only young once. I personally plan on traveling at every age but I think I’d like to experience more of it while I’m young.

So the question comes down to: how do you travel sustainably? By that I mean in a way that will allow you to travel for a prolonged period of time without either a) spending all of your money or b) sacrificing other objectives. My point here is that everyone has long term goals of some kind. Most people have career goals and things they’d like to accomplish in their lives eventually. How do you reconcile that with traveling? Admitedly, there are drawbacks traveling. I guess that everything, as economists say, has its opportunity cost. If you travel to meet new friends you leave behind old friends. To see new places you must leave behind old places. Economists say that as humans and as a society we’re always trying to maximize utility, which could be another word for happiness. We are trying to maxmize utility and infinite wants with finite resources.

There are a lot of other trade-offs with traveling. For one, your quote-unquote “career.” I think it’s very interesting that so many of us go straight from college to grad school to work in order to pull down the big paycheck that we think will make us happy. But, interestingly, it doesn’t. Again the problem here is with time. If you don’t have the time to enjoy your life, to explore the world, to meet new people, how much will each extra dollar of income contribute? If you think of what a small, tiny, sliver of the world we experience in our daily office routine, how could one not want desperately to experience more of what the world has to offer? At the same time, I’ve worked washing dishes and waiting tables to finance my travels. While there’s nothing wrong with those jobs, they aren’t exactly advancing my career goals in any meaningful way. All of this creates a kind of pressure. It feels like by traveling I’m sacrificing my future goals in some way, and this in turn makes it less enjoyable and creates a pressure to stop traveling, settle down, and start building something more meaningful with my life. (Career, longer relationship, etc, etc)

 Perhaps these are simply unavoidable tradeoffs. Perhaps not. Perhaps there are ways to square the circle. To achieve all of these goals at once, without sacrificing anything. Alas, I think this is not the case. There are always opportunity costs. But perhaps, if travel is necessary, they can be minmized. Teaching english abroad, working for the state department, writing or telecommuting from abroad. These are all ways to square the circle and advance and grow as a person without neglecting your finances or your career. The other option is to work for several months at home and then travel for several months, alternating.

Let’s say for instance you work a job that pays 50,000 annually. Let’s say after taxes you take home 40 grand. If you were to work only 6 months and earn 20,000, and live for those six months on 6,000, you would have 14,000 left. Traveling on the cheap for 6 months would cost you around 5,000 dollars. So you not only get to live half of your live on the move, you have money left over and career advancement. Tell me which person is happier, the person making 50,000 spending over 1,000 a month and no travel, or the person traveling 1/2 the time making half that but spending less money as well?

At any rate this is the paradox of life. How do you drink it all in? How can you open your hand to grab what’s out there without dropping what you’re holding right now? I’m not sure, but here’s hoping that this puzzle can be solved.

Matt

And thanks for reading this if you actually made it this far. If you did I’d be shocked. But at least I’ve been able to think this through for myself.