Not another travel blog:

By way of introduction, I want to discuss the purpose of this travel blog. I kind of hate to call it that after perusing the morass of internet travel blogs which formulaically give top 10's and best fill-in-the-blanks in Paris. Those blogs are legion and fail to get at the heart of why travel, if done correctly, is not merely something fun to check off of a bucket list or nonchalantly slip into social situations for some added credit. Travel has the ability to change a person; some people think this is for the worse, and some for the better. I believe that travel can be either or neither depending on how you approach it, which is why I will share what I have learned about how to travel "right" if, like me, you are driven by deeper compulsions than having more instagram likes than your friends.

Deep Travel.

This is the most basic necessity for travelling in a manner that can impact you on a deeper level. What I call "deep travel" refers to the time spent and the manner of approach. As opposed to tourist trips which tend to be a couple of weeks in length, deep travel entails an extended stay in a new/different place and is decidedly separate from tourist activities.

In fact, simple tourism may do next to nothing for your personal growth - it could even be a hindrance. Some thinkers and writers of the past believed this way about travel, and I think they were referring to what could more appropriately be called tourism.

To be clear, I'm not against tourism. I simply have found that when I've engaged in tourism I usually end up with more stress than relaxation, and a nagging desire to go back to the work I was so grateful to leave behind for a couple of weeks. I asked myself, then why am I such a proponent of travel, if several of the times I've done it, I've hated the experience?

One of the big reasons for this is because the feeling of novelty that we search for when we go to a new place or try a new thing, is immediately squelched by the surprisingly formulaic tourism industries which somehow offer almost nothing new or novel anywhere in the world that I've been to.

If you've never experienced tourism at all, it will be novel for you the first time at least. I would encourage someone in this position to go take a tourist trip somewhere, at least once. If you've already taken say, two tourist trips abroad, then I feel like you may come to a similar conclusion as I have; hawkers selling "local, hand-made" things at exorbitant prices, walking with a group of mostly old people while a tour guide talks, macarons of varying flavors (I might take tourist trip next time for these alone I confess), and usually some alcohol so that you can tell yourself you had a really great time in fill-in-the-blank city when in reality you could have drank and ate cookies of higher quality at home for a fraction of the cost.

What's more, tourism often shows us the negative sides of a new place while counterintuitively omitting the positive. Obviously this is not the aim, but it is the hapless tourists who get mugged on the street, ripped off at shopping stalls, sometimes deemed a nuisance by locals; and who will first notice what they can't do before staying there long enough to appreciate the things they can. It's not the tourists' fault. These sorts of responses are very human, and are part of the acculturation process. You will go through phases, ups and downs, as you learn to navigate a new environment. But that process is stunted and cut short through the nature of tourism. You get the bad before the good comes.

Returning to my "deep travel" advocacy, this sort of travel could be a couple of months or a couple of years. It forces you out of the relative comfort zone of resort hotels and curated tours. It forces you, the traveler, to change because unlike with tourism, it's not all about you. Some examples of this sort of "deep travel" could be:

• Getting posted overseas for the military or government

• Studying abroad for a semester or a year

• Working holidays

• Company transfers

• Relocating for a foreign spouse

Or anything else that causes you, the traveler, to live and work/study/partake of everyday life abroad.

In my experience, studying abroad in Japan was transformative precisely because I was afforded the opportunity to persevere through the initial culture shock and to come to appreciate the new things I could do, see, and be in a new place.

A casual tourist might be bothered by the lack of public trash bins in and around Tokyo (not like in America). But a deep traveler could come to appreciate the immaculately clean streets (Also not like in America).

A casual tourist might lament the lack of our staple breakfast foods, but a deep traveler could rejoice in the abundance of ramen shops.

A deep traveler could note how safe Tokyo is, and could find himself more relaxed while out on the town than he ever did back home. A casual tourist doesn't experientially know whether this new city is safe or not, but is rightly on guard in new territory.

Be yourself, and find new dimensions of you.

There are more than a few ways to ruin a potentially life-changing experience like deep travel. One way is to hold too strongly to your cultural norms and preconceptions despite living where those norms do not exist. This is a source of endless frustration.

Another, is to reverse course and put on an inauthentic version of yourself while you are abroad. This is an easily detectable psychological maneuver that locals will pick up on, and will cause people to behave unnaturally around you, because you behave unnaturally with yourself. It upends the self-transformation process because you don't allow your true self to be exposed in the first place. a travel-sized version of you rides out the experience, which you put away upon your return home. This robs you of the opportunity to be truly impacted, and is in my unprofessional opinion dangerous for your mental health.

So, find a balance between gracious and groveling, open and obsequious. Be open to the new things around you, and honest about your roots, your culture, your hopes and expectations - and admit at least to yourself where this new environment irks you. No one loves everything about being in a new country, and that's very much OK.

Returning to the Japan case study; find me the foreigner, or local for that matter, who just loves the jam-packed rush hour trains of Tokyo, and I'll find you a liar.

But who doesn't love their meticulous timing and convenience? Few neophytes to Japan would enjoy a side of natto with their food, but most can enjoy the sushi.

I'm saying this because it is through honest self reflection about the happy and sad surprises, that you will be able to take inventory of the good and the bad - and keep what parts of this new world could be helpful to you while letting the crappy parts stay where you found them.

Don't be afraid to ask why

One thing you will find as you traverse the globe, is that people are surprisingly similar where ever you go. The clothes are different, the language, the food. But they are, like you, generally possessed of fears, hobbies, moors, familial and cultural expectations, and battle with finding their place in the world.

This is why "why" is a worthwhile question to ask. Not because the answer is likely to provide any particular revelation, but because if you follow the "why" to its root, you are likely to find that the answer is entirely understandable. This will in turn reflexively grow your sense of empathy.

Why's never fall far from the tree. But they can fall on the opposite side of the tree beyond your vision/comprehension. It doesn't mean that the why is different from your own in any fundamental sense, but that there is space between their why and your why. This space is composed of life circumstances and environmental realities different from your own.

Learn about that space and you will see how that why, perhaps inevitably, rolled into that particular patch as yours also would have if your why fell in that location.

Learn what led a civilization to, say, dietary habits, sexual habits, or relatively more conservative or progressive lifestyles and all of the touchpoints that entails; and you will begin to see how much of these ideas were being shaped before the people you're talking with were even born, and how inescapable it is to sleep in the cradle you were born in. And the best part is that, as you consider these often (and hopefully) controversial and/or personally sensitive issues, you will also naturally identify norms and habits you have always believed and never thought to question. Which ones? Well, I can't tell you. And you won't know either until you see the person in front of you a little more clearly, and that in turn reflects back on you.

Seek discomfort

This is an obvious one so I won't spend a lot of time on it. But if you are not in a relatively uncomfortable place by nature of your travel, you should find a way to be less comfortable. Pleasure and indulgence is poison to personal growth of any sort, whether travelling or not. Difficult circumstances promote innovation to make the circumstances more tolerable. This is what growth is, and it applies to mental, physical, and emotional training alike.

Put yourself in unusual social situations. Most of us will feel uncomfortable to be a lone foreigner in another country. So do it. Get a job, or a course of study, that forces your attention away from yourself and toward an external goal. This is far from antithetical to the "personal growth" mantra I've been preaching. On the contrary, getting out of your own headspace forces you to explore and innovate in a new and more challenging environment, which forces you to grow.

Growth never happens because your circumstances are ideal. It happens because you have not reached your ideal self considering the circumstances. I'm not here advocating for any particular regiment of self-discipline. Ice baths and dopamine fasts try to hit at the same phenomenon I am referring to, but there isn't one particular fad you need to employ to create friction in your life.

On the bright side, for many of us this sense of friction will come with the territory and need not be created by us. Such is often the case of working or studying in another country. In other instances, you should find something or someway to add that friction to your life.

In conclusion, I want to reiterate how transformational the right kind of travel has been for me, and also how pointless the wrong kind has been. This bled over into my personal, then academic, and career growth in mighty ways. I believe it can have the same affect with you. Please come back for me of what I learned and continue to learn on my journey(s).