There was this thought piece a while back about how the currently young like traveling less than earlier generations, because it has become more difficult to live the myth of the noble savage. Apparently digital nomads were the last in a line of distinguished travelers that also included backpackers, volunteer work in poor countries, yoga retreats, biking across Eurasia, the bourgeois and the nobleman's grand tour. What they have in common is the relatively rich traveler going to a relatively poorer place to find themselves. Finding oneself is a past-time of the lucky, those with too much time or less facetiously, with more time than work. It is nevertheless a crucial human activity. Even my working-class dad insisted on me going to university because at the very least "I would have enough time to get to know the world". The time was in fact not sufficient and I have since never ceased to ask myself who I am in relation to others. I am convinced that most grievances in the world stem from people acting instinctively or emotionally without properly knowing their needs, desires, limits and fears. When I felt like the sky was caving in and I could hardly pull a breath through my lungs, the half-concsious way out I was dreaming about was to travel. I would be alone, have to figure things out, meet new people, have new thoughts. I would be proud of myself, living in the moment and free from consequences. Travel teaches you a lot about yourself because you see yourself from different perspectives and you are, if you rely on yourself, necessarily the hero of your own story. But I think it's greatest power lies in the fact that it pulls you out of habitual thinking. At home your schedule, your room, familiar smells, automatic responses all can be so tightly interlocked that they wrangle you into an uncomfortable mental place akin to the machine in Kafka's penitentiary colony. None of these things is bad per se but all together form a thicket of brambles around your figurative limbs. This is especially true for those of us who cannot easily maintain boundaries or impose their wishes, in particular those like me who don't have a precise idea about what they want. If you don't want, the world happens to you and even good intentions alienate you from yourself because they pile up into someone else's idea of what's best for you. Maybe their design looks like an isosceles triangle for them but in your coordinate system it's stuffed into an ugly little knot in an ominous corner next to all the things that make you uncomfortable. Without a plan you have no expectation of what habits are going to compound to. Likely it will be a bad surprise. And travel suspends the compounding, alerts your senses and changes perspectives. That part is undeniable. The one that I don't understand is why you would necessarily go to the poor and less fortunate. For sure, their perspective changes most radically from yours, but can you relate? Is it even decent to go take a picture of someone else's suffering so that you can come to grips with a boring job, bad sex and taxes? There are other ways. Different perspectives reveal themselves quite quickly, even between friends who have known each other for years. You just have to ask and listen. Once you enter the lives of strangers, you have more freedom to explore, take less risk of destroying ongoing relationships by restless curiosity.[^curiosity] And adding other countries, languages and cultures into the mix is a leap of faith. The differences come up over time and in details. The more you talk, the more you notice. My preferred method is to go some place whose language I am learning. You get a fair share of sympathy as a foreigner trying to communicate in the local language and have the trump card of a fool: people expect you to not understand. People talk openly, patiently, become friends and take you along to see the world with their eyes every time you meet. Since I started traveling I had a vague plan to establish myself in places that fascinate me. There was Berlin, the city where I rebuild myself, Tokyo and Japan, where I float on the current of extreme politeness and care, Stockholm where the city has no smell and nature stretches out before you inviting you to lie down and relax. Vienna, where music can be picked off the streets like in Pokemon Go, Prague the city of statues and coffee and so on. Although I do feel compelled to lose myself in nature for a couple of days, I am a city dweller at heart and cities fascinate me. They were the best invention to increase the speed of information before markets and electronic networks and still work best for that irreducible human component. Some cities work better than others. In some cities you accept the friction of an ugly or unsatisfying environment to gain some advantages like money, culture or community. Others are only beautiful. Nothing happens in them, nobody spends any time there, they are museums you go to once with your kid. And then there are some cities, where civilization is in full swing, life happens on all levels from poverty to cutting-edge science and they are so simple to live in that you don't even notice all that human density around you! Copenhagen is one of these cities. ## Footnotes [^curiosity]: the word curiosity was an insult once