Traveling is the most extreme example of people wanting something they don’t actually want

tl;dr If you’re traveling to go see some sights, you might be surprised how often you stay inside. If you’re traveling to drink or get laid, you might be surprised how drained you will feel. So why do we travel so much?<br><br>I’m American, and I’ve been living in Asia for a few years. I’ve been to many countries and felt many things, and I think I have figured out the entire reason why we travel.<br><br>The most extreme example of people wanting something they don’t actually want is travel. What do I mean?<br><br>When I was an elementary school student, I couldn’t wait to be a high school student. When I was in high school, I wanted to be in college. Once I got to college, suddenly the things I wanted to do were cut in half. Now I was thinking mainly about getting a job, and occasionally thinking about college. Once I got a job, I had LESS desire to go to college than I had in high school. Now I mainly wanted a better job. Now I have a good job, but I no longer want a better job. Actually, it would be nice to just go back to school.<br><br>This line of thinking applies to a lot of areas of life and travel is no exception. Some people travel extensively because they love sightseeing. When they get to a new country, they realize that sightseeing is actually a lot of work and they end up staying in their hotel room a lot. Some people travel for the nightlife, and they end up getting so drunk and hungover that they again end up staying in their hotel room a lot. We thought we wanted the things associated with “travel”, but it’s actually the hotel room that we like the most.<br><br>Something else to keep in mind is that we don’t really want to “travel”. What we really want is to not be at home. Traveling to some place we’ve been to a million times is not fun. We’ve been to our hometown a million times, and we don’t want to be there anymore. But we’ve only been to Spain once, so we want to go back to Spain.<br><br>There’s another interesting thing about Spain, though. We don’t want to go to Spain because of the heat. We don’t want to go because of the noise. We don’t want to go because of the food or the music or the language or anything. But we don’t want to NOT go to Spain because of the heat. Every con associated with Spain is irrelevant, and we only focus on the pros associated with Spain. I think this is a good example of how our brains will romanticize things we don’t have to put up with very much. I don’t want to go to Spain because it’s hot. I LOVE Spain though. I don’t want to go to Spain because it’s noisy. I LOVE Spain though.<br><br>So what do we bring with us on a trip? A passport to get in, and a hotel reservation to get out. It’s not that we want to go on a trip - it’s that we want to get away from home.<br><br>I’m not the first person to think of this. There’s a great quote from Maslow:<br><br>“People in general are scared to death of giving up the stress of being an active participant and taking on the stress of being non-participant. It's a very different kind of stress - the stress of non-participation. Now that is what I call being depressed. It's not the lack of stress, it's changing one stress for another stress. The other stress is giving up your control, your motivation, your will.”