People love to travel, and some of these travellers can circumnavigate the globe, but each of them has different motivations for doing so. This article will look at the most common reasons people decide to leave their comfort zone to get on a plane and see new destinations.
To get out of the routine.
At a certain point, the routine of everyday life can make us feel suffocated and tired of living the same life every day. It triggers a burning desire for new experiences and new challenges. Travelling is an ideal way to get out of the comfort of routine.
Having different experiences can reveal things that we didn’t know. Maybe it knows how to move in a chaotic city like New York, where there’s always something going on. It was one of the most visited destinations in the world in 2016, or ordering a meal in a language you don’t speak, Japanese perhaps; all of these are experiences that leave a mark and prepare us for other challenges to come.
To learn something new.
Learning is another reason why many people decide to embark on a new journey. Having to face adversity in unfamiliar territory is already a masterful experience, as is sleeping among trees in the jungle in an exotic destination. But this can be complemented with some history, sociology, or geography of the place you are visiting. It can also be a few classes in the native language, as many people visit Canada and Ireland.
The truth is that every destination has something special to learn from, and there is always someone willing to take advantage of that situation. Besides the fact that learning something is an immersive experience that makes it completely different from anything else.
Fulfilling a dream
Travelling allows us to fulfil long-held dreams, which can be very varied. Examples abound:
- Getting the wet of life at Niagara Falls.
- Walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
- Going to see LeBron James in Los Angeles at the Staples Center.
- Perhaps experiencing the adrenaline of the casinos and gambling in the mythical city of sin, Las Vegas.
Broadening our horizons
Travelling opens the mind; it allows us to realise that there is no one way to live life. Meeting people from other places teaches us that our way of seeing the world is just one of the millions. You can’t know how different another place is until you see it for yourself. Everything, from work, belief systems, interests, is tested when living with people from other latitudes.
Far from being confrontational, this represents an opportunity to discover new ways of looking at life and help conceive new ideas that otherwise would never have come to you. The return home will always be full of new reflections and life lessons.
Final reflections
In the end, we realise that the reasons why people travel are many and impossible to encapsulate in a list. Likewise, we feel the need to clarify that these are only the personal reasons why people travel; we are not counting work reasons, academic reasons, or other reasons that are unrelated to the recreational and merely personal. But what we can say is that travelling will always be worthwhile and will make us happier, it doesn’t have to be a transatlantic journey, sometimes what we are looking for is much closer than we imagine.
