Why Travelling Is Overrated?

Here's something not a lot of us talk about. Travelling is overrated! There! Somebody had to say it.

While I write about this, let me tell you I'm no travel hater. I actually like to travel. To have fun, make memories and to satisfy my curiosity. To try new food and to see new cities. Travelling can be enlightening but It's certainly not life changing.

Why do we travel? To break free from our monotonous life. To go see new places and to try new things. Travelling sure as hell is exciting but the craze to do it for ‘finding yourself’ is something which needs to be talked about.

With the travel industry boost, and increasing social media obsession, it's almost an idea fed into our heads. - To travel is to discover yourself!

Does it work that way really? Do you discover yourself and learn about life by travelling? Do you suddenly wake up one morning in a different country and feel like- Ahaa! Eureka!

No! You learn about architecture, history, food and culture but not a lot about life and what you want from it.

Wherever you go, you're still the same person with the same life in a different scenery. While the scenery can give you happiness, it doesn't make the world magically a better place.

It's overrated in the sense that it's no extraterrestrial experience that cures everything just because you dared to get out of your comfort zone. If you've got the time, money and an instagram account popping with quotes like- ‘one who hasn't travelled hasn't seen life’ or ‘the world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page’ , congratulations! You’re now socially cool. Because social media makes you cool by ogling at those beautiful Instagram pictures that you took with high precision while you were finding yourself.

You claim to- ‘gaining perspective’ , ‘broadening horizon’ , ‘finding yourself’. But do you? You don't change overnight or over a week. What you eventually are is an accumulation of all your life experiences and what to choose to imbibe from it. And it's a lifelong process.

You break monotony by travelling and that is great but if you do it for long enough, it'll seem like monotony all over again.

You would've read a lot about why leaving your boring jobs and travelling the world is the real deal. Or why solo travel is so cool. Sure it can be fun. But we need to stop kidding ourselves. Many would like to catch a flight to escape from reality but is it always realistic? To leave everything behind in search of yourself.

There's aspects of travel that need great amount of planning. There's money and there's time. And even under the most ideal arrangements, it isn't always a piece of cake.

Travel is an experience and as long as we're clear about it, we would do travel the right way. Because ‘take me away’ isn't always realistic. What is realistic is that to travel is fun if you have a life to get back to.

Wanderlust is tagged cool by us millennials. Travel is easy. You just get out. And that is expected to be applaud worthy.

Why isn't having a stable successful happy life just as overrated? Because it takes more than having money to book a ticket and escape to wherever.

It takes sweat and consistency to make life a good place to be in. And that is something that needs more recognition. That is something we need to idealise. That is something that makes life beautiful. That is a spot where you will no longer need to find yourself. Because there's nothing to find. And then whether you travel to break monotony or just for fun, you would do it right.

So while there's nothing wrong with travelling, we need to stop obsessing over the need for unnecessary forceful travels hoping to find ourselves.

Travel is an experience and it can be great, as long as your expectations are not out of proportion to the reality.