On Travel

Between November 2021 and August 2023, I have spent the vast majority of my life living within the city of Boston. What this tangibly means is that for 2+ years, the lion's share of my experiences have occurred within a circle of a roughly a 3-mile radius. Every friend made, every laugh given, every hobby practiced, every song danced, every lover loved, every conversation shared, has occurred within this circle.

My rough circle of influence in Boston. Centered on my house with a radius of 3 miles.

And despite primarily operating within this circle for the better part of 2 years, I neither feel nor believe I am anywhere close to exhausting the wealth of experiences afforded to me. I believe there are enough friends, laughs, hobbies, etc. to be found in this measly ~28 square mile circle for not only the rest of my life, but for *many* lives.

Then why leave? If I can find fulfillment within this circle, what do I gain by escaping? Why travel at all?

I would like to formalize my own answer to this question, and in doing so hopefully develop a cohesive framework by which I can approach my own traveling.

My answer comes in two parts.

First, I travel to determine how generalizable my sentiments for Boston are to the rest of the world.

Put simply, how many circles exist on this world that can offer me a rich variety of lived experiences? The land surface area of Earth is ~57,268,900 square miles, this equates to roughly 2,045,317 circles each with a radius of 3 miles. Even if I assume that 99.9% of these circles fail to meet my criteria for providing the fertile ground for a fulfilling life, this still implies there are at least 2,045 lush potential stages scattered across this world.

My previous circle but drawn to the scale of the world. At this scale, the circle becomes negligible.

But is this actually true? Or am I letting my romanticism overpower practical considerations? This is a frequent struggle for me, and one I am empirically quite bad at winning. In this context, I believe experimentation is necessary. For me, traveling offers this opportunity; the opportunity to envision what a life elsewhere could look like.

The downside to this justification is that the only way to truly imagine life in another region necessitates an extended stay. This means leaving behind your current home and community and relocating to somewhere else. This also requires learning a new culture, and potentially a new language, all of which one might have to navigate alone. In addition, there's no guarantee that this chosen area will be one of those precious 2,045. If you decide it is not, then you must start the process again wholly anew.

This can be a daunting prospect, but I think deciding where we choose to live and spend a significant portion of our short life is one of the most consequential decisions we can make. We do not operate in a vaccuum. We are influenced by and influencers of our surrounding environment, and in this era of interconnectivity and globalization it seems woefully myopic to not even consider the totality of our large green world when making this decision.

This brings me to my second reason for traveling. I have previously stated the world is big, and I implied that this size necessarily translates to tangible differences in experience. But while I do think this is true for natural landscapes and biomes; it is not obvious that this also holds true for the ~8 billion people that call this Earth home. What unites the 8 billion humans alive today, and how universal is human culture?

I believe at our core we are all more or less the same. We all want to be safe, happy, and loved and though the specifics of an individual's circumstances may vary, I argue these and similar desires are identical and have remained identical for most of human history.

I am not sure the same may any longer be said of human culture. I've spent some time skimming the travelogues of pre-Industrial explorers from the West and East and I am consistently struck by the diversity of customs, technologies, and ideologies that they report. But it is more than that, it's the almost reverential awe by which they are amazed by even small differences. See Ibn Battuta describing reed bowls produced by a city in Kublai Khan's China:

"The most wonderful things they make, are dishes composed of reeds glued together, and painted over with colors, such that when hot meat is put into them they do not change their color. Ten of these may be put into one another; and the person seeing them would suppose them to be only one.... and their softness is such, that should they fall from a height they would not break. They are wonderful productions." ¹

In another example, Alexis de Tocqueville describes the uniqueness of the (then recent) American democratic experiment:

"There is one country in the world in which this great social revolution seems almost to have reached its natural limits... I admit that I saw in America more than America; it was the shape of democracy itself which I sought, its inclinations, character, prejudices and passions; I wanted to understand it so as at least to know what we have to fear or hope therefrom." ²

I struggle to imagine experiencing a similar level of 'culture shock' by traveling in today's world. Modern day globalization, the internet, and multinational corporations have served as homogenizing forces across human civilizations.³ If current trends hold, I think we have left the era in human history where one can enter a foreign land and be overwhelmed by the alienness of their technology or societal structure. Indeed when contemporary individuals describe differences in culture, the examples they choose sometimes strike me as slightly superficial.

People describe different food, different music, different mannerisms. And while these all may be true, these seem relatively trivial in the grand scheme of society. I argue the underlying power structures, societal organization, and history play a much more significant role in the determination of culture. I can enter a supermarket in France and marvel at the different products compared to American supermarkets, but I argue the more surreal observation is that I can travel 3,000 miles and find the same fluorescently lit market with aisles and aisles of plastic packaged foodstuff for sale. In both locales it is now accepted that there exist sprawling coporations who stock and restock food from around the world daily on their shelves. In both locales, neoliberal economic thinking drives policy and the rich and well-connected enjoy increased access to the halls of power. In both locales, right-wing nationalism exploits rural malcontent and scapegoats immigrants and foreigners for their problems. Yes the food and music are different, but these pale in comparison to the overarching similarities in how both societies operate and function.

This does largely come down to a distinction in what exactly we mean when we say 'culture.' On this, my thoughts are still evolving, and perhaps the differences I previously dismissed as superficial are truly the best determinants of it. In addition, I should point out that most of my experiences come from traveling to and from major urban locations, I have no doubt that rural areas (being significantly less exposed to the homogenizing forces mentioned above) are much more varied than the urban jungles I tend to frequent.

In my travel, I would like to develop my thinking on this. Are we all truly the same, with similar hopes and dreams? What is culture and how truly different are modern cultures?

Life will always be too short and the world will always be too big to sufficiently sample from the variety of lived experiences possible on this planet.

This realization used to fill me with dread. Try as I might, I would never be able to pay homage to the human condition in its totality. But I have now learned to find solace in this.

The world will always be full of frontiers, and if I ever grow too comfortable I know there will always be new people to meet and new lives to explore.

To travel, is to taste those possibilities, even if only for a moment.

Thanks to Lissah Johnson for reading drafts, and Natalia Quinones-Olvera and Fernando Rossine for enlightening conversations on this topic.

Arya Kaul (C) now - forever -> more essays