Choose your own adventure

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to learn more about motivations for travel.  “Why?” seems to be the most urgent question put to travelers. It’s asked not just by others, but also by the conscience.

Everyone seems to want an explanation — friends, family, former/current/potential romances, current or future employers. Whenever someone asks, “Why are you going away?”, “Why are you traveling?”, or “Why did you do it?”, do you reply directly and justify your decision to travel? How many different answers do you employ?

It shouldn’t be a surprise that a traveler’s stated reasons and motivations will change depending on who’s asking the questions. There shouldn’t be any moral obligation to readily confess the full range of reasons you travel. How many motivations are intensely personal and will always remain a secret?

Yet the focus on Why We Travel remains, especially in blog-world. Pinpointing the source of the pressure to justify one’s travels is the work of another post. For now, I would urge would-be travelers to resist the temptation of aligning their travel motivations too closely with anything read online.

The motivations submitted by we travel bloggers can’t be taken as the whole story. In the days of the Personal Brand, it’s rare that a blog is used as a true confessional. Who knows who might be reading? Rather, Feeling the Need to Justify One’s Travel + Awareness of a Worldwide (including potential customers/employers) Audience yields cliche. Those selling independence rail against routine, pseudomysticism runs rampant, mountains are made out of minor challenges, and the quest for the self becomes an unassailable catch-all.

I’d rather read an anonymous blog that tells the difficult truth.

N.B. – I’m guilty of plenty of the above cliches in previous posts.