On a year and a half of travel and tradeoffs
I spent the last year and a half living out of a carry-on, AMA
A year ago today I was in Switzerland. I gave up my San Francisco lease in March of 2023 after months of feeling stagnant and decided to try a sampler menu of other cities.1
Two weeks ago, I signed a lease in NYC after 16 months of travel. I’ve been having a lot of conversations about it recently – friends ask how it feels to be settled, strangers ask why I moved to New York and where I was before, both ask what I thought of my year on the road. Here are some of my thoughts:
Solo travel necessitates a high level of comfort with being alone. I’m not a natural extrovert, I traveled solo for most of the year, and I didn’t know anyone in 90% of the cities I visited. As a result, I ended up spending most of my days by myself. I think it’s normal to overestimate how “glamorous” solo travel can be – the pictures come out nice, but it was definitely a pretty lonely few months.
One instance of being alone that happened to photograph well. I woke up at 4AM to drive to this hike for sunrise and was scared shitless in a pitch-black parking lot. I try not to sugarcoat just how isolating it felt sometimes to wake up alone, in a different time zone from all of my loved ones, and think about how to fill my 97th consecutive day on my own. I sat at every dinner table solo, read a lot of books2, and spent maybe too much time with my own thoughts (not a coincidence that I picked up long-distance running this year). Some days the only conversations I had were with my coworkers over Zoom.3
That said, one aspect of traveling alone that I loved was how present I felt in every moment. Being alone helped me notice and be delighted by the beauty around me – I found I was consciously tapping into my five senses in a way that feels increasingly rare in the smartphone age.
I also loved the freedom of being able to go where I wanted whenever I wanted. If I wanted to go do something, I didn’t have to wait and see if anyone wanted to come with me. I didn’t have to plan around anyone else, I didn’t have to consider anyone else’s time or constraints.
It was empowering to know that I could be content with my own company for months on end. The fear of doing something alone shouldn’t be a reason to not do things, so I’m proud that I came away with a confidence in my ability to do things on my own.Lack of routine makes it hard to do higher-level thinking. I tried to stay at least 1 month in most places I visited, but there were still weeks when I was moving between cities or coordinating my next location that I’d feel pretty untethered. When you’re thinking about where you’ll sleep for the next month or where the nearest grocery store is or how to make sure the WiFi connection is stable enough for remote work, it’s hard to get to the self-actualization part of Maslow’s hierarchy. I don’t think I was able to push the boundaries of what I could achieve professionally or personally because I was too busy worrying about whether the foundational needs would be met.
I also couldn’t plan ahead – the price of freedom was that my plane tickets were always booked last minute because I didn’t know what city I’d be in, I RSVPed a solid “maybe” to every event for a year, and everyone in my life got into the habit of beginning conversations with “So where are you these days?” It was a tough adjustment for someone who’s used to having a six-month, two-year, and five-year plan.
I missed my community more than expected. I had taken for granted how easy my life in San Francisco was with a full and varied group of friends. After spending so much time alone, I developed a renewed appreciation for how much color and joy4 my people brought to my life.
I knew I’d miss a few big moments (two engagements, one wedding, many birthdays, a few reunions), but I couldn’t have predicted how much I’d feel the absence of the mundane moments: sitting on the roof of our Russian Hill apartment eating sesame balls with Soraya, wandering into Zoe’s room (uninvited) to share my latest (unsolicited) thought in the middle of the day, laying in Alta Plaza park on a rare SF sunny morning eating bagels with my friends.
There were a lot of moments when I wished I could share the experience I was having with a loved one, and the best I could do was a photo or a video or a choppy FaceTime.
When I got back from the international leg of my travels, I prioritized visiting my friends spread across the US. Looking back at the year, there were a lot of picturesque moments abroad – the hikes, swimming in the ocean, the Duoro Valley, the Matterhorn. But I was surprised by how much more prominently in my memory lived the little moments I shared with friends in their cities – surprising Natalie at her engagement party in Denver, a driving tour of Evan’s childhood neighborhood in suburban Atlanta, watching Sylvia run her first Boston Marathon.
Big year for Natalie, who managed to get engaged and married before I signed another lease!
I think the year of travel led to one of the biggest changes in my thinking to date. I’m much more aware of tradeoffs: the cost that comes with something you want.
Even just two years ago, I was so focused on getting what I wanted that I never thought about the cost – in fact, I don’t think I was totally aware it existed. I was so fixated on the end goal that I figured, what did it matter what the path looked like? All I cared about was getting there.
I used to idealize the goals I set for myself or the things that other people had achieved. Of course I wanted that investment banking job, or that emergency fund with a year’s worth of savings, or to have met my future spouse my freshman year of college. I think I entered my year of travel with the same mindset – I just wanted to say that I’d done it and prove that I could do it.
Coming out the other end, I find that I think more about the duality of every decision/pathway/experience. Traveling was an incredible experience, but it did mean a lot of loneliness, instability, and missed moments with my loved ones. The cost of that banking job for most people I knew was the deterioration of their relationships, their mental health, their physical well-being. That emergency fund friend hasn’t eaten out in three months and turns down plans regularly to maintain that. Nowadays, the conversations at girls’ night are less about how picture-perfect those college relationships are, and more about the difficult conversations and the work put in to build and sustain meaningful partnerships over so many years.
Counterintuitively, being cognizant of the cost of things has actually brought more gratitude into my life. Where I used to feel envy for other people’s successes, I now see the work and the sacrifice they put in. I’m better at recognizing nuance and conceptualizing what happens behind the scenes before the grand opening night.
I expect that this mindset will help me make more informed, realistic decisions. Instead of discounting costs as negligible, I can weigh what it’ll take to make something I want happen, evaluate critically whether the outcome is worth the cost5 and if so, how to achieve the outcome in a balanced way. I’m finally (reluctantly) accepting that energy isn’t an infinite resource and as much as I want to believe that I can brute force my way into my goals, it’s probably not in my best interest to try to train for a marathon, pick up a new workstream, and move apartments in the same month. I can still have all the things I want – I just have to be smarter about how I allocate my attention to get them (time is zero-sum).
A few of my friends have cracked jokes about how this summer must be so much more boring than the last, given that last summer I was running around some Portuguese islands and this summer I’m running around a fifth-floor walkup. But I’m grateful for the routine because I know that even though it might seem boring to run the same route every morning, have the same thing for breakfast and lunch, and sit at the same desk from 8-5 every day, the stability of my life now will allow me to push myself in other dimensions. A consistent foundation means that I can direct my energy more intentionally towards new goals like: expanding my ownership at work, investing time in new friendships and creative outlets, training for my third half-marathon (and a hopeful PR!).
Maybe it’s not as great of a story, but I’m really excited to explore this chapter.
Refusing to use the phrase “digital nomad” on principle.
Asking me for my book recommendations is like winding up a mechanical toy (I’ll talk until the gears break).
If you were to only have one conversation a day, Mickey and Chelsea are pretty good options for who to have that conversation with.
I think there’s a difference between contentment and joy. I have a theory that you can be content alone, but having good people in your life raises the ceiling for how much joy you can feel.
This in particular is important because I’m entering that stage of my mid-twenties where everyone is getting an MBA.