Why do people travel? Why don’t we just sit at home in comfort? What is it that makes some people want, even need, to travel, to roam, to explore? Is it just that, a desire to understand, to unearth new experiences, to do something different, to break the mould, to avoid the boredom and monotony of sedentary living or is there something more deep-rooted in our psyche?
To clarify, by travel I mean the urge to see new places, experience new things and challenge one’s preconceptions in the process. This is fundamentally different to a holiday where the seeking of pleasure is the primary aim. It is the incontrovertible truth that many travel experiences are dull, repetitive, tiring and even downright frightening. Travel though must have some sort of itinerary, some basic structure and a final return home. Otherwise it becomes wandering, moving with no purpose and no timeline. While related to travel this is something else, an extension of our nomadic past as explored by Bruce Chatwin (Songlines) and Richard Grant (Ghost Riders). Travel is always defined by an eventual return home, while wandering is aimless or at least without an aim as such, a way of life rather than an experience. Travel could be considered the soft cousin of wandering but I think they are fundamentally different in terms of motivation. Wandering is something more deep- rooted, travel more peripheral.
The writer Paul Theroux wrote “that all travel is both a flight and a pursuit” and he is not the first to hit upon the seemingly schizophrenic nature of travel, “do I stay or do I go now” as the Clash would say. Every traveller will have experienced the warm rush of familiarity and bonhomie on returning home, only to be replaced by the itch to get moving again in a few months’ time. So much to see, so little time – should I stay or should I go now?
So why do we do it? Maybe the question should be reversed – why stay? Why be content with the same, day in day out? Why would somebody not want new experiences and adventure? Intuition suggests there must be some link to our nomadic past. Perhaps the move from hunting and gathering to agriculture and husbandry, often described as the single most important shift in human development, marks the point at which wandering begins to be replaced by travel. Now there was a home to return to, crops to sow and reap and animals to feed and milk. The nomadic lifestyle of the wanderer suddenly seemed unnecessary and dangerous.
But why did we still travel? Any suggestion that travel is a modern innovation is dispelled by a closer look at the lives of our predecessors. While the ability to travel may have been limited to few, there is no doubt that those able to, travelled. They travelled for many reasons. To administer distant lands, to trade, for enlightenment, to escape persecution, the reasons may be limitless but they all resulted in travel.
Ironically, today when there is probably the least need to travel in history with modern communications and social media transforming the way we live our lives, the number of people travelling is far greater than we have ever experienced before and far greater than many of our cultural highlights can endure in the long term. The need to travel seems deeply embedded in our human psyche, but why it persists so strongly remains a mystery.
