8/10/2023 0 Comments Happy travel thoughts![]() WANLILU translates from Mandarin as “10,000 miles.” As the Chinese saying goes: one is wiser for traveling 10,000 miles than studying 10,000 scrolls. Neither terrorism nor SARS detered me from pursuing and promoting the self-actualizing capabilities of experiential travel. I founded a luxury travel planning service based on these exact same ideas shortly after 9/11. Travel makes us happy, because it offers us the opportunity to step outside our well-worn, self-constructed, plebian realities and provides a platform to explore and practice our ideal visions for ourselves – who we might be if we weren’t married to our fears and anxieties about safety, security and status. I think philosopher and author Alain de Botton hit it on the head when he wrote: “Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.” Courtesy Pexelsīut who needs to spend hours on a boring couch and oodles of cash at the psychoanalyst’s office when one can spend that time and money on a much more pleasurable trip learning how to play polo at an Argentinean estancia? Travel offers us the opportunity to step outside our daily lives. Before him, Carl Jung called it individuation. Travel makes us happy, because it promises us the self-discovery needed to reach the pinnacle of Abraham Maslow’s view of the human hierarchy of needs. We are now living in the “Dream Society,” the organizers of PURE Life Experiences told me in their well-scripted promotional email, in which “Contrary to the procurement of mass tourism products, the creation of happiness through engaging journeys is never based on the knowledge of every detail in advance.”Įxperiential travel is about presenting the customer with the surprise of the “unknown,” the luxury of “unexpected choices” and the empowerment of “overcoming hurdles” (such as scaling a peak) so that he feels he has completed a “journey towards self-actualization.” I had been inspired by an invitation to this year’s PURE Life Experiences conference to ask the debaters: does travel make you happy? Where have you been that’s made you most happy or unhappy? (See their answers below) ![]() At the conclusion of a recent Intelligence Squared Asia debate on whether “Money Can’t Buy Happiness,” the audience was split – 49% agreed and 49% disagreed, with 2% undecided.īut when it came to travel, there was one very obvious winning premise – travel makes us all happy.Īs a luxury travel planner, I thought it was pretty obvious: travel makes us happy, but one needs money to buy wondrous, inspiring travel experiences.
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