There was a time in our lives when we used to take a couple of vacations in a year. One vacation for sure. Take a week off, go to Goa, and if you earned well, go abroad. That one week was chilled – no calls to worry about, living in luxurious hotels, eating good food, soaking up the weather and completely relax with friends.
Then comes this trend where affluent people who had saved up a significant amount of money, just quit and go travel.
Mind you, the word is travel. Do NOT confuse it with vacation.
Because it is NOT. Travelling is what you did when you went on a “vacation” in your college. Tight budgets, cheap hotels, street food et al. So basically they just quit to go back to the relive the experience they have already had. And they throw away a perfectly good job.
And no, they do not take a sabbatical away from their employers, because most sane employers will not mind giving their jaded employee 4-5 months off. They quit, with a month’s notice and a recommendation letter. And they pack their bags and just leave.
Now, why is it all wrong?
They say that you may not have the time later on.
It is the equivalent of panic selling.
They say that time is your most valuable asset. They say that your life will become a humdrum of a routine. Who knows what will happen in the future? You will have a marriage, kids, and then it’s a life that won’t let you go anywhere. And by the time you realize that, it will be too late.
People who spew this kind of horse manure are the people who have basically given up on life. They think that their life IS going to be monotonous.
That they ARE going to have kids.
They ARE going to regret it later.
When they say that there will be no time left later in life, they are being hugely pessimistic themselves. Who said that you are going to be tied up with a family. You will be tied up with a family when YOU WANT TO. If you do not get married, the question of being bogged down by responsibilities does not arise. Assuming thus will obviously make you panicky. But the point is that you control your life – no one else.
And especially not the people who are telling you to sell out now, while there is still time!
They say you will find yourself when you travel.
This bothers me the most. Somehow, finding yourself always involves traveling widely and Instagramming while at it. If you do not do that, the perception is that you will never find yourself. The idea that somehow you need to get away from the civilization into the wild to find yourself is a very dangerous idea. Somehow it propagates that people who stay in their lives, in normalcy, do not have a shot at finding themselves.
“But it is a matter of personal preference!”
It might be, but millions have found themselves in the chaos of civilization. The calm we seek is within ourselves, not in faraway places.
That is sheer escapism.
They say you meet new people, encounter events that you normally wouldn’t.
Again, if you are a dull, dead person from the inside living in monotony, not even quitting and traveling will rescue you. There will come a day when even traveling will get monotonous for you.
The dynamism comes within ourselves, not from places we travel to.
Meeting new people, learning new things, doing things that are out of the box are all things that can be done anywhere. There are many people who have found fulfilling jobs that take them everywhere they want to go. There are people who network with thousands, living in the same city. There are people who can speak 10 languages, yet do not quit their jobs to travel.
They say you do not know what is going to happen. YOLO.
That’s why. Travel. Quit your job. Nobody knows what the future holds. It is all uncertain.
Yes, uncertainty is the hallmark of future, but the same uncertainty holds true for the time you quit and go away to travel. The same uncertainty will hold true when you are on the road with no road plan. The same uncertainty will hold true when you travel to foreign lands.
And that is why this point is also moot.
People who want to travel should travel, but if you see and observe closely, this is turning out to be quite the fad. A hype train everyone wants the ticket to. Everyone wants to quit and just go away, live on the road, and when the money runs off, just come back, and you have your normal life back!
That is the illusion.
Because how many people around you are giving up their careers and just get up and leave?
Not a lot, right?
The best we can do that comes close to this is just take a sabbatical and go travel. Then come back with the objective of coming back. Have a vacation, spend all your cash. Pamper yourselves silly.
But come back.
Because that is the reality you cannot escape from.
Not everyone has crores sitting in safe investments where you can leech and live off the interest for life.
Get the crores in the bank first.