# It's Time to Stop Traveling

Source: https://rettig.substack.com/p/its-time-to-stop-traveling?r=3ptcv

## Summary

The author argues that frequent travel is not as beneficial as commonly assumed and can harm investment in health, work, and relationships. He says that building anything meaningful, from fitness routines to businesses to trust, requires sustained time in one place, and that he was only about 20% effective at work while on the road, compared with his estimate of 80% at home. He also argues that after a few dozen countries, further travel brings diminishing personal returns, and that "fly in, fly out" tourism is a shallow form of travel that treats places as commodities. The piece is cut off before its discussion of health is complete.

## Article

The only thing easier than travel these days is not traveling in the first place. Lately, I’m spending less time on airplanes and more time as an armchair traveler from the comfort of my own home.

File this one under contrarian hot takes and playing devil’s advocate.

The universal advice seems to be that travel is good, and you should do it as much as you can. Some travel is good, more travel is better.

But take it from someone who travels a lot, probably more than he should: this simply isn’t true.

In our industry, it can seem as if everyone is constantly on the road all the time, and no one has a home base. Obviously that’s not actually true, but there’s also an availability bias at work here: the people you see the most often face to face at events are, by definition, the people who are on the road the most.

It seems like every day I’m meeting another young, unattached person who has decided to become a crypto nomad and float around the world indefinitely—which is, of course, incredibly common and almost universally accepted in our industry. I don’t know which direction the arrow of causation points: is it that our industry attracts floaters, or is it the nature of this industry that makes it easy to float? The truth is probably a bit of both. It is an attractive, romantic lifestyle, at least on the surface.

I did the full time nomad thing for a while, and it was fun. But I grew out of that lifestyle, and I’ve recently been reflecting on why, and on why I don’t miss it in the least.

The first and, in my opinion, one of the best reasons not to travel is investment. Investment in anything meaningful requires sustained attention and commitment, and with no exceptions I can think of, that requires sitting still in one place for long periods of time. In other words, investment is antithetical to lots of travel. By extension, those who are constantly traveling are failing to invest in some of the most important things.

Interestingly, I think this applies equally in many different areas of our lives. Let’s start with health. Being healthy requires developing a healthy routine: sleep and wake up around the same time every day, have a fitness routine, find healthy sources of food, get plenty of light, have a healthy social life, etc. Nearly all of these things are impossible while on the road! Despite my best efforts, I find that my diet is almost always terrible when I’m traveling, if only because I don’t know how or where to find healthy, affordable, tasty food in new places. I don’t work out nearly as often, or as well, as I do when I’m at home. My sleep suffers, etc. More on this in a moment.

The same is true of work. Building anything of value requires time, dedication, and focus. It’s just not the sort of thing you can do in a few caffeine-fueled hours in a foreign coffee shop on a laptop and a dodgy wifi connection. Maybe some people can work effectively that way. I used to think I was effective that way. I had guessed that I was at about 80%, but when I stopped traveling, I realized that I had only been at about 20% capacity while on the road.

To be clear, there are brief periods in the life of a project—fundraising, road show—when you do need to be on the road a lot, but these should be the exception. And I think digital nomad work is fine early in your career, when you’re in an adventurous mode, trying different projects, different companies, different styles of work with different colleagues. But it’s not sustainable and it’s not scalable. By the time you’re mid-career, you should have a reliable work setup that fits you like a glove: a dedicated work space where you can work comfortably and without distraction, a dedicated time to work every day, etc.

And it’s also true of relationships. In my experience, we get out of a relationship more or less exactly what we put into it. As I’ve said many times, I’m old fashioned and I don’t think we can build trust or meaningful relationships remotely. We also cannot do so with people we see only occasionally, or in passing. Building trust requires frequent, deep interactions, the kind you can only have when you live near someone, frequently run into each other at work or at school, etc.

This is one of the least obvious, most pernicious, dangerous things about the nomad lifestyle and about remote work: you’re constantly meeting many people, and you feel like you have many friends. You’re excited and you feel privileged to have so many friends in so many places. But, in fact, literally none of those friendships are deep ones, the kind of friends who would go to the ends of the earth for you in your time of need. Even the ones that are begin to fade for lack of meaningful, face to face contact. You end up developing many single serving friendships, and no true, deep, lasting, meaningful relationships, including romantic ones. Again, this is probably fine when you’re young and already have lots of friends, but it becomes more and more important as you age and mature, and those early friendships begin to dwindle as they inevitably do.

To do big things in the world, whether starting a family, or a company, or building anything that matters, you need reliable partners. Travel severely damages your chances of having these things.

When I was young, I had a dream of seeing every country on earth. I still haven’t completely given up on that dream, but I’ve been to a lot of places and, to be honest, these days I find travel to have diminishing returns. It’s not that new places aren’t amazing—they are! Every place on earth has truly unique, exciting culture. I’ve met amazing people literally everywhere I’ve been (except perhaps Florida, but that’s another story).

But in terms of personal benefit, once you’ve been to a few dozen countries, most of the continents, rich and poor countries, the northern and southern hemisphere, then, in my experience, with very, very few exceptions (North Korea, Bhutan, and Papua New Guinea come to mind), you’ve basically seen it all. As a result, it takes a lot to surprise me these days.

This is true of basically everything in life! Learning to speak another language is incredibly valuable, but once you’ve learned three or four, there are diminishing returns to learning more. Friends are the currency of life and making friends is also amazing, but once you’ve got three or four close friends, there are diminishing returns from adding more.

The same is true of travel. The real purpose of travel is to learn about yourself, to see yourself and where you come from in a new light. And the degree to which you can do this is going to diminish after you’ve been to a bunch of places. This is not to say that you should stop traveling altogether! It just means that you should reconsider your goals, and your travel style, over time. And you should reprioritize travel relative to the other important things in your life, especially those, like work and family, that require the most investment.

There’s also a subtle risk to traveling too often, to too many different places. The best way I can describe it is with a metaphor. Many people say that dating apps killed dating, a phenomenon famously referred to as the dating apocalypse. This is because it can make potential partners seem like a commodity: it’s so easy to find another one, many people end up constantly comparing the person they’re currently with to all of the other pretty faces they see in the apps, which is dangerous and unhealthy. It’s a recipe for unhappiness.

As I suggested above, in my experience the degree to which we gain from any sort of relationship is directly proportional to what we put into it. This is doubly true of dating and intimate human relationships, and in a world where everyone is constantly trying to “trade up,” too few people are investing enough to develop meaningful, lasting, successful relationships. The results are plainly visible.

I think too much travel can have this effect too—not on birth rates, but on our ability to invest in and profit from it. The simple truth is that, like dating and dating apps, it’s become too easy to travel. Travel used to be a commitment! I’m old enough to remember the time before mobile phones, translation apps, and credit cards that worked everywhere. Going to a new place was a commitment! You needed to learn at least a little bit of the local language. You needed to study paper maps to figure out how to get around. You needed local currency and traveler’s checks. You needed physical guide books. When you arrived in a new place, time would slow down for a while as you had to reorient yourself. For better or for worse, this is much less true today. There was an era, before jet travel, when travel was of course even harder than that. Today, you can open a travel app, buy a ticket, and be in another country in a few hours, with scant planning for many destinations.

The result is “fly in, fly out” tourism (or worse, seagulling: flying in, shitting all over the place, and flying out). People arrive in a place, quickly run around to take photos in the most impressive tourist sites, post them on social media, then go home a couple of days later. They stay in a fancy hotel, inevitably part of an international brand, and eat some pizza. And all this without actually experiencing anything local at all! They may not have even met any locals. While this is the opposite of my personal travel style, I’ve been on whirlwind work trips like this: land on Monday, spend all week in meetings, sneak out for a dinner or some quick sightseeing, then head home on Friday.

This is not how travel was meant to be. In my opinion, it’s meant to be slow, meandering. Time should slow down, at least a little. You’re meant to get lost, and you’re meant to have adventures with locals getting un-lost. You’re meant to sit in restaurants and cafes for hours and people watch, and drink in the local culture, and strike up random conversations with people who barely speak your language. You’re meant to take long, meandering bus rides across the countryside, or end up in the car with a stranger, rather than just seeing airports, airplanes, and taxis, which are of course identical everywhere. (At least this tradition is still alive and well in at least some parts of the world.)

The risk of fly in, fly out tourism is that countries and cities begin to feel commoditized—like dates from dating apps. Add social media to the mix, and it’s even more toxic. You’re constantly trying to one-up yourself, and your friends. We’re meant to invest in the places we visit: invest in getting there, invest in learning about the place, including the language, culture, history, and current events, and you’re meant to invest in relationships with the people you meet there. I think it would do all of us, and the world, a lot of good if we replaced a bunch of long-weekend trips with a slow month or two of mini retirement every so often.

In this way, we can build deeper relationships with a smaller number of places, and really understand the unique beauty of a place—just as it takes time to understand the unique beauty of another person.

The single biggest issue with travel is health. Like so many things, while too much travel is dangerous, a little bit of travel is probably good for your health. It’s good for your mental health, and it’s stimulating, to go new places and be exposed to new things. Maybe, like me, you tend to spend more time on your feet while traveling than at home, since there’s so much to explore. But that’s about where the health benefits of travel end.

And the downsides are myriad! Sadly, travel impacts all of the big three elements of good health: sleep, diet, and exercise.

Let’s start with the simplest part: reaching your destination. These days, this almost always involves a plane ride (or three). As much as I enjoy flying, I find that it’s absolutely brutal on my health. The food is bad and it’s hard to stay hydrated. But the biggest reason is sleep. Sleep is critical, and it’s central to everything health related: without good sleep, you simply cannot be healthy, no matter what else you get right. Missing even one night of sleep on that redeye flight wreaks havoc on your health, to say nothing of the sleep you’ll lose feeling anxious before the trip, and the sleep you’ll lose for several nights after arrival due to jetlag. Then you get to do it all over again when you come home. In my subjective experience, it takes about a week to fully recover in each direction. And it’s impossible to say how much damage I’ve done—to my brain, my muscles, my cardiovascular system, etc.—during those weeks.

Then there’s diet, which is also critical to health and longevity. I struggle with diet even when I’m at home and have more or less complete control over what, when, and where I eat. It’s hard to find tasty, convenient sources of protein, complex carbs, and healthy fats. It’s significantly harder on the road. When I travel, I inevitably end up eating almost exclusively in restaurants, which on average is also terrible for you. It ends up meaning lots of fried food, cheese, generally low quality ingredients, lots of sugar, and carbs, carbs, carbs everywhere.

I see this pattern playing out every time I travel, and I feel helpless to fix it. Of course you want to sample the local cuisine when you travel! Of course you want to attend events and eat meals together with your colleagues and travel companions. Unless you make a huge effort, however, inevitably these meals end up being very unhealthy, like restaurant meals everywhere (to say nothing of the cost). And if you’re staying in a hotel, you don’t have the means to prepare your own meals even if you want to. (This is one reason I always insist on staying in an apartment and having a kitchen for trips longer than a few days.)

Then there’s exercise. As I said a moment ago, yes, I probably do walk a bit more on average while traveling. At home, however, I hit the gym a few days a week. I run outside in the morning. Despite my best efforts, I find these habits to be almost impossible to maintain while on the road. For one thing, I’m usually sleep deprived almost the entire time, especially on a short trip, and when I’m sleep deprived, sleep always comes first. Others might disagree, but I don’t personally see much benefit from working out while short on sleep. Even when I do have time, I often struggle to find a gym, or a running path. I do my best to choose hotels that have good gyms, but it’s often impossible to tell ahead of time whether the gym is any good, and in my experience, even fancy five star hotels often have miserable gyms. When I want to run outside, I often find that the weather is terrible, or that I’m in stuck an urban hellhole like Dubai where running is utterly impossible.

Finally, let’s not forget mental health. As wonderful as travel can be, it’s inevitably stressful. We have to concern ourselves with all sorts of things we don’t have to think about at home. Where are we going to sleep? What’s the condition of the accommodation? What’s the exchange rate? How safe is the area? Can I drink the water? Will my apps work, and which ones should I use? How’s the Internet? How do I get to the next event or attraction? What’s for lunch?

These concerns, while individually small, take their toll collectively. I find the travel itself to also be psychologically exhausting: figuring out how to get to and from the airport, what time to leave, what to carry, whether I’m going to be upcharged for things like baggage, etc. I think this is one of the main reasons why, even if you’re physically not moving much while on the plane, train, or bus, travel is still always exhausting.

Taken together, all of these small things add up to a great deal of stress. I’m someone who tends to handle stress well, but I find that I need more sleep while on the road than I do at home, and occasionally I really start to feel degraded from all of it, physically as well as mentally. I find that it’s much easier to get sick and injure yourself while traveling than while at home. And it’s part of the reason that, after a stressful trip, I often feel like I need a “vacation from my vacation”—and a full week to recover after getting home, after even the jetlag is gone.

All the more reason not to overdo it with travel. All things in moderation! Take a big trip a couple of times a year. Take more frequent, shorter trips to nearby destinations that are more similar to home, more familiar, and involve less jetlag. And when you do have to travel, prepare to be good to yourself before, during, and after travel. Relax your ordinary health related goals: focus on maintenance, and most of all, on sleeping well! Your healthier future self will thank you.

## Comments

**naomiii.eth**: As someone who has been doing this since last year, I agree...

Travel isn't always as glamorous as it's made out to be - and there's no need to go far for a change of scenery. 

There's also quite some studies that show how that these holiday trips do very little for long-term well-being :))

 It's also because, if the last day of the holiday goes shit, we'll view the entire trip through a different lens cause that's how memory works (see kahmeman's work on how we evaluate experiences)