The Implications of Wanderlust

What does increased travel mean for our future?

“Despite all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us… edgy. Unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood” ~ Carl Sagan

You’ve felt it before. The restless itch arising in the middle of a long afternoon. The vague sense of wonder, of longing, as you look across an open landscape. The urge to move. To explore. To discover. To break out of your routine and remind yourself how to experience the world. To indulge these feelings in spite of every cliché surrounding them.

Wanderlust. The Travel Bug. Whatever words you use to describe the feeling, it stirs deep within you like a hungry animal catching the scent of its next meal. Over millions of years, this drive to explore the unknown has kept our species alive. A drive not just to wander, but to investigate and understand the unknown, to explain the mysteries we come across. To learn and improve with each new discovery.

In nature, long term survival is not the norm. Of all species to have ever inhabited the earth, 99.9% are now extinct. Extinction is the rule — survival is the exception. By itself this may seem bleak, bordering on hopeless. But in many ways, humans are exceptional. A species that survives is not necessarily the species that is the strongest, fastest, or even the most intelligent. In the course of evolution, the species that survives is the one most adaptable to change.

Our instinct to explore, both the physical world and the intangible one, is what has led humanity to thrive. We now have such control over our environments that, with the exception of war and natural disasters, we can stay in one place our entire lives without difficulty. With the ground conquered, we turn our heads up: to airplanes and spacecraft.

I sit and write this mere hours away from leaving my home in the Pacific Northwest to board a one-way flight to India, and remind myself I’m just one small piece in a larger trend. While I’m among the relative minority fortunate enough to have such an opportunity, the global barriers to travel are nonetheless crumbling.

The New Age of Global Travel

In 1980, approximately 227 million people travelled internationally by airplane. By 2012, this number more than quadrupled, soaring to well over a billion people. If this continues, annual air travel demand is expected to double by 2035 ([1] UN World Tourism Organization, 2013)

As technology advances and machines become more efficient, the cost of travel falls. Adjusting for inflation, the price of plane tickets in the past thirty years has dropped to less than half of what it was.

Combining this spike in travel with the communication power of the internet, we’re entering an age of unprecedented interconnectivity. The spread of skills and ideas across countries leads to more innovations from technology to health to travel, which in turn makes it easier to travel and connect, and the cycle repeats. As I plan my travels, I’ve spoken with dozens of people in countries across Southeast Asia who I plan to stay with at different points, most of whom I’ve never met in person.

The Changing Climate (No, not that one)

As more people can travel, they will have the chance to see and reflect on the world outside their bubbles, and hopefully gain some of the amazing perspectives travel has to offer. But what does this mean on a larger scale? I tend to take things from a Big Picture perspective, and the story of how backpacking Europe or Southeast Asia changed your life starts to lose its luster when it’s exactly what everyone expects to hear from you already.

As any traveler knows, attempting to explain your experiences to someone in such a way that they even come close to understanding is near impossible, especially in a single conversation. And so it comes as no surprise when you hear things like this:

“I went to [insert impoverished country], and they had nothing. But they were so happy, and the kindest, most generous people I’ve ever met. It really made me think about my own life, and how privileged we are to live this way.” ~ Most people

In every sense, this is a great thing to understand, and improving your sense of gratitude and compassion should be a lifelong pursuit. But after hearing this same story enough times, I lose focus on the individual experience and I consider instead what this increased volume of travel means to a global society. As is so often the case, I have more questions than answers:

How will this affect politics and law? International law is a tricky area, and enforcing it can sometimes feel like walking through a minefield. As increased tourism and outsourcing stimulates developing economies, more people will be able to travel, increasing trade and interaction. This leads to a rising number of multinational corporations, which means companies from one country will have more power to assert their values on local cultures, if they so choose. As a product of all these trends, among others, law will gradually become more homogenous across cultures.

What about the spread of disease? A rising standard of living and rapidly advancing healthcare will likely offset the worst of things. On the other hand, anyone who’s played the game Pandemic knows how effectively diseases can spread between countries due to higher levels of tourism (unless it’s Madagascar).

How will it influence different cultures? Will we see a blending of different values between countries? Or will the world’s more powerful countries, whether through ignorance or arrogance, inadvertently stamp out the local customs and lifestyles of those we interact with?

Looking Forward

When studying other cultures, we must practice some degree of moral relativism. Different societies care about very different things, and what may seem acceptable in one country may be appalling and offensive in another. However, you still have to draw the line somewhere: some countries still treat women as second class citizens; many others still allow slavery.

This leads to a question. If you’re aware a problem exists, and you can alleviate it without bringing harm on yourself or others, does that create some obligation for you to take action? Particularly as an American, how do I fulfill this obligation without overstepping? We’ve taken it upon ourselves as a world power to play police and fix the world’s problems, but our meddling is met with mixed results, and equally mixed reactions.

Not that we should institute a “hands-off” foreign policy. Aside from any altruistic motives as citizens, it is still in our best interest for other countries to thrive: stronger economies around the globe means more political stability, lower global risk of disease, and increased trade. Increased trade builds world economies, meaning more money and a higher standard of living across the board (“more than 38 million Americans jobs depend on trade,” according to the U.S Chamber of Commerce.) Moreover, most criticisms of foreign aid effectiveness stem from mislabeling, such as political donations being lumped into the same category as famine relief while not actually helping anyone, as Bill Gates explains in this video.

As current generations begin travel the globe in skyrocketing numbers, we have both the means to make a difference and the awareness that we should. Assuming that the typical human cares about other humans, we have the motivation to do something. The problem is that for many people, the inconveniences or obstacles are stronger than the motivation to act. So we’re left with an equation that looks like this:

Action = Obstacles - Motivation

So we can increase motivation, or decrease the inconveniences and obstacles. These may seem like large tasks, but obstacles could be as simple as not knowing how to help. When international aid isn’t your life, you probably don’t feel motivated to get involved any more than the other dozens of other causes you see every day (if this cause is one that strikes a chord with you, consider checking out The Gates Foundation, The Borgen Project, or find charities on GiveWell.)

Besides aid, how do we create lasting improvement in a struggling country, while still respecting local cultures and the autonomy of their people? Just because we can intervene, should we? As I step forward into countless unknowns, these are the types of questions I hope to answer.