Hey Colin,
A little over 3 months ago I discovered minimalism, I watched the documentary, Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things, I saw you and I turned to my partner and said I wish I had traveled, as if I had missed my chance.
I have had a desire to travel since I was young and at 19 I started planning a solo trip to Rio, Brazil, but everyone told me how dangerous it would be to travel on my own as a young girl, filling my head with horror stories the naysayers changed my mind.
I’m 24 now, I have a great job that I actually hate, I own a house that didn’t bring me the happiness and contentment I thought it would, the happiness that everyone told me I would get from owning a house. So here I am, my bucket list is still untouched, and I’m feeling more discontent every day.
Me and my partner own the house together and unlike me he has absolutely no desire to travel or sell the house, so I feel stuck and don’t know what to do. I love him but I know I will regret it if I don’t travel the world.
I don’t know anyone who has travelled or is travelling and I need some advice to help me make the right decision.
I understand this isn’t so much a question as it is just me babbling about what I’m going through right now, but I hope you can just be an ear and maybe offer some advice or tips as my mind is all over the place at the moment and I would love to have some idea of what path to take.
Thanks Colin,
Evie
—
Hey Evie-
I feel like there are three main sub-questions here that I’ll respond to one at a time: one about changing one’s circumstances to alleviate discontent, one about the social frictions of wanting to travel, and one about the ability to make such changes within the context of an established relationship.
First, you’re already in a good spot in terms of recalibrating things so that you’re suffering from less discontentment and able to do more of the things you want to do but which you haven’t had the chance to do, thus far.
Simply recognizing that there’s a problem is a vital step on that journey, and now that you’ve noticed and flagged this issue—that you feel stuck and that life perhaps feels a little predictable and clingy, not allowing you do things beyond the bounds of established ritual and well-traversed milestones—you have the chance to make tweaks and/or dramatic changes to that formula.
Before said tweaks and/or changes, though, I’d suggest setting aside time, maybe a few hours, maybe a weekend if feasible, to just sit and think and consider what you actually want your life to look like. Where would you be if time and money and career weren’t issues? How would you be spending your time? With whom would you spend your time and what dynamics would exist within those relationships?
Imagining such a life is valuable because, by default, most of us will chase filler-goals provided to us over the years by well-meaning parents, mentors, and marketers who want us to pursue certain lifestyle goals and buy certain things. We inherit these ideas of what success looks like and follow paths toward such goals, seldom questioning why we’re headed in a particular direction and unlikely to act upon our apprehension even if we do accidentally fall out of lockstep for a time.
This doesn’t mean that more conventional goals and lifestyle milestones are wrong or not wonderful and enjoyable and rewarding: they absolutely can be.
But for some people they’re simply not the right fit.
Any given dress or jacket will be wonderful for the people it fits, and the worst thing ever for folks whose bodies don’t conform to those exact proportions. Most of us require at least a bit of tailoring, and even more ideally something custom-made for our bodies, aesthetics, and lifestyles, so we can live us-shaped lives rather than pursuing off-the-rack goals that fit everyone on the planet kinda’ sorta’ halfway-decently well.
If you’re keen to customize your current lifestyle, take the time to figure out how you’d actually like to be living, consider the elements of that dream life, and sort out which components you can have right now and which you could achieve with a little bit of effort; bending some of your goals to fit within your current paradigm.
It may turn out that most of what you want can be had with just a few tweaks and no dramatic lifestyle adjustments, or it may be that you’ll need to completely rethink everything you’re doing if you want to achieve those goals. In either case, it’s helpful to know how much time, effort, and resources you’ll need to apply to get to where you’d like to be, and what shape that application will take.
Regarding the social frictions you’re currently experiencing and the further frictions it sounds like you may be anticipating when it comes to travel, keep in mind that the majority of fears we have about travel are somewhat warranted, but only in the way that being concerned about dying of a heart attack or being hit by a car are warranted.
Which is to say: there are risks inherent in living any kind of lifestyle, anywhere on the planet.
Consider that you put yourself in harm’s way by simply leaving your home, but almost always that increased level of risk will be worthwhile—in part because the increase in risk is fairly low and in part because what you get in return will almost always be monumentally better than the small bit of security you give up in the tradeoff.
The same is true with travel, with the added caveat that unfamiliar risks are often more terrifying-seeming than familiar ones.
If you live in a place like the US, where car travel is common, driving a car to the grocery store isn’t anything to comment upon and the risk you take by getting behind the wheel fades into the background of other negligible risks you take every moment of every day.
If you come from a city where mass-transit or walking is more common, though, your perception of car-related risk will almost certainly be heightened. The many bad things that can happen while in a car may seem more extreme because the fear of the unfamiliar amplifies our perception of risk, sometimes to comical extremes.
The same is often true of travel-related risks.
The are definitely extreme cases (traveling to an active war zone, for instance) where the dangers will be vastly different from what you’re accustomed to, but almost always the risks you take elsewhere will be permutations of the familiar, not something radically different from that to which you’re accustomed.
Travel isn’t risk-free, but I know young women who travel solo, old men who decide to take their first trip in their 60s, and everything in between.
One needn’t travel to be alive and happy, but it does expose a person to valuable frictions: challenges that’re just beyond what we’re comfortable with, and just beyond what we think we’re capable of facing. And those frictions can help us persevere, grow, and adjust our perceptions accordingly.
Finally, regarding your desire to change things up and how that might play out with your existing relationship.
In general, the best thing to do when something is unclear and/or causing mental anguish in a relationship is to have a very open conversation about it. Until you address the subject with clarity, it’s almost certainly mostly theoretical to him, and thus, he hasn’t had the opportunity or reason to really think through what things might look like if you change your lifestyle to allow for more travel, or whatever else—any adjustment could impact him positively, negatively, or neutrally. So having that conversation is a fairly vital early step as you figure out, with increasing specificity, what you want to do next.
It’s impossible to know for sure how he will respond and what that response will mean for you until you’re able to talk it out.
But it’s important to remember that people shouldn’t live for other people, giving up all of our needs so that someone else can have theirs fulfilled, and to remember that if we’re not structurally sound as individuals—in a good place, mentally and physically—we’re less capable of being good partners.
So anything you can do to ensure you’re feeling happy, healthy, inspired, and to feel like you’re growing and have excess time and energy to share with others is beneficial for both of you.
Importantly, the same is true in reverse.
There’s a chance that he has needs that aren’t being met, as well, and having that kind of conversation will provide him with the opportunity to consider things more broadly, to dream big dreams, like you, and to figure out where he would most like to be according to his own standards, rather than those he adopted at some point earlier in life and perhaps hasn’t had the excuse or time to question.
There’s also a chance you’ll both realize that the best path forward actually forks, with each of you going a different direction, entirely separate or with a very different relationship dynamic than you have now. Which isn’t an easy thought, but it’s a possibility any time people grow or express an unmet desire to grow. Sometimes we grow in different directions, and that’s okay.
The most important thing to remember here is that there’s no right or wrong way to do any of this, and once you take the time to step back and figure out who you are and what you want and what version of yourself you’d like to be, you’ll be in a more optimal position to make clear-headed decisions about what happens next, and how those next things happen.