Everyone has a path before them, the path of least resistance, a way through life that won’t attract to much attention. It probably looks a lot like the life of your father or your mother. By the time you become an independent adult (whether that is 18 or 21 or even 25) you have built up a lot of momentum simply from the circumstances you were born into. Finding your own path in life is one of the best reasons to travel for personal development.
My path looked like this: after high school, go get a university degree, and then get some sort of professional certification, and become a professional; an accountant, maybe a lawyer, or an investment banker. Work hard, climb the corporate ladder, make money, buy a house, accumulate more wealth than your social group, and then maybe when you are financially independent you start a business of your own, something that would come with a reasonable level of prestige.
My parents dictated this path; it is the same as the major bullet points of my Dad’s life. My parents never specifically said that this was what they wanted me to do, but it was easy to get the impression that they thought almost everyone who had taken a different life course was worse than them, especially people with less money. I fell into a social circle of people who reinforced the belief that I had inherited.
Moving cities to go to university I was forced to change social groups. I became friends with the people who happened to be living on my residence floor, who liked to drink a lot, and who were not inspired to try hard at their studies. Once I did have some friends I stuck with them. I was friends with people who were close, easy, and who made the effort to be friends with me. I didn’t put any effort into maintaining relationships. I never tried to seek out and befriend people who shared my ideals and who I thought would make good friends.
My path after university, if it had been the one I wanted would have lead me into a job with a level of prestige, at least compared with my friends. Some form of status that I could cling to and use to look down on the people I was closest with. I had learned that personal value comes in comparison to others, so this was the mindset I had at the time. On the day of my graduation ceremony, I was out eating lunch with my parents at a fancy restaurant and I remember feeling like my parents were proud of me for one of the few times in my life. I had a business degree, I had a smart and attractive girlfriend, I was talking about getting a masters degree, and I was going off to Europe to go traveling. I was firmly on the approved path, living my life just as everyone would have expected.
Traveling after university was part of the path of least resistance. My Dad had done it after he graduated, my brother had done it, and Amanda wanted to go. It was sanctioned and it was easier than confronting the reality that my university grades and my previous work experience was not going to suffice to get me into the type of job I wanted. Even though traveling was part of the path of least resistance for me it would eventually be the driving force in pushing me off of that path.
Six months of travel introduced me to what it was like to live my own life. To wake up in the morning and think, “what do I want to do today?” instead of “what do I have to do today?” It was a taste of being free, but it wasn’t enough to really make me question the path that I was on. I returned home, started looking for a job and resigned myself to progressing on the same path as before. I came back to the same social circle, the same activities, and I became pretty depressed.
The first few months of being home were really hard to deal with. I could remember so clearly how it had felt to be traveling. I had been excited to be alive, and now, working a job I did not like, I just felt bored, stressed, and tired. I thought that the enjoyment of traveling came from the lack of responsibilities, I thought that I couldn’t incorporate that into a life where I needed to make money. I didn’t know at the time that the happiness I was experiencing traveling didn’t come from having no responsibilities, but instead it came from living a self directed life.
Two years of living for the weekend, working, and feeling depressed went by until Amanda and I decided to travel again. Lots had changed in two years. My relationships had all deteriorated; I didn’t really have any close friends. My relationship with Amanda had deteriorated, and was in a pretty bad place.
Over the course of six months on South America I started thinking about how unhappy I was, about the regrets I had, about the negative aspects of my relationships. Traveling gave me space for reflection, and along the way I slowly started to feel happy again, excited by the possibilities of life.
When the time came to return to Canada, Amanda and I talked a lot about how we had failed to live the lives we wanted to, after traveling the first time. We realized that the same paths were not going to work for us. I realized that I needed to get off the path of least resistance, and start living the life I wanted to live. I had been living for other people at home; doing what I thought my parents wanted, what I thought Amanda wanted, what my friends wanted. I had spent my last six months trying to get in touch with what I wanted and I needed to go somewhere new, away from people I knew, to become the person I wanted to be. I didn’t want to be pushed down the path others had chosen for me.
After 9 months back in Canada there have been ups and downs, but for the first time in my life I have found things that I am passionate about, things I want to spend my free time working on. I have connected with people who share my ideals, and pushed myself to grow in ways I never would have before. I am thinking about where I want to take my life and how I want to get there.
I feel pretty lucky to have gotten off the path I was on, and to have come to where I am today. I got to this point through a lot of random events and through a lot of luck. Traveling got me off of my path for long enough that I could stop, look around and think about where I was going. I feel like I woke up one day and started asking myself questions:
Why are you friends with the people you are friends with?
Why do you live where you live?
Why are you hoping to randomly find a job that you will like?
Why are you in the relationship you are in?
Too many of the answers to these questions were “because I have been there for a while”. With all the cities in the world, there should be a really good reason you live in the one you live in. With all the opportunities to invest your time, there should be a good reason you spend your time at the job you have. With all of the people in the world, and the opportunities to connect because of technology, there should be a good reason you spend your time with the friends you have.
When you have been following the path of least resistance for 25 years, a lot of the answers to these questions are uncomfortable. If you are busy enough with work, socializing, and distracting yourself it is possible to avoid thinking about them for a really long time. Traveling gives you the space you need to see where you are going and why.
It can be scary to think about what you may lose by quitting your job and going traveling for six months or nine months or a year. “What if I end up in a job worse than this one”, “what if my friends grow distant”; but the scarier what if is, what if you spend your only opportunity to be alive living someone else’s life?
