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Comments so far are missing a major reason travel is likely enjoyable. One of my favorite theories on why time feels like it accelerates as you get older is tha

Comments so far are missing a major reason travel is likely enjoyable. One of my favorite theories on why time feels like it accelerates as you get older is that your brain tends to only store unique memories. Like that daily commute you do every day and the odd feeling you sometimes get at the end of it where you can’t remember driving… Travel is a set of unique experiences that form unique memories. Part of what’s addicting and pleasurable is that it helps slow down the perception of the passage of time, among many other positives. It’s also self reinforcing in that when you think back, you tend to disproportionately remember travel vs other experiences. There’s clearly a lot more benefits than that, but it certainly seems like a significant factor.

xz0r 5y ago
Time accelerates as one gets older is due to relativeness of perceived experience of duration. 1 year for a person who lived 50 years is relatively short(2%) compared to someone who lived for only 20 years (5%)
- notahacker 5y ago
  Also, if the 20 year old looks back 5 years, they were a hormonal teenager, still growing physically, treated as a minor and had never experienced half the things they'd experienced now. They were a completely different person in many respects then, and if they look back 15 years it's their very first memories. If the 50 year old looks back 5 years, their life probably wasn't all that different. If they look back 15, their kids were still at home and they had a different job title but they were fundamentally the same person, and they feel they've been that way for a very long time.
- uxp100 5y ago
  Is one theory.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  That's just a statement, there is no logic behind why life would be experienced as percentages rather than in absolute time. Personally, I'm more prone to believe the unique experiences concept, because that actually has some basis for it, and also meshes with my real life. I have a few years in my early 20s which are just a blur (because I was working a crummy office job), but I have a year or two in my 30s which feel like a lifetime in themselves, and I can recall numerous specific days, because I was doing a totally new thing (road tripping around the mediterranean)
LAC-Tech 5y ago
I've moved a lot as an adult, and I can confirm that this is true. It's nothing to do with how old you are, and all to do with how much your life changes. Last time I stayed in the same place/job for a few years it was a blur.
CalRobert 5y ago
Explains why life since having kids feels like 5 years have gone by with nothing to distinguish them.
- oblio 5y ago
  You can travel with them, too. It's just not as easy :-)
  - andi999 5y ago
    But also not that difficult.
    - oblio 5y ago
      The grandparent comment was basically saying that most (all?) travel stopped 5 years ago, when presumably they had kids. So at least for some people, based on the fact that they stopped traveling, it is difficult :-)
      - andi999 5y ago
        I believe that is more a choice than a given.
    - CalRobert 5y ago
      It's all relative I suppose. It's a hell of a lot harder than it was! When I travel with adults I don't have to worry ahead of time about handling poop or bringing multiple changes of clothing or buying twice as many tickets or booking a room where it's OK if my kid is screaming for half the night because how do you get a wildly jetlagged 2 year old to sleep? They can't get vaccinated yet either so that's another source of stress too.
      - andi999 5y ago
        My experience is it is easier to go with the flow (with kids), so if the 2 year old can only adjust 1 hour of jetlag per day then you start with going to sleep at 4am and work your way down.
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
someone who gets carsick, i cant imagine. urrgh,
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
This is a more specific instance of something more general: new things are more exciting in the short term. Someone else commented below about the hedonic treadmill. Travel is what creates unique experiences in people because traveling is a rare thing for people in general. When I toured we had 220-230 shows a year, everyday in a different place. I did it for 5 years. It's hard now to even tell one year from the other. I surely made great stories, but most of them are foggy nowadays. Most unique experiences I have left of that time are either global events, I shared the merchandise stand with Nick Alexander the merch manager of EODM the night before he was brutally killed in the Bataclan attack, or too important to forget, like one of the crew members having a baby and rushing him to the airport so he could be there on time.
- mahathu 5y ago
  Who did you tour with?
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    I'm Italian, I toured regularly with an Italian band here and with some small-to-medium band from USA around Europe (the festival season in spring-summer is actually pretty great). They were mainly from the so called "stoner" scene, such as Farflung, Fatso Jetson, Naam, White Hills etc.
    - ff_ 5y ago
      Do you know anything about what happened to Duna Rock?
      - ff_ 5y ago
        Sorry, I meant Duna Jam.
- jseban 5y ago
  Travelling for work is something completely different from travelling for leisure, which is what is meant by travel in this context.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
First time driving a long distance by car as a kid is a huge event of new experience; 1000th time it's become a forgettable drag.
- nicbou 5y ago
  Then you get a motorcycle
  - randcraw 5y ago
    And take back roads (rather than highways).
    - nicbou 5y ago
      And the back trails too!
msoad 5y ago
It feels like you didn’t read it all the way. This is not an article against travel
pastacacioepepe 5y ago
I think time feels like passing faster because 1 month at 50 years old is a much smaller portion of your life than it is at 8 years old. It's a matter of relativity.
- mlyle 5y ago
  I think it's both. It's a much smaller portion of your life, and a much, much smaller portion of the novelty.
ltfey 5y ago
Also, travel tends to give a context to unpleasant or difficult experiences that make them tolerable. They led to something. They weren't mindless petty humiliations like one experiences in an office job (a recurring eight-hour economy-class flight to nowhere). They were scenes in a story. There's a lot about travel that just sucks. Flying is horrible, especially now. Hotels are soulless. You're surrounded by people trying to take petty economic advantage of the fact that you're in an unfamiliar place. Things never happen quite the way they're planned, and while sometimes this produces serendipity, it's sometimes infuriating or even terrifying. Still, people are remarkably able to handle discomfort, pain, and even danger if there's a purpose to it. With travel experiences, there almost always is. Sure, you spent six hours in an airport because some reptilian airline executive saved a few thousand dollars by cancelling a flight... but you got there, and you got to see and do things most people, in human history, could only read about. Travel itself isn't fun at all. It's the experiences that travel makes possible that are rewarding. The good recontextualizes the bad. This is paradoxical in a number of ways. For one thing, putting too much prior effort into engineering the experience leads to high expectations and disappointment. "I saw the thing. Now what?" We often don't know in advance what will produce the true prize memories. For some people, this is infuriating, and they have coped by creating Instagram culture, where the focus becomes the mindless collection of digital images ("look at all the expensive experiences I can buy") that makes travel, far from an escape from our decadent and purposeless treadmill culture, an extension thereof. Travel and "education" are the two forms of conspicuous consumption that are socially acceptable. Spend $200,000 on a car and people will make small penis jokes (as they should) behind your back. Spend $200,000 (or forgo earnings in an equivalent amount) to take pictures of yourself next to recognizable world monuments... and you're "worldly". Travel makes you more interesting, people say, and it sure can... but if it were always so, then why are the people who get to do it all the time, the rich, so uninteresting and so useless? Ultimately, what distinguishes travel is not that the experiences are good or bad in different proportions than are possible in a more homely life, but that we have the cognitive machinery--an innate conception of story--that makes the negative experiences, even if they are in fact petty and pointless, tolerable in the context of what is gained by going through them. In office life, this doesn't exist. We spend so much time there, we know the unpleasant bits are not only unnecessary but utterly detrimental. Office life is never physically or cognitively demanding, but it is emotionally stressful, and furthermore it delivers absolutely nothing of value. The people who stole all the money sell a little bit of it back to you, so you can survive today and return tomorrow. So perhaps the lesson is not that travel is wonderful, but that today's working life is so atrocious that people will spend substantial proportions of what little disposable income the system has given them, not to have rewarding experiences (which are possible through, but not guaranteed by, travel) but merely to escape it.
visarga 5y ago
When you're doing something boring it's the opposite effect - time seems to slow down, but when remembered later, it seems to vanish.
saiya-jin 5y ago
I've noticed this some 14 years ago when doing mighty backpacking trip(s) in India. 2x 3 month trips, traveling all around that place with little plan and just return ticked, planning max few days in advance. Every day was so different. It didn't feel like years after some time on the trip. More like I've switched whole reality, myself and everybody else. After some 2 months, life and reality back home was just a distant dream, too unreal to even consider seriously. Thank god it was before phones and wifi became so commonplace, it massively helped with that, writing an email once a week in some obscure internet cafe. Coming back, it felt I've spent a lifetime away. Twice. Now I judge vacations on how it feels how long it lasted, the more it does the happier I am with deciding for it.
scotty79 5y ago
I feel that time goes faster as I get older but I don't enjoy travel. I don't make more memories in different places. All but few memories from the time I spent abroad evaporate very quickly and I'm left with general feeling that I lost a clearly defined chunk of my life. What remains more often are bad memories about being tired and uncomfortable.
stefandesu 5y ago
I was in Japan for a student exchange in 2016/17 and the amount of detail I remember from that time is astonishing. I can barely remember how I spent my day yesterday (in general I feel like I don't have a very good memory), but I can easily list all the trips we've taken during that semester and remember details that I would usually forget. In general, I feel like most of my memories are structured around my unique (mostly travel-related) experiences. Oh 2015, that was the first time I ever left continental Europe and flew to Iceland in the middle of the semester to visit my friend. Things like that.
dominotw 5y ago
this is exactly how i think about it too. Only diffs counts. so main goal in life is to create as many diffs as possible.
- codethief 5y ago
  This reminds me of one of the most epic episodes of Money Heist where $character, shortly before dying, says something that resonated a lot with me: > Mucha gente cree que en la vida solo hay un gran amor, lo que no saben es que se pueden vivir varias vidas. […] Hoy acaba algo pero es el día de tu siguiente vida. Tienes que vivir muchas vidas […], muchas... (English translation: https://www.deepl.com/translator#es/en/Mucha%20gente%20cree%20que%20en%20la%20vida%20solo%20hay%20un%20gran%20amor%2C%20lo%20que%20no%20saben%E2%80%A6%20es%20que%20se%20pueden%20vivir%20varias%20vidas.%20%5B%E2%80%A6%5D%20Hoy%20acaba%20algo%20pero%20es%20el%20d%C3%ADa%20de%20tu%20siguiente%20vida.%20Tienes%20que%20vivir%20muchas%20vidas%2C%20muchas https://www.deepl.com/translator#es/en/Mucha%20gente%20cree%.... ) I like to think that this can be applied not only to love (like here) but also to switching jobs, careers, places, … anything really that causes a big change (a diff, as you say) in life.
ravenstine 5y ago
That unique experience is hard to find, though, especially as one gets older, I find. Once you've been to a handful of cities, you've kind of seen them all. If you live near a major city it's even worse because chances are you've seen most of what it has to offer, and if you visit another city somewhere else in the world it's like "Oh, yeah... more museums... more theme parks... more bars and clubs... another beach... some skyscrapers... street food... people who don't speak my language... I should have stayed home." I know it's not like that for everyone, but that's essentially why I don't always like traveling and why it annoys me when people tell me I should get out more and travel. When I travel, either I want people or I want solitude. Most of my enjoyment from traveling comes from seeing family and friends, and it really doesn't matter that much where we're situated. But if I have neither, then being in a sea of people is really worse than just being at home. In that case, I want to be alone, and I can easily get that by driving 1.5 hours into the mountains where I live. Travel isn't a bad thing, in fact it can be a great thing. My problem is that we've made travel out to be a grandiose life achievement. In the near past and for millennia, humans spent most if not their entire lives in one place, and there's nothing wrong with that.
- jghn 5y ago
  A bit hyperbolic, perhaps intentional, but I agree. It's compounded by the fact that I'm just not cut out for true adventure travel. Sorry, I need some modern conveniences. The result has been that over the years my travel preferences have become decidedly more milquetoast.
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    I think I might have somewhat similar requirements. I need a nice hotel room. Camping, tracking etc are completely off the table. I've never found that to restrict where I could visit. It does make everything more expensive though.
    - jghn 5y ago
      Yep. If one wants to pay enough money you can get glamor versions of just about anything. Ignoring for the moment that I'm often not willing to "pay enough money" a big part of it for me is that it starts to homogenize the experience back towards that mean we're discussing. It loses some of the unique character. Put another way, some of my travel fantasies are pretty out there, I just know I'll never do them. Even if I had the cash and was willing to spend it, at that point the experience would never match the fantasy.
tarsinge 5y ago
There is a deeper reason for slowing perception of the passage of time: mindfulness. When you travel or do a unique experience you usually are fully committed to living these experiences. Practicing mindfulness has worked great for me to achieve the same results in my everyday life (granted, I have the chance to live in the countryside with a garden). From the outside I don't do much and live a very mundane life, but for me everyday is very different and time has slowed down. Like watching how birds or insects behave differently everyday, trees grow, and more generally how every microscopic bit of nature change slowly day after day to cycle through the seasons. Travel can still be an enjoyable experience but there is nothing more meaningful I'm searching for.
SkyPuncher 5y ago
> One of my favorite theories on why time feels like it accelerates as you get older is that your brain tends to only store unique memories. My theory is that it's less that it only stores unique memory, but it is always trying to resolve things into generalizable patterns. Kind of like a compression algorithm - but in this case not always accurate or reversible. For me, time during the pandemic has been flying by because every day is nearly the same. Wake up work, maybe excercise in the evening, play video games, sleep.
stronglikedan 5y ago
> theories on why time feels like it accelerates as you get older My theory is that everything takes a little longer as you get older, but in very small increments, so you don't really notice it. E.g., getting ready in the morning takes just a few seconds longer each day as you get old and slow down, but you remember it taking a set time, say 30 minutes. Then one day, you're up to 40 minutes, but it still feels like 30 to you. Aggregated across your myriad daily activities, and you're either getting the same amount of things done in a day, but your day is "shorter", or you're just running out of time altogether, because "where did the time go?" So, you perceive that time is moving faster, because you're getting less and less done in the same span.
tjr225 5y ago
Unfortunately, travel has been turned into a commodity just like anything else. “Bragging rights” associated with travel have only become more desirable with the spread of social media, and other things that allow you to “travel” superficially- such as cruises.
NuNotNon 5y ago
I believe culture is a factor that we can't remember and enjoy daily commute. Most people consume just pop culture, that makes them to enjoy and fantasize only "unique" and spectacular aspects of life. I recently traveled by bus not exactly by standards, in a more modest area. Before that I read some literature, which had as characters normal people, with some life situations in which normal people face. It made me feel different that two-hour road, I saw people differently, I felt a little like in one of the stories and I enjoyed.

xz0r 5y ago

Time accelerates as one gets older is due to relativeness of perceived experience of duration. 1 year for a person who lived 50 years is relatively short(2%) compared to someone who lived for only 20 years (5%)

notahacker 5y ago
Also, if the 20 year old looks back 5 years, they were a hormonal teenager, still growing physically, treated as a minor and had never experienced half the things they'd experienced now. They were a completely different person in many respects then, and if they look back 15 years it's their very first memories. If the 50 year old looks back 5 years, their life probably wasn't all that different. If they look back 15, their kids were still at home and they had a different job title but they were fundamentally the same person, and they feel they've been that way for a very long time.
uxp100 5y ago
Is one theory.
oh_sigh 5y ago
That's just a statement, there is no logic behind why life would be experienced as percentages rather than in absolute time. Personally, I'm more prone to believe the unique experiences concept, because that actually has some basis for it, and also meshes with my real life. I have a few years in my early 20s which are just a blur (because I was working a crummy office job), but I have a year or two in my 30s which feel like a lifetime in themselves, and I can recall numerous specific days, because I was doing a totally new thing (road tripping around the mediterranean)

LAC-Tech 5y ago

I've moved a lot as an adult, and I can confirm that this is true. It's nothing to do with how old you are, and all to do with how much your life changes. Last time I stayed in the same place/job for a few years it was a blur.

CalRobert 5y ago

Explains why life since having kids feels like 5 years have gone by with nothing to distinguish them.

oblio 5y ago
You can travel with them, too. It's just not as easy :-)
- andi999 5y ago
  But also not that difficult.
  - oblio 5y ago
    The grandparent comment was basically saying that most (all?) travel stopped 5 years ago, when presumably they had kids. So at least for some people, based on the fact that they stopped traveling, it is difficult :-)
    - andi999 5y ago
      I believe that is more a choice than a given.
  - CalRobert 5y ago
    It's all relative I suppose. It's a hell of a lot harder than it was! When I travel with adults I don't have to worry ahead of time about handling poop or bringing multiple changes of clothing or buying twice as many tickets or booking a room where it's OK if my kid is screaming for half the night because how do you get a wildly jetlagged 2 year old to sleep? They can't get vaccinated yet either so that's another source of stress too.
    - andi999 5y ago
      My experience is it is easier to go with the flow (with kids), so if the 2 year old can only adjust 1 hour of jetlag per day then you start with going to sleep at 4am and work your way down.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

someone who gets carsick, i cant imagine. urrgh,

peoplefromibiza 5y ago

This is a more specific instance of something more general: new things are more exciting in the short term. Someone else commented below about the hedonic treadmill. Travel is what creates unique experiences in people because traveling is a rare thing for people in general. When I toured we had 220-230 shows a year, everyday in a different place. I did it for 5 years. It's hard now to even tell one year from the other. I surely made great stories, but most of them are foggy nowadays. Most unique experiences I have left of that time are either global events, I shared the merchandise stand with Nick Alexander the merch manager of EODM the night before he was brutally killed in the Bataclan attack, or too important to forget, like one of the crew members having a baby and rushing him to the airport so he could be there on time.

mahathu 5y ago
Who did you tour with?
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  I'm Italian, I toured regularly with an Italian band here and with some small-to-medium band from USA around Europe (the festival season in spring-summer is actually pretty great). They were mainly from the so called "stoner" scene, such as Farflung, Fatso Jetson, Naam, White Hills etc.
  - ff_ 5y ago
    Do you know anything about what happened to Duna Rock?
    - ff_ 5y ago
      Sorry, I meant Duna Jam.
jseban 5y ago
Travelling for work is something completely different from travelling for leisure, which is what is meant by travel in this context.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

First time driving a long distance by car as a kid is a huge event of new experience; 1000th time it's become a forgettable drag.

nicbou 5y ago
Then you get a motorcycle
- randcraw 5y ago
  And take back roads (rather than highways).
  - nicbou 5y ago
    And the back trails too!

msoad 5y ago

It feels like you didn’t read it all the way. This is not an article against travel

pastacacioepepe 5y ago

I think time feels like passing faster because 1 month at 50 years old is a much smaller portion of your life than it is at 8 years old. It's a matter of relativity.

mlyle 5y ago
I think it's both. It's a much smaller portion of your life, and a much, much smaller portion of the novelty.

ltfey 5y ago

Also, travel tends to give a context to unpleasant or difficult experiences that make them tolerable. They led to something. They weren't mindless petty humiliations like one experiences in an office job (a recurring eight-hour economy-class flight to nowhere). They were scenes in a story. There's a lot about travel that just sucks. Flying is horrible, especially now. Hotels are soulless. You're surrounded by people trying to take petty economic advantage of the fact that you're in an unfamiliar place. Things never happen quite the way they're planned, and while sometimes this produces serendipity, it's sometimes infuriating or even terrifying. Still, people are remarkably able to handle discomfort, pain, and even danger if there's a purpose to it. With travel experiences, there almost always is. Sure, you spent six hours in an airport because some reptilian airline executive saved a few thousand dollars by cancelling a flight... but you got there, and you got to see and do things most people, in human history, could only read about. Travel itself isn't fun at all. It's the experiences that travel makes possible that are rewarding. The good recontextualizes the bad. This is paradoxical in a number of ways. For one thing, putting too much prior effort into engineering the experience leads to high expectations and disappointment. "I saw the thing. Now what?" We often don't know in advance what will produce the true prize memories. For some people, this is infuriating, and they have coped by creating Instagram culture, where the focus becomes the mindless collection of digital images ("look at all the expensive experiences I can buy") that makes travel, far from an escape from our decadent and purposeless treadmill culture, an extension thereof. Travel and "education" are the two forms of conspicuous consumption that are socially acceptable. Spend $200,000 on a car and people will make small penis jokes (as they should) behind your back. Spend $200,000 (or forgo earnings in an equivalent amount) to take pictures of yourself next to recognizable world monuments... and you're "worldly". Travel makes you more interesting, people say, and it sure can... but if it were always so, then why are the people who get to do it all the time, the rich, so uninteresting and so useless? Ultimately, what distinguishes travel is not that the experiences are good or bad in different proportions than are possible in a more homely life, but that we have the cognitive machinery--an innate conception of story--that makes the negative experiences, even if they are in fact petty and pointless, tolerable in the context of what is gained by going through them. In office life, this doesn't exist. We spend so much time there, we know the unpleasant bits are not only unnecessary but utterly detrimental. Office life is never physically or cognitively demanding, but it is emotionally stressful, and furthermore it delivers absolutely nothing of value. The people who stole all the money sell a little bit of it back to you, so you can survive today and return tomorrow. So perhaps the lesson is not that travel is wonderful, but that today's working life is so atrocious that people will spend substantial proportions of what little disposable income the system has given them, not to have rewarding experiences (which are possible through, but not guaranteed by, travel) but merely to escape it.

visarga 5y ago

When you're doing something boring it's the opposite effect - time seems to slow down, but when remembered later, it seems to vanish.

saiya-jin 5y ago

I've noticed this some 14 years ago when doing mighty backpacking trip(s) in India. 2x 3 month trips, traveling all around that place with little plan and just return ticked, planning max few days in advance. Every day was so different. It didn't feel like years after some time on the trip. More like I've switched whole reality, myself and everybody else. After some 2 months, life and reality back home was just a distant dream, too unreal to even consider seriously. Thank god it was before phones and wifi became so commonplace, it massively helped with that, writing an email once a week in some obscure internet cafe. Coming back, it felt I've spent a lifetime away. Twice. Now I judge vacations on how it feels how long it lasted, the more it does the happier I am with deciding for it.

scotty79 5y ago

I feel that time goes faster as I get older but I don't enjoy travel. I don't make more memories in different places. All but few memories from the time I spent abroad evaporate very quickly and I'm left with general feeling that I lost a clearly defined chunk of my life. What remains more often are bad memories about being tired and uncomfortable.

stefandesu 5y ago

I was in Japan for a student exchange in 2016/17 and the amount of detail I remember from that time is astonishing. I can barely remember how I spent my day yesterday (in general I feel like I don't have a very good memory), but I can easily list all the trips we've taken during that semester and remember details that I would usually forget. In general, I feel like most of my memories are structured around my unique (mostly travel-related) experiences. Oh 2015, that was the first time I ever left continental Europe and flew to Iceland in the middle of the semester to visit my friend. Things like that.

dominotw 5y ago

this is exactly how i think about it too. Only diffs counts. so main goal in life is to create as many diffs as possible.

codethief 5y ago
This reminds me of one of the most epic episodes of Money Heist where $character, shortly before dying, says something that resonated a lot with me: > Mucha gente cree que en la vida solo hay un gran amor, lo que no saben es que se pueden vivir varias vidas. […] Hoy acaba algo pero es el día de tu siguiente vida. Tienes que vivir muchas vidas […], muchas... (English translation: https://www.deepl.com/translator#es/en/Mucha%20gente%20cree%20que%20en%20la%20vida%20solo%20hay%20un%20gran%20amor%2C%20lo%20que%20no%20saben%E2%80%A6%20es%20que%20se%20pueden%20vivir%20varias%20vidas.%20%5B%E2%80%A6%5D%20Hoy%20acaba%20algo%20pero%20es%20el%20d%C3%ADa%20de%20tu%20siguiente%20vida.%20Tienes%20que%20vivir%20muchas%20vidas%2C%20muchas https://www.deepl.com/translator#es/en/Mucha%20gente%20cree%.... ) I like to think that this can be applied not only to love (like here) but also to switching jobs, careers, places, … anything really that causes a big change (a diff, as you say) in life.

ravenstine 5y ago

That unique experience is hard to find, though, especially as one gets older, I find. Once you've been to a handful of cities, you've kind of seen them all. If you live near a major city it's even worse because chances are you've seen most of what it has to offer, and if you visit another city somewhere else in the world it's like "Oh, yeah... more museums... more theme parks... more bars and clubs... another beach... some skyscrapers... street food... people who don't speak my language... I should have stayed home." I know it's not like that for everyone, but that's essentially why I don't always like traveling and why it annoys me when people tell me I should get out more and travel. When I travel, either I want people or I want solitude. Most of my enjoyment from traveling comes from seeing family and friends, and it really doesn't matter that much where we're situated. But if I have neither, then being in a sea of people is really worse than just being at home. In that case, I want to be alone, and I can easily get that by driving 1.5 hours into the mountains where I live. Travel isn't a bad thing, in fact it can be a great thing. My problem is that we've made travel out to be a grandiose life achievement. In the near past and for millennia, humans spent most if not their entire lives in one place, and there's nothing wrong with that.

jghn 5y ago
A bit hyperbolic, perhaps intentional, but I agree. It's compounded by the fact that I'm just not cut out for true adventure travel. Sorry, I need some modern conveniences. The result has been that over the years my travel preferences have become decidedly more milquetoast.
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  I think I might have somewhat similar requirements. I need a nice hotel room. Camping, tracking etc are completely off the table. I've never found that to restrict where I could visit. It does make everything more expensive though.
  - jghn 5y ago
    Yep. If one wants to pay enough money you can get glamor versions of just about anything. Ignoring for the moment that I'm often not willing to "pay enough money" a big part of it for me is that it starts to homogenize the experience back towards that mean we're discussing. It loses some of the unique character. Put another way, some of my travel fantasies are pretty out there, I just know I'll never do them. Even if I had the cash and was willing to spend it, at that point the experience would never match the fantasy.

tarsinge 5y ago

There is a deeper reason for slowing perception of the passage of time: mindfulness. When you travel or do a unique experience you usually are fully committed to living these experiences. Practicing mindfulness has worked great for me to achieve the same results in my everyday life (granted, I have the chance to live in the countryside with a garden). From the outside I don't do much and live a very mundane life, but for me everyday is very different and time has slowed down. Like watching how birds or insects behave differently everyday, trees grow, and more generally how every microscopic bit of nature change slowly day after day to cycle through the seasons. Travel can still be an enjoyable experience but there is nothing more meaningful I'm searching for.

SkyPuncher 5y ago

> One of my favorite theories on why time feels like it accelerates as you get older is that your brain tends to only store unique memories. My theory is that it's less that it only stores unique memory, but it is always trying to resolve things into generalizable patterns. Kind of like a compression algorithm - but in this case not always accurate or reversible. For me, time during the pandemic has been flying by because every day is nearly the same. Wake up work, maybe excercise in the evening, play video games, sleep.

stronglikedan 5y ago

> theories on why time feels like it accelerates as you get older My theory is that everything takes a little longer as you get older, but in very small increments, so you don't really notice it. E.g., getting ready in the morning takes just a few seconds longer each day as you get old and slow down, but you remember it taking a set time, say 30 minutes. Then one day, you're up to 40 minutes, but it still feels like 30 to you. Aggregated across your myriad daily activities, and you're either getting the same amount of things done in a day, but your day is "shorter", or you're just running out of time altogether, because "where did the time go?" So, you perceive that time is moving faster, because you're getting less and less done in the same span.

tjr225 5y ago

Unfortunately, travel has been turned into a commodity just like anything else. “Bragging rights” associated with travel have only become more desirable with the spread of social media, and other things that allow you to “travel” superficially- such as cruises.

NuNotNon 5y ago

I believe culture is a factor that we can't remember and enjoy daily commute. Most people consume just pop culture, that makes them to enjoy and fantasize only "unique" and spectacular aspects of life. I recently traveled by bus not exactly by standards, in a more modest area. Before that I read some literature, which had as characters normal people, with some life situations in which normal people face. It made me feel different that two-hour road, I saw people differently, I felt a little like in one of the stories and I enjoyed.