That was quite egocentric description of what appears to be culture shock. I'll start with an account I read at a merchant sailor's museum. When the sailors re

That was quite egocentric description of what appears to be culture shock. I'll start with an account I read at a merchant sailor's museum. When the sailors retire, they prefer to live with other sailors, because of differences in worldview between sailors and non-sailors. In conversation the latter might say "You talk about going to Buenos Aires as if it were a trip to the grocery store." The sailors feel out of place, because of the implicit otherness. Now for a personal account, I used to do a lot of tango. (Co-incidentally) Buenos Aires is the birthplace and many will say still the heart of tango. Some people will visit Buenos Aires, take private or intensive lessons, and come back name dropping the studios, and milongas, and teachers they met, and try to pass on the lessons they learned. It can come across as "In BsAs they do things DIFFERENT and BETTER", with a snobbish and arrogant attitude. Why do I say this is 'egocentric'? I'll highlight and explain key quotes: > "Because travel has a way of messing with you and you’re too impressionable in your twenties." This is humblebragging, since the author ends with how personally transformative and addictive travel is. But setting that aside, some people travel overseas when they are under twenty. As a kid we lived in Ecuador for a few years. My sister traveled in France and in Bolivia in a couple summers when she was in her teens, and we did family trips to the Bahamas, Ecuador, and Peru. Are people under 20 somehow not impressionable enough? Or does it take a truly insular life until adulthood to fully appreciate the multi-cultural experience? Or perhaps the best way to build up 'armor' against culture shock is to get it in small doses while young? > "Wait until your thirties or forties or fifties or later because most people are set in their ways by then." Well isn't that a load of ageist manure. Yet it's also oddly compatible with the line "You’ll spend your entire life traveling." This sounds like the author is set in the ways established as a 20-something - just like author says that occurs with almost everyone else. > "First of all, the person who you were before you traveled no longer exists." Not surprising as you can never set foot in the same river twice. Lots of people have transformative experiences, including obvious ones like college, military, marriage, and parenthood, or less obvious ones like Timothy Leary's famous use of LSD at the age of 40, or learning to dance tango. But those obvious ones are boring, run-of-the-mill life changing experiences, down to the point of stereotype. "Yes, you have the most beautiful baby in the world and I love to see the dozens of pictures you post on Facebook every day." "No, I didn't know that poop comes in so many different colors." When you have a baby, or a long-term partner, you start to wonder “Do I want to work 60+ hour weeks and have barely any vacation time?”. When you have teenagers you start to wonder “How come young people in other countries aren’t crippled with student loan debt?” So it's not like these thoughts are special to 20-somethings with international travel experience under their belt. On the flip side, are these traveling 20-somethings thinking "Why doesn't the US have paid parental leave for both parents?" or "Why is the cost of medical care and elder care in the US so expensive?" Likely, no. But it's something a traveling 30-something or 40-something is more likely to be thinking about. > "Your friends and family and peers — they won’t understand. In fact, they don’t really care that you’ve just gone through this transformative journey." The thing is, many of those friends, etc. have also had transformative journey. The parents - the ones who 'will listen to your tales for a few minutes' - have certainly had a transformative experience, just due to being parents. But excepting Timothy Leary, or a few others, relating these transformations to others who haven't had a similar experience is boring. The socially acceptable solution is tit-for-tat. If you want to spend 20 minutes talking about firewalking on the beach in Thailand, then you have to listen appreciatively to your friend talk excitedly for 20 minutes about their child's newest accomplishments, or the differences between L.A. style and New York style salsa. Now, I recognize that this written for 20-somethings who feel a bit of a reverse culture shock coming home. But it's addresses the culture shock by suggesting the reader's unique experiences are somehow better than the unique transformations of everyone else. This is a path towards snobbish that many, including myself, find off-putting. If that snobbishness comes through when relating one's personal experiences, then it's not surprising that friends and family won't even put up with a tit-for-tat exchange.