The Journey

I’m writing from an early morning train winding south from Edinburgh to London, where I’ll change trains and head to Bath for lunch with a dear friend that I worked and lived with one summer at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, who now lives in Wales with her husband and son. I’m on vacation with family, but today I leave early to travel solo down the spine of the isle to the land of Jane Austen. (I am irrationally excited to see the town where some of my favorite Austen novel, Persuasion, was set.)

I watch the sun rise over the English Channel, and most of the towns here in (what I think is) Northumberland are still sleepy and quiet in the early half-light. After watching about a thousand hours of British murder mysteries during the pandemic, all I can think about is the shockingly high murder rate in any of these towns where a great vicar-slash-sleuth lives. (What is Britain’s fascination with clergy who also solve murders? I’m looking at you Father Brown, Sister Boniface, and Hot Vicar du jour from “Grantchester”.)

My Romance with Analog Travel

The last time I visited Edinburgh was 1991, fresh out of high school and at the start of what was, back then at least, the ubiquitous post-graduation backpacking trip through Europe during which I visited ten countries in two months. This was before the Euro; before the internet was what it is today; before smartphones or any widely-available cell phones. Travel at that time was an analog affair. I hauled my copy of Frommer’s Europe on $50 a Day everywhere, dog-eared with hostel and restaurant recommendations. My Eurail pass was a golden ticket to the whole continent, and irreplaceable if lost. I kept it tucked in my money belt along with traveler’s checks, also irreplaceable if lost. Currency had to be exchanged from country to country. I called home once a week from a pay phone and kept conversations under three minutes.

Since then I’ve done a fair amount of solo travel: two months each in South Korea and Germany, six weeks in Italy, two weeks each in Ireland and France. Almost all of it was before the global tech explosion of the last ten years.

Today, my phone gets me anywhere I need to go without having to ask for directions. I can call home as easily as if I were home myself. I have a few Pounds Sterling, but they’re hardly needed — nearly everywhere has contactless payment and I don’t even need to pull out my card, since my phone is my wallet as well as my GPS, travel guide, pay phone, and rail ticket.

I find all of this ease to be a bummer! It takes a lot of the romance out of travel as I first experienced it. Globalization has me feeling less and less away from home. I lament the lack of discomfort and vulnerability. I can go wherever I need to go without having to rely on the locals for directions or recommendations.

I don’t have to rely on anyone, in fact. I can be an island.

I think this is important to note, relevant to the state of the world today, and socially dangerous.

 

Bring Back Vulnerability!

Some of my fondest memories from that 1991 backpacking trip have to do with feeling quite vulnerable, needing help, and discovering the big-hearted nature of nearly every local in every country — even in famously unfriendly France! I forget the details of one particular night in France, when my travel mate and I arrived very late for some reason — we must have been in one of the smaller towns, the ones that rolled up the sidewalks at 9pm — and had to find a place to stay. Why? Had we missed the hostel’s curfew? Forgotten to reserve a room or a bed somewhere? No idea. What I’ll always remember, though, is the very kind Frenchman who walked with us from place to place for nearly two hours until we found a room for the night. He displayed such care and concern for us wandering free spirits. After we’d finally secured a spot, he told us he would have invited us back to his family’s house, but hadn’t wanted to wake his wife and child so late at night by calling to make sure it was okay to bring a couple of strangers home.

In October 2024 I visited Portugal for the first time, and Europe for the first time in nearly ten years. Even in that span of time so much had changed; before my trip to Paris in 2015 I’d had to make sure I had a debit card with one of those new-fangled chips that had become ubiquitous in Europe but not yet so in the States, and my phone had been essentially useless outside the reach of a wifi connection. Fast forward to a few months ago and I could have stuck my nose into my phone for just about anything I needed. Luckily, I had started reading How to Break Up with Your Phone a few weeks earlier and had decided to leave my phone in my bag as much as possible. I got a hard copy of the Rick Steves’ Portugal guidebook and tore out the sections for Lisbon and Évora to carry around with me.

Any time I had a question about where to go, what to see, how to get from point to point, I checked my impulse to use my phone to find an answer. Instead, I asked people. So old-fashioned! I learned some basic phrases in Portuguese and did my best to not ask, “Fala Inglês?” until I was completely out of options.

There’s real beauty in being vulnerable.

Vulnerability & Happiness

It turns out that vulnerability, trust, connection, and happiness are highly correlated. The world’s happiest countries are also the countries with the highest levels of social trust between people, and between citizens and their institutions of government. Nordic citizens, for instance, enjoy governments with high levels of transparency and low levels of corruption — something I took for granted until it was gone here in the States.

This social trust gap was exemplified in a 1997 incident when a Danish woman was arrested, strip-searched, and her baby briefly removed from her care, after she left the baby unattended outside a restaurant in NYC’s East Village — an exceedingly common practice in Denmark, indicative of Danes’ high level of social trust, and embarrassingly telling about Americans’ hysterical levels of social distrust. Strip-searched? Seriously?

Over the last several decades American parents have succumbed to rising fear about their children’s safety in the real world — which social psychologist Jonathan Haidt blames largely on our media, and which has led to overly-supervised, play-deprived, device-addicted, chronically depressed and anxious children, and parents who end up “overprotecting children in the real world while underprotecting them in the virtual world”.

Apart from parenting practices, we in America are acutely aware of how easily we have been manipulated by social media and the governments that we now know are quietly corroding our social fabric, sowing distrust and disrespect for others through bots and trolling (never mind our now firmly embedded contempt for those who think differently than we do about social, political, and economic ideas).

While vulnerability, trust, connection, and happiness are inextricably linked, so are isolation, distrust, loneliness, and unhappiness. America ranks pretty high on loneliness ratings, with 36-52% of citizens feeling lonely on a regular basis depending on the source, while the Nordic countries’ loneliness rates vary from 16.6% (Denmark) to 27% (Sweden). In Denmark 74% of people report feeling that people are generally trustworthy, while only 37% of Americans feel the same way. In the 2024 World Happiness Report, the Nordic countries rank 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 7th, while the U.S. ranks 23rd. I spoke on a recent podcast episode about some of the practices that help Nordic countries to regularly rank highest in the world for happiness, and their strong social connections have much to do with this.

 

Travel: A Unique Opportunity

There’s a lot we can do to increase our trust and connection, and most of it has to do with getting a bit lower to the ground, so to speak: more meeting up with each other in person, cultivating local communities, getting to know your neighbors. Vulnerability is a bit harder to practice in our everyday lives; sometimes you have to step outside of your regular circumstances, and international travel is a wonderful way to do that. Be warned though, that modern global technology can keep us safe in our little bubble even while halfway around the world. Here in the UK I could hop from McDonald’s to Starbucks to H&M, tapping my phone at each spot and basically feeling like I never left home. If I don’t know where to go I can just plop the destination into my map app and follow directions as if I’m walking in my own neighborhood. If I’m in a country where English isn’t the native language I can just translate my question in a phone and hold up the screen to a local without ever having to take a stab at speaking their language. In short, I don’t ever have to feel nervous or uncomfortable.

Which would be such a bummer.

Learning to be comfortable being uncomfortable allows me to travel just a bit like I did as a teenager. And when I do, a bit of the magic returns. I feel alive in ways unique to international travel, to being a stranger in a strange land. Right-sized, wide-eyed; vulnerable, trusting, connected, and happy.

 

Do you have a favorite memory of when travel gave you the gift of vulnerability? Please share in the comments or hit “reply” and tell me your story!