I travel a lot and one big advantage of travel I've found is not necessarily all the 'cool adventures' but the fact that you're around strangers all the time so you're allowed to experiment with your personality.
At home you become one version of yourself and people know you and treat you as such and you respond in kind.
Everything becomes sort of routine to maintain the status quo.
Travel is amazing because you literally have no preconceived notions or expectations from other people so you can experiment and be different versions of yourself and no one will be the wiser.
You can learn a lot about yourself and others this way.
When I'm at home, I'm always afraid of keeping up the same persona. I have very bad social anxiety at home, I'm terrible at talking to people at gatherings, haven't been on a date in four years.
But when I'm traveling, none of that matters:
> Travel is amazing because you literally have no preconceived notions or expectations from other people so you can experiment and be different versions of yourself and no one will be the wiser.
You're 100% right. I go overseas and I have no trouble meeting new people, enjoying myself at bars and clubs, asking a cute fellow traveler out to coffee in Taipei or wherever the hell I am.
The trick is learning how to bring that home. Still figuring that one out though I've gotten better.
What if you can't bring it home? What if your home environment is arranged such that you're at a significant disadvantage or there's toxic situations happening that keep you socially anxious at home?
Obviously your social anxiety stems from 'being at home'.
Maybe there's actual tangible external reasons causing it at home that you're not even aware of....
You're probably right. My anxiety at home even manifests as eczema, such that it completely disappears when I'm traveling but reoccurs the day before I fly home.
It might just be fear of upsetting the balance that home life provides even if you tend to gravitate towards the organized chaos to which you've become accustomed.
That makes sense. Much of my anxiety is just remnants of some real bad shit I went through four years ago. Part of my reluctance towards getting close to people is a fear that I'll fall into the same situation I was in back then.
I think being yourself all the time wherever you are is incredibly counterproductive. I don't view myself as perfect, which means there are areas of my own self I want to change, and without me consciously attempting to become different from my current self, absolutely nothing will change and indesirable personality traits will just continue to perpetuate themselves.
Some behaviours just clash with your environment, and there's always the decision whether a change to your environment or a change to your perception of your environment is the wiser path to take in resolving these conflicts. Maybe moving to a different place will solve your anxiety problems (toxic environment), or practicing to become more confident (internal change) will do so.
Telling someone to "Just be themselves, all the time, wherever they are" however tells them to ignore any of these conflicts and in my view is an incredibly pessimistic view in a certain sense. You're telling them that their environent is a certain way, that their self is a certain way, and that they might as well run head first into their environment without changing their trajectory, because that's the right thing to do, and that that is the obvious thing to do, that their attempt at changing either is futile. If they do happen to suffer due to these conflicts, then that is the fault of the character and environment lottery they just happen to have lost.
Now there might be character traits that you want to strenghten, and maybe your perception of your environment prevents you from doing so. I think that's the only case where a limited "Just be yourself (more)" is a step in the right direction. In any other case it's just encouraging virtues and vices in the same way, and due to that, blindness to which is which.
Haha, the psychology of the 'self' is very very interesting and a little scary.
Do you think all of your thoughts are 'completely original' and created by you?
Or do you think that most of your thoughts stem from things you have experienced in the direct environment of your life and your overall personality,goals,likes and dislikes are built upon these thoughts and experiences? And therefore by changing your environment and experiences you would be a completely different version of yourself?
What if you were born to a Saudi Arabian family? What are the chances you would be a Muslim, possibly signifigantly conservative, you wouldn't like the TV shows and music you currently like, your goals would be drastically different because the culture has different socially sanctioned versions of success, etc.....
How much of you is really 'you'? Where does the idea of 'you' begin and where does the surrounding world stop?
>What if you were born to a Saudi Arabian family? What are the chances you would be a Muslim, possibly signifigantly conservative, you wouldn't like the TV shows and music you currently like, your goals would be drastically different because the culture has different socially sanctioned versions of success, etc.....
Yes, if both my genome and my upbringing were different, I would be a different person.
Is this really insightful? Where is the insight, for those seeing insight here?
I know for a fact I'm a different person when I'm with my mom, standing alone at a bar, with my friends. Friends is a big thing, often when I travel I notice that amoung groups of friends, especially ones straight out of high school, there is a clear social hierarchy. You can't help but think that the follower type should have gone alone and learned to talk to strangers better.
Travelling and meeting a wide assortment of people really does grow your own personality in interesting ways, it's human nature. You get to test out different traits that people who know you would raise an eyebrow at. I bet it gets quite complicated and involves how trust is formed and how people who act sporadically are less trustworthy. That trust game just isn't in play with strangers you'll never see again.
Just don't let them search you out on facebook, the personality trait status quo enforcer.
When I was in my 20's, I'd do something similar, but at different bars / clubs. One bar felt very much like a "Cheers" type of bar (comfortable, felt like a second home). Another was a Country / Western dance club type, where I was a totally different person. Not to mention my work persona, etc.
This has a lot more to do with your personality than travel, I think. To me, genuinely being myself is the thing that's liberating; the added stressors of travel do little to with finding clarity in this realm.
Not trying to get all hippie dippie or existential but I think your personality is strongly influenced by your environment so 'being yourself' you're talking about is just one 'version' of yourself.
There's a genetic component for sure... but environment is huge I think.
Indeed the definition of human growth is built upon changing yourself and exposing yourself to novel situations/environments and stress-ors where you have to become a 'new version' of yourself..whether more competent, more wary, more upbeat, more physically capable, etc. in order to overcome the challenges.
However, I don't think you have to travel to Costa Rica and stay in a eco-friendly yurt in a rainforest for this.
Just somewhere significantly far away where you don't have to maintain any sort of status quo. Pittsburg is as good as Paris in this regard.
At home you become one version of yourself and people know you and treat you as such and you respond in kind. Everything becomes sort of routine to maintain the status quo.
Travel is amazing because you literally have no preconceived notions or expectations from other people so you can experiment and be different versions of yourself and no one will be the wiser.
You can learn a lot about yourself and others this way.
It's also extremely liberating.