newelty

As a former writer for a Guidebook Company That Shall Not Be Named, I’m partial to thoughtful essays about why we travel. Guidebook work is about facts and trends, neither of which lend themselves to any reflection whatsoever.

Yesterday I picked up the amazing new McSweeney’s, made in newspaper form. Coincidentally, I had already bookmarked this blog post from Jonah Lehrer on the cognitive inner workings behind why we travel, which is part of McSweeney’s No. 33.

“Why do we travel? It’s not the flying I mind–I will always be awed by the physics that get a fat metal bird into the upper troposphere. The rest of the journey, however, can feel like a tedious lesson in the ills of modernity, from the predawn x-ray screening to the sad airport malls peddling crappy souvenirs. It’s globalization in a nutshell, and it sucks…

But most travel isn’t non-negotiable. (In 2008, only 30 percent of trips over fifty miles were done for business.) Instead, we travel because we want to, because the annoyances of the airport are outweighed by the visceral thrill of being someplace new. Because work is stressful and our blood pressure is too high and we need a vacation. Because home is boring. Because the flights were on sale. Because Paris is Paris…

The larger lesson, though, is that our thoughts are shackled by the familiar. The brain is a neural tangle of near infinite possibility, which means that it spends a lot of time and energy choosing what not to notice. As a result, creativity is traded away for efficiency; we think in literal prose, not symbolist poetry. A bit of distance, however, helps loosen the chains of cognition, making it easier to see something new in the old; the mundane is grasped from a slightly more abstract perspective.”

This rings true for me. I travel to seek novelty, to feel my newelty-meter increase because of stimulus I’ve never encountered before.

For more on a similar line of thought, I highly recommend Alain de Botton’s book, The Art of Travel. Here’s a favorite passage:

“Of all modes of transport, the train is perhaps the best aid to thought. The views have none of the potential monotony of those on a ship or plane, moving quickly enough for us not to get exasperated but slowly enough to allow us to identify objects. They offer us brief, inspiring glimpses into private domains, letting us see a woman at the precise moment when she takes a cup from a shelf in her kitchen, then carrying us on to a patio where a man is sleeping and then to a park where a child is catching a ball thrown by a figure we cannot see…

At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves–that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas important to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.”

Happy Monday, and may you–like me–enjoy spending today dreaming of your next big trip.