Travel will change you.

PLEASE for the love of god don't be one of these people who think traveling is going to change them as a person and become more spirtual and enlightened! Travelers like that soon end up talking to the homeless junkies in the hostels and no one else!

Go because you want to, no other reason than that. If you think it will make you stronger, more intelligent, deep, mysterious, more attractive to the opposite sex or cool then you won't get out of it what you should, due to your Ego blocking the way :p

Quote Dj Barbie

Dj Barbie,
I agree and disagree with what you are saying. I believe traveling does change you. But not in the radical ways that most people think travelling will change them: travelling wont make you a more attractive person, unless the people you hang out with are status whores and judge each other by how many places they've travelled, because travelling a lot essentially means having a high social status because it means that you can afford to spend a lot of money. Also being the type of pretentious traveller that you describe could lead to the same consequences as you described.

Nonetheless, I've learned a few things from travelling that i wouldnt have had i sat comfortably in my home. I learned for example, that (amazingly!) i had it in me to take off without relying on the judgement and guidance of any other being but myself, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, i learned what kind of people my friends truly were. People that i deemed adventurious turned out to be the type of people that you describe: they travelled, looked like they enjoyed life, looked like they did so many activities and lived on the wild side and yet it was all a show for facebook. every single time they did something fun, the camera would be snapping them in all sorts of positions to make sure that the people on facebook would see them at their coolest the most refined and most adventurous. It was for the image and not the experience after all. In fact, during those times that on the facebook pictures we looked to be doing the most, we did nothing at all, AT ALL. it was just a photoshoot. I ended up hating them, and hating myself for being in that situation, and I swore i'd never do that again. I wasted time, money, and a gorgeous vacation on a gorgeous place to where i doubt i'll be ever to go back in a really long time. So many of my plans were ruined because of my friends.

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I also agree and disagree... I absolutely agree with "go because you want to, and no other reason than that" - but undertaking anything for that sole reason (i.e., not even going any further than "I want to") is going to change you. Making decisions without expectations always gives you the best results.

All I can say is travel has changed me, I've learned what I've learned from travelling and I know other people are unlikely to share it. I slightly disagree with "travelling won't make you a more attractive person" - to me travelling properly (i.e. not just getting cheaply drunk in another country for a week) does exactly this, I just make better friends with people who are interesting and have a lot of stories to tell than narrow-minded English people who spend each summer in Tenerife yet can't point to Spain on a map. On a side, I can't stand people who say "travelling opens your mind".. if you want to enjoy travelling surely your mind already needs to be open!

One thing I can say about travel which for me is spiritually enlightening - and I'd be interested to hear our originally quoted's view on this who's about to walk from Scotland to Austria - is that walking and travelling alone by myself makes my mind race, it's like a turbo meditation session. Doing this in a country where you don't speak the language makes it even more so as you can probably go for days and days without having a conversation with anyone. Reply to this

um dj barbie thanks for sharing that... it was... enlightening lol i think i just changed a bit as a result
i do pretty much the same thing except that im studying japanese which has no use anywhere in europe. nonetheless, i already speak italian as a second language (english is third) and by proxy i can understand/ speak little spanish and french, speak another european language which is my first language but which i cannot disclose, and have a friend who can speak greek for me (and of course sufficiently know all the words in greek that will allow me to insult swiftly and efficiently lol).
i had this conversation with a friend who was really annoyed at how people who went abroad to australia or england came back pretending they had seen a totally different world fro what we saw day to day here in canada, which we agreed was absurd seeing as its basically the same damn colony, just different architecture. nonetheless though ive spoken to people who have lived for long periods of time in places like japan or hong kong and they're of european descent, who have grown up in canada and that moved to these places around their mid to late twenties. they describe experiences of total isolation, culture shock, and melancholy. besides, its pretty sugoi when they can just start talking to someone in chinese or japanese right in front of me, or know so much about another culture and have adopted quirks like demanding that everyone who enters their home remove their shoes at the door etc etc... has the person underneath changed? no. your temperament, your character is always the same, it has been like that ever since you were four years old and nothing you do will change it(psych major here). but you become more nuanced i guess? much more of an interesting person, quite a bit more openminded, and definitely more knowledgeable about certain things (pertaining to the places youve visited or the experience of travelling itself). Reply to this

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no. your temperament, your character is always the same, it has been like that ever since you were four years old and nothing you do will change it(psych major here)

Psych major? I'm unaware of any psychological theories that don't detail progression of behavior after 4 years old?

Erik Erikson's eight stages

Freud' Stages of Development

Just to name 2. Depends on which Approach you support, I'm no "Psych Major" but I did study it for my degree, and I wouldn't DREAM of saying some has developed or STOPS developing and changing at the age of 4. I was a nitmare as a teen fighting, stealing you name it! Came out of school and grew up and not interested in any of that. and thats a VERY basic example. Reply to this

okay while i'm aware of erikson's, freud's, kohlberg's and even piaget's stages of development, from the perspective of lifetime development, you can still change, albeit not radically.

erikon's theory was that in different stages of life people have different challenges that they have to live up to and adapt to, there wsa nothing there about how you change. freud actually was the one that stated that as one grows through stages one gets stuck in a stage that they do not fully adapt to as a child (same as what im saying), kohlberg's theory of moral development is closer to what mell is taking about, a realization about other people and their perspectives and adapting as you grow a more other-centric perspective on the world, whereas piaget was simply saying that as you grow as a child you accomodate to things you have no comprehension of, and you assimilate those you can fit into your current schemas, etc etc, sorry to go on about psych theories.
nonetheless, what im driven by here is that studies have been done on children for a long long time to see whether children that have psychotic tendencies happen to change after a while. they found out everything can be fixed before the age of 4, but after four there is nothing one can do to make a child that is psychotic, otherwise. i didnt do this research and this is definitely not my personal theory. id like to think children can change after 4 years of age, otherwise the ramifications of these experiments that they have done on children are pretty messed up.
can you change, realise other stuff, learn more about other ppl, accomodate info about the world and adjust to it? sure you can, but its all driven by your inherent tendencies, what you learned as a child and what temperament
fundamentally speaking in psychology there are only 4 major personality traits and they are : openess (willingness to try and be open to new experiences and things), agreeableness (how easily you get along with people), neuroticism (how quickly you get irritated and anxious about things), and conscientiousness (how likely you are to follow through wiht your plans and your responsibilities). all other personality traits are in some form related to these or are a part of these. and its really hard to change (not impossible) these underlying characteristics of people.
thats all the psych major has to say for now. :P Reply to this

i had this conversation with a friend who was really annoyed at how people who went abroad to australia or england came back pretending they had seen a totally different world fro what we saw day to day here in canadawhich we agreed was absurd seeing as its basically the same damn colony, just different architecture.

They might have a point. Same colony but there are some differences. I met an American woman and she said that what she wants to learn from Europeans is how not to define herself by her money. She said that people in N. America tend to do that. Reply to this

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The act of traveling itself I do not think changes a person. However, being exposed to unfamiliar territory and the experiences that go along with being away from your "comfort zone" and things you are used to can make you a more well-rounded individual. Likewise, being away from those comforts may lead you to appreciate them even more when you return from your trip. These may be small changes to some, big changes to others, but change is change.

That is not to say that traveling is the only way to accomplish this, but it is one of the effects I believe traveling can have on people, and, usually, it is for the better. Reply to this

Travelling has also made me very good with managing my money. I have learned how to make the most of whatever money I get. Reply to this