How to Travel Smart and not be Depressed - a 3 Step Guide.

Hey there fellow brain-melts!

You are wasting your potential and your 20s/ 30s/ 40s/ life and that university education student loan that haunts you every hanxious Sunday morning was absolutely worthless because you are doing nothing useful with your life and any creativity you may have is completely manufactured based on your 6 hour screen time and lack of curiosity.

Sound familiar?

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Not living well/ properly/ as fully as ‘everyone else’ has been my greatest fear since I was 15 years old and I randomly lost my best friend. For the first time I realised that life happens once and every day could be your last so you better make the most of it.

There are two (opposing) philosophical paths to stomp down when you hit the existential crossroads:

(1) Nihilism = giving up but make it chic

(2) Aristotelian ‘good life’ = overachieve in absolutely everything you do and call it ‘virtue’.

Both, in practice, I have tried. Both, are not sustainable and are also not fun.

There is a third escape which has become far more prolific since the advent of commercial airplanes and the interrail card which is -

TRAVEL.

When you cannot decide how to live, you can simply go somewhere else! Yippie!

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The bad news, is that travel risks just being existentialism with better weather. This is because it gives every decision a flattering sense of purpose. For instance -

You are not avoiding your responsibilities; you are in Lisbon.

You are not emotionally confused; you are drinking a tiny coffee in Naples.

There are respectable reasons for movement of course. These include: work, friendships, curiosity, love and the belief that a £26 flight is effectively free. (CO2 vibe).

There are also less respectable ones. Movement provides the sensation that something is happening, and when something is happening, I do not have to ask whether I am using my life correctly. #lifehack

Now here is the thing fools!!

Okay read that again.

And again.

_{Now refund your Ibiza flight.}

Okay good we’re back.

I’d like to make a really heavy NB here. I am the first person to say yes to a trip. I will categorically never reject a sun lounger, a snorkeling opportunity, a €1 espresso bar in Lisbon - but the risk of traveling like this is that we switch off. We focus only on our immediate surroundings, like when the next bowl of olives will arrive or how to get a wasp out of your pina colada. Or, if it’s for work, how to navigate a breakfast buffet while your boss is watching, or the fuck moment when you go from chill drunk to druuuunk at a business event.

Because travel is the answer. Truly.

We get one shot here guys so let’s just do it.

Lets go to Madagascar, or Peru, ride a dolphin, jump off a cliff or out of a plane or approach sentinel island and try to make them drink Diet Coke before getting speared and cooked.

Travel is a spectrum. And if you do it wrong, it is either (1) a waste of time (2) extreme but depressing (#chasinghighs #skydivemoment).

Instead we need to treat travel as a triangle and pay attention to every corner.

The Travel Triangle (TTT)

For legal, moral and therapeutic reasons, I should clarify that Ryanair cannot cure clinical depression.

I am talking about the more common spiritual malaise in which you have visited six countries this year, taken 4,000 photographs and still cannot remember the last time anything genuinely surprised you.

See, moving is not the same as traveling.

You can take your body to Marrakech while your mind remains trapped between Instagram, Google Maps and a restaurant list made by somebody called Millie from Clapham.

You can photograph a mosque without learning who built it, eat the national dish without asking why it became national and call a country “underrated” after spending seventy-two hours in its most expensive neighborhood.

At that point, you are simply moving your existing personality around like hand luggage.

To travel well, you need to move three things:

1. Your body.

2. Your mind.

3. Your heart.

Neglect one corner and the triangle collapses.

Your body gets new scenery. Your mind gives it meaning. Your emotional life allows the whole experience to change you.

Simple. Geometric. Almost scientific.

Let’s begin.

Take notes.

The Uncomplicated Art of Moving your body (via plane/ train/ bus/ car/ bike/ ferry/ cruise (hate)/ blimp/ crawl/ idc).

Starting out simple.

Book the flight. Board the train. Get on the slightly suspicious ferry. Go somewhere where breakfast is unfamiliar and crossing the road requires your full intellectual capacity.

Physical travel is good for you because novelty forces you to wake up.

At home, an hour can disappear between your bed, your desk and a supermarket.

Abroad, an hour can contain a cathedral, a minor linguistic crisis and the best tomato you have ever eaten. But do not confuse distance with depth.

You do not receive one unit of personal growth for every airport endured.

Sometimes a weekend in the next town will alter you more than three months spent “finding yourself” in Bali alongside twelve thousand other people from Surrey.

The objective is not to collect places like fridge magnets (I literally do this and it does bring me joy but there has to be more right? _Right?) .

It is to become present.

—

Some ideas on how to become present (written by someone clearly struggling with being present):

—

(1) Walk without immediately opening Google Maps.

(2) Sit somewhere without photographing it.

(3) Notice how people use the streets, what they eat, what they argue about and which historical person has been placed on the money.

(4) Go on a date with a local without getting kidnapped

(5) At least Duolingo ‘hello’ ‘how are you’ and ‘thank you’

(6) Smoke a cig (doesn’t count when abroad and is in fact very chic - especially if in the Middle East).

The Highly Complex Addiction-Breaking Rehabilitation Practice of Moving your mind

OK guys, we’re getting into psychological territory now.

Curiosity is the mind’s version of hand luggage, except Ryanair has not yet found a way to charge you £46 for it.

(This is the best one-liner I’ve written in a long time, please read accordingly).

I have developed a highly sophisticated three-step treatment plan:

1. Before you arrive somewhere, learn one thing about it.

2. While you are there, ask three questions.

3. After you leave, follow whichever answer continues to bother you.

This does not mean turning every holiday into a doctoral thesis. Nobody wants to share a sun lounger with someone conducting an independent investigation into municipal governance. I made this mistake with my little sister in Hvar. She is curious, brilliant and extremely smart, but it turns out there is a limit to how much Bosnian-Croat politics and ex-boyfriend analysis one woman can absorb over the course of a summer holiday.

Instead, it’s about resisting the urge to consume a place without understanding any of it.

• Why does the city look this way?

• Who drew the border?

• Why is this dish made from these ingredients?

• Why do the buses smell like fish?

The more advanced stage of treatment involves reading beyond your existing opinions. Speak to people who know things you do not. Ask questions that risk revealing you are not already an expert.

This is horrifying, I know.

Those of you who follow me online, predominantly on TikTok, may have noticed that appearing unintelligent for even seven consecutive seconds is a deeply ingrained and sickening fear of mine.

Fortunately for us, intelligence is not knowing everything. It is having a mind capable of moving when it encounters something new.

Because idk about you but I am STRUGGLING to have an original thought lately.

I am going to blame my iPhone, iPad and openAI. Essentially what’s happening is that our creativity is being boxed off by the silicone val tech dweebs as the algorithm says, “People like you normally think this.”

And we go

“uh huh, okay, lemme just scroll on that for 5 hours before bed.”

It is not groundbreaking that this is doing something a little odd to our minds right?

So YOUR job is to occasionally reply, “How embarrassing!! What else is available?” Then dunk your head in ice water.

What I’m saying is that we should try to return from a journey with more questions than we took with us.

Otherwise, we have not expanded our minds. We have not learnt much about the place, each other or ourselves. We have simply flown our existing opinions to another country and photographed them beside a nice building.

The Art of Edging an Emotional Meltdown (In a GOOD way)

Omgggg JUST FALL IN LOVE ALREADY!!

Preferably with an Italian hottie and not the man asking whether you “_{believe in energy}” beside the hostel fridge at two in the morning.

(I dont stay at hostels and this is just one of the reasons why, but I assume you might so this line should land in an inclusive and #relatable way).

The heart can travel much further than romantic love.

It can move towards friendship, wonder, homesickness, grief, embarrassment, tenderness and awe. Its job is not only to love. Its job is to let life leave a mark.

You can visit every country in the world, read the entire hotel library and still return emotionally exactly where you started.

And the saddest traveller is not the one who gets lost, it is the one who sees everything and allows nothing to reach them.

So allow something to happen to you.

Snog someone.

Make a friend you weren’t expecting.

Go somewhere alone.

Say, “I miss you.”

Say, “That hurt me.”

Say, “I would like you to stay.”

Absolutely revolting. Do it anyway.

This is different from chasing highs.

Jumping out of a plane can be frightening _{(I wouldn’t know I’m too scared)}, but so can sending an honest text message. One lasts forty-five seconds and comes with a professionally packed parachute. The other can ruin your entire Thursday.

Emotional travel is not recklessness. Some fear is useful information. Some strangers should remain strangers. Some cliffs should not be jumped from, and some men should be left permanently beside the hostel fridge.

It is about abandoning the belief that the best life is one in which you remain perfectly composed.

A surprising amount of life is lost to trying to look unbothered and through our performative af nonchalant vibe, we unintentionally can become ironic about the things we want.

Very chic. Very safe. Spiritually devastating.

We are so frightened of being cringe that we risk becoming untouched.

But years later, you’ll remember the kitchen where somebody made you tea. The stranger who shared their food with you on a train. The friend who waited when you were running late. The person who kissed you once and permanently altered the temperature of a particular city, or gave you an std. (manifesting the first for y’all).

The point is to be delighted by something small.

To care when caring is inconvenient.

To become attached to people and places you cannot keep.

To accept that a full life will occasionally make you look foolish, leave you homesick or break your heart.

Not every encounter has to transform you, but you should remain transformable.

TAKEAWAY: Travel well enough to be affected.

Let another person complicate you.

Let a place become more than scenery.

Let yourself feel foolish, moved, frightened, delighted, devastated or briefly in love.

The point is not merely to see the world, rather to meet it with enough openness that, every now and then, it gets inside.

So, Kate, in conclusion, how do you travel smart and not be depressed?

HERE IS THE ANSWER (I think):

• Move your body far enough to encounter something unfamiliar.

• Move your mind far enough to understand that your first impression was probably incomplete.

• Move your heart far enough to risk returning changed.

That is the triangle.

Without the body, you remain at home.

Without the mind, you are cattle with excellent luggage.

Without the heart, you are simply collecting evidence that you were alive.

And we only get one shot here guys.

Love,

Kate xx