4 Painful Sacrifices Required for Long-Term Travel
Mount Rainier, Washington
Our lives are defined not nearly as much by what we choose to do as they are by what we choose not to do. Every single choice that we make in our lives means that we're choosing not to do a million or a billion other things in that given moment.
The possibilities of how we could spend our lives are truly endless. Have you ever stopped to consider that if you really wanted to, you could completely and radically change the fabric of your existence? If you're a software engineer in San Francisco, you could choose to quit your job, move to Atlanta, and work construction if you really wanted to. If you're a lawyer in New York City, you could fly to Vietnam and teach English in an international school instead.
If you live in a city, you could move to the country. If you have never left your home state, you could choose to travel the world. If you always moved around as a child, you could choose to pick a town and invest it in it as a long-term home and community.
If you've never been a social person before and you have few friends, you could push yourself outside of your comfort zone, learn new conversational skills, and radically transform your social life. Conversely, if you've always been surrounded by dozens of shallow friends, you could cut those shallow friendships out and focus on the few gems instead.
Our lives are defined by the constraints we put in place—the things we're willing to give up. But giving things up and putting constraints in place is painful, and it can hurt. It can feel like a loss.
One of my favorite questions to ask myself is, "What pain am I willing to sustain?" (Taken from Mark Manson's book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.) To me, this question means: what am I willing to continue struggling for, even when it's difficult and even when it hurts? What am I willing to sacrifice and give up in order to achieve something better, in order to create an exceptional life? (Not an exceptional life based on someone else's standards, but rather, an exceptional life based on my own personal values.)
These questions definitely apply to the desire for long-term travel.
Are you willing to sustain the pain that long-term travel requires?
Tucson, Arizona
Trendy van lifers on Instagram make #VanLife seem glitzy and glamorous, care-free and easy. The same can be said for digital nomads flying off to exotic beach destinations to sip mai tais and pretend they're working on their laptop in a hammock, when we all know how fucking uncomfortable trying to work from a hammock would actually be.
I'm not here to rip on digital nomads or van lifers at large, because I'm one of them. I've experienced both of these lifestyles while traveling full-time for almost three years.
But you want to know a dirty little secret about many of the glamorous van lifers and digital nomads you see on Instagram?
Many of them are fucking faking it.
You heard me. Hundreds if not thousands of these glamorous accounts pretend to be full-time travelers living this glitzy lifestyle, but if you read the captions and watch the accounts for long enough, you'll realize that most of the people behind these glam accounts are, at best, traveling part-time.
They'll fly off to an exotic destination and claim to be a "digital nomad," but in actuality, they only spend a month or two traveling per year, and while they're overseas, they've never given up their apartment back home. For the vast majority of the year, they are just working from a permanent home base in a city like every other shmuck.
The same goes for glamorous van lifers. If you look at these van build photos and note the utter lack of necessary supplies, you quickly realize that, at best, they're on a two-week trip to a coast that can easily be reached from their home city. They're living "van life..." but only for a few nights at a time. They never actually make the sacrifices that are required to travel full-time, to truly live on the road and not have a home base to return to.
These people, despite their hundreds of thousands of followers, are not willing to do what it takes to travel full time. They're not actually willing to sustain the pain of travel.
4 Painful Sacrifices Required for Long-Term Travel
So what do you have to be willing to give up? The exact sacrifices required to travel full-time will vary from person to person, but it is a certainty that you WILL have to pay the price if you're going to go all-in. The only question is, what will be required, and are you willing to embrace the pain with open arms?
Here are four of the most painful things I've personally had to sacrifice to live this lifestyle for the past three years (and counting):
Community
Squamish, British Columbia
Personally, community and close relationships has been the number one major sacrifice that's been required to travel full-time. I do my best to still maintain a sense of community and relationship by taking as many opportunities as I can to visit family and friends while I'm traveling, to meet new people along the way, and to (hopefully) make new friends. Despite these efforts, there's no way around it: by constantly being on the move, there's no way that you can invest as deeply in friendships and community as if you were living in the same town day in and day out, year in and year out.
If there's one sacrifice that will one day bring an end to my travels, it's this one. I miss friends and family when I'm away. Especially if you're traveling on your own, solo world travel can feel incredibly fucking lonely when you don't speak the native language. Even traveling with a significant other can have its lonely days, as you both wander through cities or hang out at campsites and realize that you don't know another soul for thousands of miles in any direction.
Comfort
Tucson, Arizona
Even if you're globetrotting and living in AirBNBs along the way and you aren't dealing with the challenges of day-to-day van life, you have to be willing to embrace discomfort and uncertainty at every turn.
Especially as an international digital nomad, you have to truly embrace a minimalist lifestyle. There's no way you can have your preferred espresso machine with you at every apartment you travel to. You can't bring your shelves filled with books, your exercise equipment, or even as many clothes as you'd like. You might not be able to find your favorite food in the local grocery store, your AirBNB might not have a measuring cup (or even a coffee maker)... the list of small discomforts is endless.
When living in a van, you can have your preferred French Press and clothes with you, but you're faced with different discomforts like finding places to shit and shower (the two biggest challenges of living in a van), finding a place to fill up water instead of just turning on a tap with an unlimited supply, and so many other small challenges.
Security
Germany
If you ask most homeowners why they bought their house, a common response is "for security." When you're traveling, you're eminently insecure. Shit has a tendency to go wrong when you least expect it. In many ways, being a successful traveler is dependent on learning to deal with the shit that goes wrong in an easy-going and effective manner.
If any experience has indicated how insecure traveling can be, the COVID pandemic did. Millions of digital nomads from around the world had to pack up their bags and fly home at the drop of a hat for fear of being stranded in a foreign country.
Or did they? Not everyone did. Some nomads weathered the pandemic in place in whichever country they found themselves in at the time. Those are the true badasses of long-term world travel.
Never mind that "security" is a massive fucking illusion. We're always insecure, always balanced on the knife-edge of oblivion, even if we don't realize it.
Efficiency and Optimization
...but efficiency and optimization of what?
Full-time world travel optimizes for having new experiences and seeing new places, so in a sense, it is efficient in this way. But you can't optimize for everything at the same time, and so you'll need to sacrifice optimization in other areas of your life.
One of these sacrifices could be work. While I'm a firm believer that you can be a highly efficient and effective employee as a digital nomad, if you start adding in a side hustle on top of your day job, try to start your own business on the side, or are trying to work massive amounts of overtime at your standard job... things begin to crack and break apart under the pressure. It's tough to optimize for massive amounts of work efficiency while traveling full-time. One job? Sure, totally doable. A 9-5 and a couple of side hustles? That's probably too much.
Optimizing for the perfect diet can be very difficult when traveling. You might not have access to all the foods that you want to eat or the cooking space to prepare them in the perfect way. You very often have to use whatever you find at your disposal, such as the particular foods sold in the local grocery store and the plates and utensils (or lack thereof) in your rental unit. I'm usually ok with this, but even as a non-picky eater, it sometimes irks me when I can't find the exact foods I'm used to.
Finally, optimizing your fitness routine can be quite difficult when traveling full-time. While I can usually get my most beneficial exercise in, not having a home gym setup for stretching, foam rolling, and cross-training in addition to my riding and aerobic workouts continues to prove challenging. Even when it comes to aerobic training, it can be difficult to optimize your workouts perfectly when you're constantly heading out into new or unfamiliar terrain. It's much easier to train and push yourself when you know what the trails are like, how difficult the climbs on your planned route will be, and where and when you can push yourself to stretch and improve your fitness.
Parting Thoughts
Choosing to travel the world full-time or live in a van is a choice that, while opening up many millions of possibilities, shuts down millions more. By choosing to travel, you're choosing to give up many other major benefits in your life. You're choosing to endure certain types of pain and certain types of struggle.
The question you need to ask yourself is: is it worth it? Is this struggle, this sacrifice, worth it in order to free myself from my tiny box in the city and so I can go out and see the world?
Only you can answer that question.
