My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

To learn more about the book, please visit here, and you can listen to a conversation about the book on a podcast with the New Books Network here and on Spotify:

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Last year, I wrote a post titled Getting Offline and Touching Grass: How Do We Encourage Others to See the World Differently? I want to return to this thread for a moment because there has been something stirring in the zeitgeist—our current political and cultural moment—that speaks to this deep urge many of us feel to change our habits, values, and goals, both individually and collectively.

Many of us feel inexplicably uneasy living in “modern times” and desperate to simplify our lives and lead a more purposeful existence, yet do not know where to begin. In terms of material comforts, most of us live incredibly comfortable and enriched lives by historical standards. And yet, many of us still feel utterly exhausted and constrained due to how cluttered our lives have become. If thoroughly examined, I suspect most of us would report feeling as though we do not have even an inkling of time to invest in all the things we all, deep down, want to be truly doing instead.

Far too many of us are working rather uninspiring jobs or are tied to seemingly endless life obligations that sap a great deal of our time, attention, and energy for the bulk of our existence on this planet. Much of these activities we are “getting through” day to day not because we want to be doing them necessarily, but because we suffer under enormous societal pressure and responsibilities to provide for and sustain families, communities, and various organizations. We get wrapped up in a vicious cycle of work-spend-consume-repeat. This tends to create a deeply unsettling hollow feeling inside of us. The anthropologist in me can’t help but see that the world we inhabit now, and the hectic, fast-moving lifestyles most of us lead, are not only strange and antithetical to human well-being but vastly divergent from what most of human existence was in the past—one we often imagine as simpler, slower, and more fulfilling, albeit not necessarily easier.

Our endless debts keep us bound to a repetitive lifestyle that can eventually wear us down and force our minds to confront some of life’s most existential questions related to meaning and purpose: What am I doing with my time here? Is this the life I truly want to lead? How do I reorient my life if I am dissatisfied? Do I even possess the power to change my circumstances if I want to?

The phrase “living deliberately” derives from one of Henry David Thoreau’s many famous quotes, where he lays out his basis for simple living in his renowned work Walden, or, Life in the Woods:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

This passage is filled with beauty, a rigorous quest for simplicity and truth, and a zest for life that I suspect will always speak to our desire to live life to the fullest. Thoreau, in reflecting on his mortality here, forces us to contemplate our own death and how we are to cherish our own life, not to squander it on trivial pursuits found in material obsessions, but grounded in the “essential facts of life.” Yet the modern world, despite all its great achievements in the material space, still somehow manages to throttle our desire to “live deep.” How can that be?

While escaping society to live in the woods may strike many as extreme and unachievable today, a more moderate version of “living deliberately” is achievable for most of us when applied incrementally to our daily lives. It is also worth noting that Thoreau doesn’t seem to have ever married or had a life companion, nor did he have children. He also had the fortune to have a mentor in Ralph Waldo Emerson who allowed him to essentially squat on his land for the two years, two months, and two days that afforded him the ability to leisurely figure out what “living deliberately” meant in his quaint little cabin in the woods. Thus, he didn’t have to contend with what living deliberately means while juggling families and other financial responsibilities like most of us, at least during this hiatus at Walden Pond. Nevertheless, his words are still on point and full of truth worth meditating on.

To my mind, “living deliberately” fundamentally means two things: (1) reducing or eliminating the things in life that unnecessarily complicate or negatively impact our well-being. This could be downsizing our home because it has become unwieldy and taxing on our time and attention. There could be relationships in our lives that also need to be given more space or perhaps severed entirely due to how much mental or emotional strife they cause us. And (2) proactively incorporating positive things into our lives and working them into our daily routine. It might be as simple as committing to a morning habit to stretch, do yoga, meditate, or run to get in better physical and mental shape. More substantially, we might need to take time off from work to travel or simply recalibrate our lives, especially in light of major life challenges such as losing a loved one, suffering from a serious illness, or recovering from trauma.

Together, this combined approach of subtraction and addition to our lives will, if implemented consistently, dramatically increase the well-being of our lives and get us closer to leading a more intentional existence. The other phrase from Thoreau’s quote I like to dwell on is the “essential facts of life.” What are those essential facts? I think those ultimately vary according to how each of us perceives them, but they closely approximate what I detailed in a previous post on the equation to the good life:

“While I think many factors contribute to the well-being of humans and do not believe there is a one-size-fits-all equation to the good life, I do think there are some general features that contribute to a well-lived life. This rough equation, or rather working hypothesis, toward a ‘theory of life satisfaction’ looks like this:

That said, for us to be able to construct our own viable equation of the good life, we must first learn how to proactively insert the values, habits, and goals into our lives that we aspire to. This requires a lot of time reflecting on what things we truly value. What are the “essential facts of life,” and what reasonable habits can we begin to cultivate to achieve our goals given the constraints we’re currently under? Can we begin to uncouple some of those constraints, if only a little? If we have identified what those essential facts of life are, are we living up to our expectations? For instance, most of us would rank being with our loved ones as one of our top priorities. Yet when we are in each other’s presence, are we making the most of our time together? Are our conversations with each other wholesome and meaningful? Are we giving each other the full respect and attention we deserve, or are we continuously distracted by our screens, squandering invaluable time to build lasting memories with each other?

I have been actively experimenting with Thoreau’s philosophy of living deliberately for nearly half my life now since I read his work in my early 20s. All these things that allow us to live a more intentional life are, as mentioned, highly variable. For me, the working list of things I continue to do or aim to do that allow me to live more deliberately literally began with Thoreau’s book Walden and continued from then on with the value I have placed on reading and learning, which is an endless lifelong pursuit.

Reading books. I’ve been actively reading on average about 2-3 books a month since I started tracking my reading in 2015. I don’t share this to brag, but to illustrate that simply working a doable habit into our lives, like reading x number of books per month or year, incentivizes a personal expectation and goal with ourselves.

Some may think that time isn’t on their side to add something this demanding to their hectic schedules, yet believe it or not, I even maintained this same reading schedule of 2-3 books a month while in grad school, working part-time, teaching classes as an assistant, and having our first child. (And most of those books were often extracurricular from what I was reading in graduate school). That is how much I value reading, and it goes to prove the point that when we prioritize our values, we will find ways to manifest them.

And this becomes true for each additional thing we learn to prioritize and actualize in our lives. I’ve also done this with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (actively practicing 2-3 times a week) and have done the same with running, hiking, and biking over the years. Gardening has also become a high priority in the last couple of years and has improved my life immeasurably and is perhaps one of the greatest exercises in living deliberately because it literally grounds you to the earth and the changing of the seasons.

And in the subtraction category, I am always on a quest to simplify my life as I “prune and purge” our house items (although nearly all my books are obviously exempt from this process). Part of this might derive from my OCD, but I am constantly evaluating what things in our house we no longer need or can donate or sell. I am incessantly asking myself, “What can I live without?” or “How can I simplify my life more?” I abhor clutter and sense it’s a great source of unconscious stress for many of us to be surrounded by a chaotic environment. I have a hunch that when the space we inhabit is orderly, our thinking is likewise.

There are many more things I am actively pursuing or aspiring to do that I feel will guide me to living a more deliberate life and feeling most alive, which includes traveling, having adventures, cooking, hunting and fishing, backpacking, catching more sunsets and sunrises, making home repairs or improving something in our house, splitting firewood, taking my son somewhere he wants to go on a random weekday, learning to play the piano, learning languages, and discovering ways to become more involved in my community.

As I wrote in a previous article on Thoreau and living deliberately, we ultimately must learn to first make mental shifts in our thinking before we can deliberately reorient our lives,

We have to learn how to reclaim our intentionality. Being an intentional person means taking an active role in our lives. That might sound cheap and hacky at first because it sounds like we’re being led like puppets on strings and are devoid of free will. Are we not, after all, the authors of our own thoughts and actions? What does it mean to live a deliberate life?

The good news is that we all already know what it is like to live a deliberate life because that is what children do. As children, we once saw the world exclusively through a lens of purpose, curiosity, and unconstrained vitality. How do we return to that mindset? Can we return to that mindset?

While building a one-room cabin in the woods like Thoreau and living a life of simplicity has always been a dream of mine, I know that isn’t happening any time soon. But I learned years ago how to make moderate tweaks to my habits and behavior that accumulate over time. We’re all on different journeys in our lives and reclaiming our intentionality is going to vary for each of us. However, we do not all need to continue “leading lives of quiet desperation” as Thoreau once lamented...We all can begin by reclaiming our intentionality at any time we want.

In Remembrance: Wendell Berry

As a final nod to someone who knew a few things about the “essential facts of life”, I will share a poem that my wonderful wife Hilary shared with me a few days ago that we’ve been reflecting on by the author Wendell Berry, who passed away this week on Monday, August 31, 2026 (coincidentally my birthday). Wendell was yet another remarkable human being who epitomized the idea of living deliberately. This is his poem, ‘Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front’:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
 vacation with pay. Want more
 of everything ready-made. Be afraid
 to know your neighbors and to die.
 And you will have a window in your head.
 Not even your future will be a mystery
 any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
 and shut away in a little drawer.
 When they want you to buy something
 they will call you. When they want you
 to die for profit they will let you know.

 So, friends, every day do something
 that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
 Love the world. Work for nothing.
 Take all that you have and be poor.
 Love someone who does not deserve it.
 Denounce the government and embrace
 the flag. Hope to live in that free
 republic for which it stands.
 Give your approval to all you cannot
 understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
 has not encountered he has not destroyed.

 Ask the questions that have no answers.
 Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
 Say that your main crop is the forest
 that you did not plant,
 that you will not live to harvest.
 Say that the leaves are harvested
 when they have rotted into the mold.
 Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

 Put your faith in the two inches of humus
 that will build under the trees
 every thousand years.
 Listen to carrion – put your ear
 close, and hear the faint chattering
 of the songs that are to come.
 Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
 Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
 though you have considered all the facts.
 So long as women do not go cheap
 for power, please women more than men.
 Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
 a woman satisfied to bear a child?
 Will this disturb the sleep
 of a woman near to giving birth?

 Go with your love to the fields.
 Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
 in her lap. Swear allegiance
 to what is nighest your thoughts.
 As soon as the generals and the politicos
 can predict the motions of your mind,
 lose it. Leave it as a sign
 to mark the false trail, the way
 you didn’t go. Be like the fox
 who makes more tracks than necessary,
 some in the wrong direction.
 Practice resurrection.

May your coming weekend and days be lived deliberately.

For consideration:

• How do you live a more intentional life?

• What things are you aspiring to add or subtract from your life to live more deliberately?

Leave a comment

Related articles:

• Getting Offline and Touching Grass: How Do We Encourage Others to See the World Differently?

• How Travel and Adventure Factor into an Equation of the Good Life

• The Case for Slow Travel and Slow Reading in a Fast-Paced Society

• Would Life Improve If We Abandoned the Internet and the Rest of the Digital World?

• How Do We Combat Brain Rot? Heed Thoreau’s Advice to Live More Deliberately

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Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB

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Want to read more from Those Who Wander?

My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

To learn more about the book, please visit here, and you can listen to a conversation about the book on a podcast with the New Books Network here and on Spotify:

Subscribe now

Greetings, fellow wanderers,

Today, I am once again republishing another post from the archives.

As Those Who Wander continues to grow, I recognise that many newcomers to this Substack may not have access to or be familiar with some of my initial writings. With over 150 posts in the archive, I aim to make some of the paywalled posts more accessible to a wider audience.

That said, if you have been enjoying these ramblings on travel, adventure, and anthropology for a while, please consider supporting my writing, which grants you full access to everything I’ve written on Substack, including excerpts from my book.

An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is a first-person account of backpacking the Appalachian Trail that dives into anthropology, travel, fear, and the meaning of adventure in culture and society. If you love social science, adventure, and travel, this book will be for you. Subscribe and stay tuned for more updates and upcoming events.

The book is available for order on all major online retailers, including Amazon (here), Barnes & Noble (here), and Bookshop (here). If you’ve recently read the book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

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Cheers!

-JSB

Now onto today’s archived post, The Flâneur and the Freedom to Walk

The well-being of human life, culture, and society depends on a baseline set of standards. Food and water must be gathered and continuously supplied. Shelters need to be constructed and maintained. One must feel safe and secure in their homes, on the street, and in their wider communities. In aggregate, humans must first reach a certain threshold of basic physical and psychological standards before obtaining higher aspirations akin to those spelled out in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

However, once our material standards have been met, we all seem to crave something beyond the material world. Whether we are secular or religious, we all desire deeper meaning to our lives, and there is a realm of experiences that many of us yearn for. We feel this urgent sensation, but rarely do we know how to appease it. Where should we begin seeking this “meaning” in life? Some of us believe that we must go searching far and wide, way “out there” beyond the horizon. However, a forgotten method of exploration suggests we begin our search by aimlessly wandering wherever we find ourselves right now.

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A flaneur is a French term that is simply defined as “an idler or lounger” and was first ascribed to 19^th-century affluent males sauntering down European boulevards, idling their days away while everyone else worked. How nice that must have been. A slightly better definition describes the flaneur as “primarily a leisurely observer of city life, someone who wandered through urban landscapes, observing but not actively participating in what they witnessed. This allowed them to experience and analyse city existence from a detached, external perspective.”

However, these definitions fail to capture a few important things. First, there is too much pomp and classism dripping from this definition, which makes it seem as if this behavior can only be for an elitist class of scholars, artists, or writers who have the luxury of spending all day with their heads in the clouds. Second, it is too city-centric–one can just as easily apply this mode of thought to rural or purely natural settings as well. Lastly, it misses or downplays the larger significance of the experiential aspect of those who partake in this activity or what can be gained from having the mindset of a flaneur. This isn’t simply a casual stroll for mere entertainment or relaxation per se, but more akin to walking mindfully.

This concept of slowing down to wander and explore one’s immediate environment is quite a revolutionary and democratic act. Henry David Thoreau, a flaneur in his own right, captured this sentiment perfectly when he wrote, “It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.” Likewise, Marcel Proust also famously opined, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” As I argued in Wandering and Mindfulness: On the Right to Slow Down,

“Slowing down and appreciating the small details of our world is one of the most remarkable discoveries and enhancements one can make to their life. It is a central component to what I mean in my definition of wandering—appreciating that adventure is all about how you see things rather than what you look at or where you are situated on the globe. Acts of wandering infused with mindfulness allow adventures for anyone, anywhere.”

This is essentially what the true flaneur is up to. It wasn’t their outward appearance of walking around in some flamboyant outfit to be admired by all the lowly laborers of the 19^th century, nor was it entirely the large sum of wealth they had accumulated that allowed them to idle their days away. Rather, this was a creative mindset and philosophy of life that one stepped into on occasion and a skill in how to be captivated by one’s surroundings. The flaneur is attempting to live in the present by admiring how infinitely interesting everything around them is. It follows that given the right attitude and attention, wandering one’s own town, city, or countryside can be just as thrilling as strolling down some grand boulevard in a famous European city or park.

Thus, if one has the acuity to harness this mental skill of the flaneur, virtually any place on the globe becomes worth traveling to. That is why I think the art of wandering is such a revolutionary, democratic, and liberating act at its core. However, this is easier said than done, especially when we live in an increasingly populated and industrialized world. After all, we need plenty of places to wander freely.

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There is (to be overly dramatic for a moment) a “war on walking” that greatly hinders our ability to walk casually through our cities and towns nowadays. Many of us probably scoff at the idea of someone blissfully and casually lost in a modern city. Cities fill a lot of us with instant anxiety and stress from how overstimulating such environments have become. Heavy, loud traffic; pollution; and sirens echoing from a firetruck or ambulance–all create a cacophony of assault on our senses. Physically trying to cross streets and crowded sidewalks with our heads on a swivel and doing our best not to run into others makes the idea of slowing down to “take it all in” laughable in this hectic environment.

Also, it should be noted that this “war on walking” isn’t a conscious conspiracy led by the plane, train, and automobile industries but rather a long-term process of urban planners and politicians succumbing to the winds of change and trying their best to make appropriate changes for transportation and commerce for their towns and cities. Nevertheless, these inevitable changes have often come at the expense of the pedestrian way of life.

The author Rebecca Solnit, in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, noted that “Freedom to walk is not much use without someplace to go.” As a consequence of industrialization, we’ve spawned a world that “accommodates the automobilized and suburbanized mind” with the “privatization of space,” where previous public spaces in cities and towns that were once much more densely integrated and had naturally evolved for walking—allowing for the free flow of people to wander, to interact, to exchange ideas, to democratically assemble and protest with much ease—have been dramatically altered and eliminated to make way for suburbs, highways, and other infrastructure for driving and expediting consumerism. This has had a tremendous effect on the ways we perceive and experience space and time, especially within cities and towns.

Our bodies have evolved to function in a world completely unlike the world we now inhabit, and as a result, Solnit worries, “that body has begun to atrophy as both a muscular and a sensory organism.” This sudden phenomenon of technology supplanting the functioning of the human body, leading to a lack of movement, may help explain rampant health problems in society such as obesity, stroke, high blood pressure, and osteoporosis, along with such marketable niches of gyms, dietary supplements, surgeries, and tenuous gadgets and other modern charlatanism promising to make us perfectly fit in 30 days or less. The physical effects are just the beginning. How we think individually and collectively is also transformed as technology and the rapid transformation of society influence our bodies and minds in unpredictable ways.

We cannot control the winds of change, and while many spaces of cities and towns are difficult or impossible to casually traverse, we can rest assured that, for now, there remain plenty of places to wander. The fact is, most of us likely inhabit places with the freedom to walk somewhere–parks, trails, nature preserves, railroad tracks, downtown squares, and endless miles of unexplored streets. Maybe those places aren’t always the most idyllic, and perhaps they are even downright shabby—we would, after all, be hard-pressed to find anyone who genuinely enjoys walking down a city block of boarded-up foreclosed homes. However, I’d venture to guess that there are still many beautiful unknown spots to explore within walking distance of wherever we find ourselves. The only down payment they require is a small investment of our time and attention. As I stated in my earlier post,

“[M]aybe we don’t always need some far-flung expensive tour around the world to bring us greater contentment in our lives. Many of us wish we could travel more than we do but learning how to appreciate smaller acts of wandering and mindfulness may be more empowering than we first realize. Applying mindfulness to the wanderings that are accessible right out our back door or in our own neighborhoods is what most of us have control over and can do to live a more adventurous and fulfilling life. How do we remain enchanted by the places we’ll spend most of our time? Is it possible that we can see these mundane places we’ve lived in for ten or twenty years with fresh eyes and explore them as if we’re just now visiting them for the first time?”

There are plenty of places around the globe where walking feels more natural than others. Some of those places are by design, like Dublin, Ireland, which has been referred to as a “walker’s city” and a place I recently traveled to and wrote about. I envy those who live in such enchanting ancient cities or have quick access to the mountains and seashores of the world to easily ramble along. But I have to remind myself time and again that while I can only occasionally visit some of these places, I have to mostly live in one spot on the globe at any given time. I have to learn (and often relearn) how to appreciate what immediately surrounds me. I have to step into the mindset of a flaneur from time to time and take advantage of one of the greatest freedoms of all and one I always have access to: the freedom to walk.

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Related articles:

• Adventure as a Mindset

• Dublin and Its Environs: A Walker’s City and the Weight of History

• Applying the Adventurous Mindset: Room Travel with a French Aristocrat

• Wandering and Mindfulness: On the Right to Slow Down

• The Case for Slow Travel and Slow Reading in a Fast-Paced Society

• Traveling Versus Wandering

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB

Share

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Want to read more from Those Who Wander?

My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

To learn more about the book, please visit here, and you can listen to a conversation about the book on a podcast with the New Books Network here and on Spotify:

Subscribe now

I’ve been a father for over five years, and this experience has dramatically changed my relationship with travel and adventure. In the first couple of years, I was concerned with how I would sustain my wanderlust as a parent. When I look back on my former self, especially before I had the experience of being a parent, I notice that I had a limited view of things. I had a lot of fears in my twenties about having children, mainly thinking that it would completely compromise my interests and my ability to continue to travel and have adventures. In other words, I had made it all about me.

In the absence of children, I assuredly would have gained a few grander adventures by now. However, I would have also missed out entirely on some fundamental insights into life. I would not have discovered what it means to instill the value of adventure in a child.

When I reflect on the meaning of travel and adventure, what I really desire is not more adventures just for myself (although I will always gladly welcome those opportunities), but learning how to inculcate adventures in others. In other words, I already understand why travel and adventure are important. What I truly want, and what I think is far more important to figure out, is how others come to value wandering too. What better way to learn how others come to appreciate adventure and “seeing the world” than watching it happen through the eyes of a child?

Having children and watching them interact in the places we take them is perhaps some of the greatest anthropological training one can receive, even if it is a biased case study and small sample size. My running theory for how to get people to see the value in cultivating a life of travel and adventure is the same as how one writes good literature: Show, don’t tell.

When we examine how others become motivated and inspired to travel and have adventures, we see that it can take place at many different stages of life. Some of us do not have the means to travel all that much from an early age, and we may not get to travel well into our 20s, 30s, or maybe not even until after we’ve retired. But one thing that seems clear is that, of the sample of travelers and adventurers, the desire to travel is often instilled at an early age. Either a parent, a close relative, or something in the broader culture such as books or film ignites something in our minds with an insatiable curiosity to one day venture deeper and wider into our world.

One thing I have learned in the last few years about how to instill a “culture of wandering” in someone is learning to be flexible yourself. This hasn’t always come easy to me as I’ve historically been a stubborn person, wanting things to go exactly how I plan things. As I wrote recently,

“I used to tie myself up in knots when things didn’t work out exactly as I’d planned. I was rigid and hard on myself. Like a child throwing a tantrum because I didn’t get my chocolate bar as a treat, I’d be enraged with myself or blame it on others or often “the system,” some abstract entity that had wrecked my plans. Yet through these many iterations of travel plans going astray, I was forced to accept my folly, temper my reactions, and choose an alternative route of adventure. In time, this painful lesson has sunk in…

You have to cultivate the right attitude and mindset. There is a kind of superpower to be learned here: You can pivot when things don’t work out. Like water over stone, you can learn to flow with much more ease around obstacles and train yourself to be better composed and clear-headed in the midst of the unexpected struggle or unplanned roadblock, which is perhaps one of the most edifying lessons of life.”

What’s more, it will help your children tremendously if you can provide them with frequent exposure to the world in many different places and settings. These don’t need to be expensive, far-flung, exotic corners of the world necessarily, just eclectic enough to give them a feel for how wide and diverse the world can be. This may feel cumbersome at first, but in time you will be pleasantly surprised with how well they adapt, and this can only benefit them throughout their life.

To map out a brief trajectory of our family’s travels: Our son Walden was born in the waning days of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2021. We managed to take him on his first plane trip to Nevada and Arizona, where we rented a car and took a road trip from Las Vegas to Sedona and the Grand Canyon.

In 2022, we took our first international trip with him to Mexico City.

In the last three years, we’ve taken numerous trips, and he’s already visited almost half the states in the U.S. and visited half a dozen National Parks at this point. We camp at local state parks in Indiana occasionally and hike regularly.

While the initial years of parenthood and travel had their occasional challenges, I’ve come to realize just how adaptable children are to the world—the insight being that when you place your kids in many different environments, they often adapt more readily to all sorts of changing situations. You are effectively inculcating them with an ethos or culture of travel. Learning to sleep in tents, hotels, parking lots, cars, etc., or being on the move with you as you grapple with the many challenges of travel, flight delays, standstill traffic, forgetting things, losing sleep, or having to reorient plans. The hope is that they are slowly learning things about the wider world that are ultimately preparing them for the grander challenges they will face down the road. We should not underestimate the many unforeseen benefits travel and adventure have to offer.

All these minor inconveniences and stressors, I suspect, grant kids a power of flexibility and resiliency over time that they wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to if they are only being routed back and forth to schools and homes with rigid schedules and limited freedom, as an increasing number of kids are nowadays. The growing consensus of “helicopter parenting” and everyone else being too obsessed with safety in our present society seems to be that we need to box children into secure institutions and keep them sheltered from the outside world as long as possible. For an anthropologist like me, it seems like a no-brainer that sticking kids behind computer screens for most of their adolescence is one of the greatest and most absurd tragedies of modern times. I am confident that we will not create a curious, self-reliant, and resilient society this way, and we will only continue to instill fear and anxiety in subsequent generations if we fail to learn how to reorient kids away from the internet and back into the outside world to touch grass.

If our youth need dissuading away from anything in our day and age, perhaps it’s social media and a culture that breeds epidemic levels of complacency, fear, depression, and anxiety. It remains debatable whether we have handicapped large swaths of our population because we have not taught them how to properly engage with the world. That said, I believe the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, accurately identifies the roots of the problem,

“The two big mistakes we’ve made: overprotecting children in the real world (where they need to learn from vast amounts of direct experience) and underprotecting them online (where they are particularly vulnerable during puberty).”

While encouraging youth to venture out into the world may be one of the important keys to alleviating such problems and reclaiming their courage and autonomy, I worry that it isn’t enough to simply tell kids to get offline and go outside. The dilemma rests with parents in the early and adolescent years of parenting and whether or not we possess the ability to show them what is possible. Children don’t just mimic their parents in the early years; they often idolize them. Parents, for a short while at least, are their role models before they start to mimic their peer groups as teenagers. They watch every move we make from day one because they are trying to figure out how they will need to survive in the world. And if their role models exhibit behaviors of being in constant states of fear, anger, outrage, anxiety, depression, and cynicism, we can rest assured that they too are inculcating those same behaviors as a means of adapting to the kind of society and culture they supposedly live in. “Best to play it safe, stay home, and play on the phone.”

The world can be a dangerous and hurtful place. Watching your child fall off their bike or get stung by a hornet can be a painful thing to witness or having them get lost out in public is extraordinarily frightening, but the answer to preventing them from getting hurt or lost isn’t necessarily to completely remove all potential threats and obstacles from them: to take away the bike or keep them inside all summer until the insects are safely hibernating. They are going to get hurt, and it could be costly to repair broken bones. I personally never want to spend a single moment in the ER with my child, but I have to allow myself to realize that the chances of this occurring are a part of the tradeoff I’m making for exposing him to the added risks that come from being in the outside world. After all, the whole point of resiliency is that stress and facing crises are required to enhance one’s physical and mental resiliency.

I had one of the most fortunate and adventurous childhoods where I lived on a property that allowed me to be constantly outside: fishing, swimming, hiking, canoeing, riding dirt bikes, skateboarding, cutting down trees. While I suffered many injuries: concussions, scraps, lacerations, broken teeth, and nearly broken ribs, every moment of pain and recovery was worth it because it taught me a host of important lessons about how to confront and overcome certain fears and anxieties in the real world. Computer technology has created an impressive and compelling simulacrum of the world to receive endless information about it and get our vicarious thrills in various ways. However, no matter how many monstrous data centers we force into people’s backyards, it’s never going to compete with having all our senses present in the midst of a true adventure beyond television and computer screens.

Deep down, most of us understand all this intuitively, yet our society continues to spiral into an uncertain future where the forces of technology, most apparent in artificial intelligence, seem to be making it harder, not easier, to slow down and give our time and attention to the things that truly matter; one of those things at the top of the list being our children and how we responsibly show them how to explore the world. Building a lifestyle that prioritizes our personal autonomy remains a difficult challenge for many of us given the structure of our fast-paced, highly demanding society. The world often feels imposed on us, threatening our autonomy. It shouldn’t feel like we have to fight like hell to choose the pace at which we want to live our lives, and yet fight we must.

We obviously do not want to teach our kids to be too cavalier and gullible when it comes to taking risks and having adventures, nor do we want them to be overly cautious and distrustful of everyone. There is a healthy and responsible balance to be taught to them in how to wander in this world, but I think we can only give them the best chance of success by first teaching them that we are unafraid to venture out with them and show them the world with all its possibilities.

For consideration:

• What lessons have you learned work best as a parent in teaching your kids to overcome fear?

• What’s been the greatest set of challenges for you as a parent when it comes to travel or adventure with them?

Leave a comment

Related articles:

• Sustaining Wanderlust as a Parent

• The Grand Adventures Far Down the Road: Preparing for a Dream Journey That May or May Not Happen

• What Does Travel and Adventure Offer Us?

• Getting Offline and Touching Grass: How Do We Encourage Others to See the World Differently?

• Alleviating Youth Uncertainty with a “Year of Wandering”: How Do We Implement the Gap Year in the United States?

• The Future Depends on Reimagining Our Lives Now: Where is Society Going in the Wake of AI Hype and Transformation?

• The Case for Slow Travel and Slow Reading in a Fast-Paced Society

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow!

Cheers!

-JSB

Share

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Want to read more from Those Who Wander?

My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

To learn more about the book, please visit here, and you can listen to my latest conversation about the book on a podcast with the New Books Network here and on Spotify:

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Greetings,

Today, I am excited to introduce readers to Matthew David Nelson for this month’s Featured Wanderer. Matt is a fellow Substack writer and author of Wayfaring Hearts, a beautifully curated Substack that showcases Matt’s incredible photography and in-depth reflections on his travels.

As you will read, Matt has a very raw and transparent approach to both his writing and his photography. His words and visuals immediately grip you and compel you to reflect on the deeper meaning behind what’s being said or illustrated.

Please enjoy this interview and check out Matt’s Substack, Wayfaring Hearts, and his photography website to learn more.

Previous and future guests of Featured Wanderers can be found here:

Featured Wanderers

About Matthew David Nelson

I caught “the bug” in my mid 20’s, quit my corporate job to travel, and started my own website to document what I was up to. I got into photography because I thought stronger visuals would help me better sell my writing, and discovered a newfound passion for making images as well. Then in the Balkans, I connected with a sustainable travel company that hired me for intermittent photography work that would end up taking me from the Balkans to the Himalayas and back a couple of times over the next two years. I then started publishing articles about those experiences in magazines, and later editing and writing guidebooks for Rough Guides.

I was initially influenced by Paul Theroux, though more recently by Henry Miller (he wrote a couple of fantastic travel books), W.G. Sebald, and Peter Matthiessen. I’m currently in Kosovo, working on a long-form travel narrative/photo-book. My writing attempts to seek the universal within the mundane, and delves a lot into the art and literature that I take inspiration from. I believe in traveling slow, becoming a resident, and returning to places to deepen my understanding of them, versus always being on the move and trying to write about everywhere and everything. My decision to make photographs almost exclusively on film has augmented that process of slowing down and looking more deeply.

Justin to Matt: I always like to begin with this question on the origin of people’s wanderlust. From your writing, I’ve gathered that we share a similar trajectory with regards to travel, both growing up in the Midwest and only occasionally being able to afford to travel more locally or regionally in our adolescent years. Likewise, it wasn’t until around our mid-twenties that we found ways to travel abroad. However, you say you were curious about other cultures from an early age. Can you briefly tell readers what inspired you about travel early on, what things kept that aspiration for travel alive over the years, and what eventually motivated you in the last few years to adopt a more nomadic lifestyle?

Matt to Justin: When I was growing up in the Midwest, my family rarely ventured outside of Iowa. Even the coasts seemed far away and inaccessible. I don’t remember even complaining about this; it just didn’t seem like something necessary at the time. Though I was really drawn to world history in school and fascinated by exotic places and cultures, I guess I just assumed that these things could only be admired from afar, and not experienced firsthand.

My mom saved a lot of homework assignments from my school days, and one telling sign of who I was at that time was a paper from the final days of a school year, requiring one to list their plans for the summer vacation. Uncovering this artifact years later, it appears that I had casually listed the major world wonders as my intended summer itinerary, as if it would be no significant undertaking. My mom felt this foreshadowed my current lifestyle; that a strong curiosity for the wider world had been festering inside me before I could articulate what was happening. I think that even from an early age, we all show signs of what attracts us, and who we will later become. For me, curiosity and a desire for expansion are what drive me in all things, and travel is the tool I have used to answer those callings.

Justin to Matt: I’ve really enjoyed the back-and-forth conversations on travel you’ve had with Jay Ventress on Substack. I love how you’ve identified certain places as “surrogate homes” or places you’ve connected with on a deeper level, such as Pristina, Kosovo, and Delhi, India. I find it interesting that many travelers often resonate with a few select places (Hemingway in Paris, Spain, and Cuba comes quickly to mind since I’ve been reading his works lately). What’s compelled you to visit and inhabit those specific cities and countries you’ve explored in the last few years? What drew you to them to begin with, and what about them has had you designate them as “surrogate homes”?

Matt to Justin: I recently unearthed a couple of weathered Hemingway paperbacks circa 1976 from the stacks of a vintage bookstall in Belgrade, Serbia. So I’ll be traveling with you and Hem to those places in spirit. Specifically with Delhi and Prishtina (where I am writing from now), I was drawn to the former for personal reasons and the latter for photography work. And both places moved me in such a way that I continued to feel drawn back over and over again - either to reconnect with the friends I had made there, or to undertake new assignments. It felt so natural to return to these places, almost as if I had lived there in a prior life.

Over the last few years, I have naturally shifted toward slower travel—renting long-term accommodation, investing in local relationships, etc all of which help one arrive at a deeper understanding of a place. I have come to favor depth as opposed to breadth in travel—I want to feel I have truly lived and experienced the few places that I resonate with most. And that shift toward slow travel made it less feasible for me to live in the US and maintain a home base that I would be using less and less over time. I find it’s not as sustainable for me to be constantly on the move, and so having a couple of places that can serve as home bases around the globe has helped me to feel more settled and able to root down to an extent.

Justin to Matt: This is a question I’ve investigated in my new book, but I don’t know if I can confidently say I have an adequate answer to yet. What do you think best motivates someone to travel? Do you think some of us are just inherently restless and instilled with wanderlust, having that yearning to escape for a while, or do some of us just get lucky by being socially inspired either through culture or knowing someone who’s inspired us to travel?

Matt to Justin: I wrestle with this question a lot. I sometimes wonder if we do what we do because we lack something within ourselves - “Is something wrong with me?”, I ask half in jest. Or perhaps we were born in the wrong place and time, and are searching to recover something we’ve left behind. Thoreau, talking about life in general, wrote that some people simply march to the beat of a different drummer, which is my favorite explanation for this. For many of us, the status quo of “work for 11 months of the year, and take two or three weeks for yourself” isn’t sustainable, and should be inverted as much as possible. This quote by Paul Theroux is one I keep coming back to:

Justin to Matt: It sounds like you are a big reader too, so we share a love for a lot of the same authors, including Henry David Thoreau (my wife and I even named our son Walden), and I notice many travelers are often bibliophiles. I’ve explored this connection a little bit in my own writing, but to your mind, what do you think the connection is there? Why are reading and travel so compatible, and what’s a book or two that’s significantly shaped your thinking lately or in the past?

Matt to Justin: I believe they’re compatible because they both have such a great potential for self-transformation. Travel at its best is an outward action of responding to and engaging with a certain place at a certain time, and reading is the experience of a past place and time through the consciousness of another person. So travel and literature coincide beautifully, because you can simultaneously be on an outward and inward journey if you read while traveling. And as travel exercises your sensory receptivity, reading exercises the imagination. These activities are complementary, and to me seem to round out the whole experience of being alive.

Walden was very formative in that it shifted my way of thinking about life, and how one spends one’s time, which is truly the most important resource we possess. More recently, I have been incredibly impacted by The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. It’s disguised as a series of walks through the English countryside, but it is about everything from art to history to dreams to destruction, and, obliquely, Sebald shows the reader how to see beneath the surface of what we call reality and recognize the interconnectedness of all things. He also intersperses many photographs throughout the book in an artistic way - both his own and found photographs - which is especially inspiring to me, as someone seeking to combine text and image.

Justin to Matt: I’m always fascinated to hear the personal stories of people giving up the comfortable and predictable 9-5 life in exchange for a more nomadic life of travel and adventure or just a simpler life in the vein of Henry David Thoreau. While I resonate with this mode of life, I think a lot of people find it rather bewildering behavior of “giving it all up” to pursue a vague sense of wanderlust or simplification. What do you think it is about our society or culture that prompts some of us to want to escape it or at least give up the 9-5 for the sake of simplicity?

Matt to Justin: I feel that as Americans, we’re deeply programmed to live our lives in a way that serves and sustains the American empire/economy. Part of expanding one’s awareness of the world is recognizing this programming for what it is and shifting one’s priority from comfort and conformity toward experience, even in the face of discomfort and instability. It’s kind of like the red and blue pills from The Matrix. Once you recognize that you don’t have to accept what has been laid upon you, it’s hard to go back to the way you lived before. (Am I really here to just transfer wealth from my boss to my landlord?)

We all live to some extent in our own internal worlds, which are ever in the process of expanding or contracting. As individuals, I think we just need to decide on the way of being in the world that most serves us where we’re at, and for many, the “9-5” is the right answer, and that’s fine.

Justin to Matt: Related to the last question, one of the things that resonated with me the most was you discussing this on the Blue Planet podcast where you ask, “Why does our culture reward work that we do behind a screen more than work out in the fields with animals and in nature just being out in the fresh air and moving your body and creating something natural?” It’s been a couple of years since that interview; have you reflected more on this since then, that you’d like to elaborate more on?

Matt to Justin: I come back to this idea constantly. Particularly in the Balkans, a mass exodus from the villages to the cities has been a relatively recent phenomenon. And when walking through these cities, glimpsing the massive apartment buildings on the rise, wondering who one day will live in them, and puzzling at the profusion of delivery drivers zipping around the city on scooters bearing hot meals—I can’t help but feel the disconnectedness and unsustainability of it all.

I think back to my corporate days; if an alien were to have come down and observed me, it would seem that I made a living by staring at a screen and making clicking noises when not sitting in meetings. I can’t help but worry about how divorced we are from the natural world, and when at some point our supply chains no longer serve us, we’re going to need to pivot back to whatever is left of our natural world and quickly. It seems like we’ve gotten everything backwards, and that we reward the exact opposite behaviors and outcomes that are truly of most importance.

Justin to Matt: Both photography and writing often share a powerful goal of capturing meaning and aspiring to transmit a message and, presumably, effect some change in a person. Since you are both a writer and photographer, which do you think more powerfully motivates someone to travel: the photography of a landscape, a culture, etc., or the well-crafted structure of a story? Is it maybe the combination of the two (which you do very well), or is it perhaps merely context-dependent where each medium speaks to different people in different ways?

Matt to Justin: I feel visuals are better for grabbing one’s attention, but that writing is always the more impactful medium, because it requires more effort and participation from the reader. The reader has to sit and devote time to journeying through the mind of the writer (for minutes or days depending on the format), build a landscape, and hold it in their imagination. And in that process of imagination, perhaps one starts to ask “what if?” and place themselves in the story in a way that is more intimate than with beautiful images. I find great storytelling to be so transformative because it slowly builds a realization within the reader at a deeper level.

Justin to Matt: Something I appreciate a lot about your philosophy on travel is that you don’t romanticize it. You are very transparent and honest about the challenges and limitations of travel, and that, as you put it in that great podcast episode from Blue Planet by at the Blue Planet Stories Substack, “It’s not the answer to everything” and that “Travel doesn’t necessarily change you. It’s about how you live your life and the choices you make.”

I love that and find it refreshing because I think too often writers and promoters of travel sometimes romanticize travel too much as this grand fix to a lot of their ailing problems. They tend to gloss over this fact that you highlight so well: That sustaining a travel lifestyle in the way that you and others have requires you to put a huge amount of thought and work into it for one’s travel experiences to produce something of value and meaning. How do you think about the role of travel writing today—what the ethics of motivating others to travel are, and how do you think about sustainable travel?

Matt to Justin: I feel like the dizzying speed at which the world has changed in the past five years has really impacted the way I see travel. Sustainable travel in particular is such a tricky concept. I’m not sure that travel even is sustainable, and I have a friend in the industry who has the same doubts. I think travel writers need to reexamine the purpose of writing in the first place. Is one writing about a place to encourage others to visit, or writing in a way that leaves the reader with no desire to visit, having experienced it deeply and vicariously enough through the writer?

Travel writers have a lot more responsibility now. And I think that affects how we choose places to write about - asking the question of whether the locals of a place truly want more visitors, or do they want to preserve the traditions and way of life they currently lead. Asking the question of “who benefits from my travel expenditures?” is a great exercise. Romanticizing travel is the wrong approach. Travel writing needs to be honest and show some of the ugly sides of travel as well.

Justin to Matt: How do you foresee your relationship with travel changing in the coming years? Are you anticipating traveling more extensively to other areas of the globe? Is there a part of you that eventually wants to “settle down,” as they say, or are you hoping to always prioritize being on the road in some capacity?

My transition to slower travel has me traveling a lot less these days. But I feel like I may continue to move like a pendulum along this spectrum. Years ago, I was traveling nonstop and got burnt out to the point where I didn’t want to travel at all, but I suspect after a long enough break, I will start swinging back in the other direction.

For me, travel has become less about movement, and more about slowing down and gaining understanding of myself and the world around me. In fact, this year, being based in Kosovo, I am traveling less than ever, and feel as if I am a traveler who isn’t traveling. I feel more like an outsider than a resident, but more like a resident than a traveler.

I can say that I have no desire to attain a certain number of countries visited. I feel I only have the capacity to see and process so much, so I make a point of regularly returning to the places I love and make an effort to deepen my connections, understanding, and experiences in these places.

Justin to Matt: From before you stepped foot in another country to where you are now, how has travel changed or transformed you? What is a lesson you’ve learned in your travels that you don’t think you could have learned without traveling?

I go back and forth on whether travel itself is transformative or merely a catalyst for that process. So many people travel and see only what they expected to see. I think that for it to be transformative, it requires some type of response or act of surrender from the traveler. I also think there are diminishing returns to travel. Over time, it becomes difficult to sustain the same amount of growth and transformation one gains from their first experiences. It becomes easy to get desensitized to travel, and I think this is part of why travel writing gets more difficult over time. You can’t expect that each trip or experience is going to reveal something profound.

But this challenge also makes it meaningful and beautiful. Through travel, I was able to discover what I am truly capable of. I look back on projects or assignments I have undertaken, essays written, photographs I’ve made, and can’t help but realize that these things were only possible by going out into the world, embracing uncertainty, and crafting something out of the endless opportunities in store for one who wanders.

Justin to Matt: Is there anything else you’d like to share, highlight, or emphasize about your work?

Matt to Justin: I would love to connect with others who grapple with finding meaning in everyday life, whether that involves travel or not, and see what we can learn from—and how we can inspire—each other, so please feel free to reach out if you’ve made it this far.

And thank you, Justin, for the thoughtful and nuanced questions. Examining them all has been an illuminating and necessary process of reflection.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this interview with Matt. Much of what he reflects on resonates deeply with me, especially what he had to say about how we spend our time and it being our most valuable resource. I wholeheartedly agree and sense that how we choose to spend our time and attention is where we will find inner peace in life.

I hope you’ll spend some time reflecting on his work and poring over his photography at Wayfaring Hearts.

Leave a comment

Previous and future guests of Featured Wanderers can be found here:

Featured Wanderers

My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

Thanks for being a fellow traveller with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB

Share

Support Those Who Wander

Want to read more from Those Who Wander?

My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

To learn more about the book, please visit here, and you can listen to my latest conversation about the book on a podcast with the New Books Network here and on Spotify:

Greetings, fellow wanderers,

Today, I am once again republishing another post from the archives.

As Those Who Wander continues to grow, I recognise that many newcomers to this Substack may not have access to or be familiar with some of my initial writings. With over 150 posts in the archive, I aim to make some of the paywalled posts more accessible to a wider audience.

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That said, if you have been enjoying these ramblings on travel, adventure, and anthropology for a while, please consider supporting my writing, which grants you full access to everything I’ve written on Substack, including excerpts from my book.

An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is a first-person account of backpacking the Appalachian Trail that dives into anthropology, travel, fear, and the meaning of adventure in culture and society. If you love social science, adventure, and travel, this book will be for you. Subscribe and stay tuned for more updates and upcoming events.

The book is available for order on all major online retailers, including Amazon (here), Barnes & Noble (here), and Bookshop (here). If you’ve recently read the book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

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-JSB

Now onto today’s archived post, Do We Know Who We Are?: The Significance of Anthropology

Do you ever soberly stare at yourself in the mirror and wonder “What exactly am I looking at?” Have you ever stepped back from time to time, glanced about your house, town, or city, and wondered how all this stuff got here? In short, “What are we” and “How did we get here” are the eternal questions anthropologists, philosophers, and every curious human on the planet have been asking and attempting to answer for centuries. We, all of us, are a part of a vast never-ending story.

From mythology and religion to philosophy and science, we’ve devised many diverse and often conflicting stories and institutions that attempt to explore and categorize our origins and evolution. How we make sense of our humanity is the enduring task of anthropology, a field of study that can be thought of as a kind of sense-making toolkit for interpreting our human story.

Every anthropologist who writes about or teaches anthropology is, at some point, prompted to justify their existence and their utility for their institution and wider society—a topic all the rage right now as humanities departments are in a crisis and threatened by budget cuts over their self-inflicted identitarian and activist shift in recent years.

Annual income is a strong indicator of our social utility in modern American society. When it comes to the study of anthropology, it is quite low on the totem pole, and frankly, has always been because it is a field of study that’s always struggled to define direct applications for society and also never fully captivated the attention of most of society. Most people find the subject interesting on the surface, but conversations with prospective students of anthropology are always soon followed up with an inquisitive, yet overtly judgemental, “But what are you going to do with a degree in anthropology?” 

When I first stumbled across the subject during my senior year in high school, circa 2008, I researched how much anthropologists made—the average annual income was about $36,000 a year (around $52,000 in 2024). That’s remained fairly constant. Thus, I knew what I was getting into if I was going to go down this route of financial uncertainty and dubious social utility, but I liked the prospect of chasing after something so tantalizing as the study of humanity, despite not making much money doing it. Many parents and plenty of others in our society are often chagrined and bothered to see someone pursue a career in the humanities or social sciences with no clear return on investment. That is a fair critique in the context of our culture, but it’s also a narrow one in the grand scheme of things. People ought to realize that money isn’t the only motivating factor in life. 

During the early 19^th century, the English scientist Michael Faraday made significant discoveries in the study of electromagnetism, yet had no idea how revolutionary this knowledge would soon be. One day, after a lecture, a woman is reported to have approached him and asked what the utility of these discoveries was—what is this going to do for us? He is said to have replied, “Madam, will you tell me the use of a newborn child?” Thus, the future power and utility of knowledge often escapes us and ultimately rests in its potentiality. Anthropological knowledge is like that.

The concluding remarks in The Atlantic on ‘The Humanities Have Sown the Seeds of Their Own Destruction’ by Professor Tyler Austin Harper resonate here,

Ironically, activist faculty and their conservative critics share the same nihilistic vision of the future of higher education: Both believe that the only valuable forms of research and teaching are those that accomplish something obviously useful. Such views are born of austerity, and they are utterly foreign to me. When I fell in love with English on a college campus many years ago, it was precisely because studying John Milton and James Joyce and Octavia Butler was so intoxicatingly useless in market terms. It rejected the assumption that value and utility are synonyms. The humanities captivated me—and foiled the best-laid plans of mice and pre-med—because literature and philosophy seemed to begin from a quietly revolutionary premise: There is thinking that does not exist merely to become work, and knowledge that does not exist merely to become capital. As a blue-collar undergraduate, that was a radical proposition. And it’s the only kind of politics we should expect—or require—from the humanities.

Anthropology, and the rest of the humanities, do not necessarily offer us riches, no, but they do enrich the mind in startling ways that have immense value that is ultimately incalculable. What’s more, we are granted a remarkable lens through which to view the world. Like travel and adventure, anthropology can take us around the globe and teach us to appreciate the diversity of human behavior and culture. I won’t pretend that reading Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific and learning about the Kula exchange system of Papua New Guinea is going to be useful at landing you a job at Goldman Sachs, but it will certainly broaden one’s perspective on alternate forms of economies, exchange systems, and human decision-making in ways you probably won’t find in most economics department majors.

The perennial questions of anthropology that we are always returning to are:

• Who are we? 

• What are our origins? 

• What does it mean to be human?

• How do other cultures understand and interpret their world? 

• How do we explain the diversity of humanity, both physically and culturally? 

• How resilient are we and how have we evolved and adapted to changing environments? 

Anthropology at its best serves to guide all of us toward seeing and appreciating the diversity of human thought and culture across time and space. By design, it is meant to overwhelm and humble us with the magnitude of collective human wisdom. Anthropology at its worst devolves into simplistically categorizing people based on superficial traits of biology or culture and treating people differently based on those features. However, anthropology is also a discipline that morphs in time like everything else. 

What we have to understand is that, like any other serious inquiry, this is an iterative process, a story that is constantly tweaking, making mistakes, self-correcting, and never-ending. The present form of any discipline and what scholars of a given moment consider the “best” or most “socially and politically useful” research topics and agendas of the day don’t matter as much as the long arc or cumulative amount of knowledge it has gathered. That is what we should keep our eye on and is the story worth pursuing.

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In the early 21st century, we have created an unusually complex and baffling world—one which many of us are struggling to comprehend and navigate. While our brains are wonderful mechanisms of evolution, they are not flawless, nor are they fully prepared to grapple with present circumstances. We are not born with instant recall of everything that came before us, and so we depend on a culture and society to give us some semblance of our history and a blueprint of how the world actually works. That too can be faulty and distorted, but we deserve to know something about who we are and how we got here, or else, I’m afraid, we’re left with little to guide us toward answering those aforementioned questions. Is our present culture and society up to the task of informing us of our past? Are we capable of understanding our reality calmly and collectively? Do we know who we are?

An alarming number of us appear to be bewildered, anxious, depressed, and desirous of meaning in the modern world. As I’ve argued previously,

We’re still suffering from many of the same ailments to one degree or another. While life has undoubtedly improved for a lot of us in terms of our material conditions, we are still wracked with many anxieties and fears we just can’t seem to shake. Many of us seem to be suffering from a “crisis of meaning” in our lives. Thus, it’s questionable whether we’ve progressed as much as we think given that with each step forward in technology or culture, we often tend to introduce a new set of problems.

We are all searching for meaning. We all want something out of life.  More than anything, we want purpose. What gives our lives meaning? Where do we derive happiness from? We might believe that we obtain happiness and meaning from the tangible objects of our desire, surrounding ourselves with plenty of comforts and luxuries, but if this were true, surely the abundance of our materialist culture that we’ve been accumulating for generations would have made most of us content by now. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Life satisfaction has much more to do with the psychology of our minds, the sensations we discover in new experiences, and the memories we construct with one another. Are we so sure that we’ve constructed a society that aligns with who we are? 

As I argued elsewhere,

Given our extensive evolutionary history being nomadic hunter-gatherers, I can’t help but think that part of the reason so many of us feel restless, anxious, depressed, angry, cynical, or lacking inspiration nowadays is that the structure of our society and culture is no longer fully in line with how we are physically and psychologically primed.

One lesson I’ve learned studying anthropology, and particularly the lifestyles of hunter-gatherers, is that for most of human history, most societies and cultures appear to have managed to live a rich and high-quality life without the excess materialism and standards we seem to heavily depend on today. While there are plenty of important cultural and technological innovations (not least the advancements in medicine) to marvel at today, there is also tremendous conceit in the idea that we’re the pinnacle of a great society, an exceptional culture unlike any that’s come before. That’s hubristic thinking to my ears.

Many of us seem to think that “our culture” invented everything out of whole cloth very recently. This belies the fact that most of us inherited the world we were born into without raising a finger. It’s odd to take credit for and have excessive pride in something we inherited (consider “American exceptionalism”). And for what it’s worth, it’s also hubristic to incessantly admonish your own culture and society, e.g., to call for its death as has been sadly an endemic phenomenon on many American college campuses of late. One can take pride in a culture without overinflating its worth. Likewise, one can critique a society in the hopes of it doing better without devolving into nihilism and self-loathing. Once more, I digress…

Few of us seem to recognize just how much of culture is not just confined to specific geographic boundaries and historical periods but the product of people who lived thousands and tens of thousands of years ago interacting and exchanging their knowledge and skills, sometimes over vast distances. The anthropologist Leslie White commented on the fundamental achievements of “primitive” peoples in his 1959 book The Evolution of Culture, summarizing,

The accumulated knowledge, skills, tools, machines, and techniques developed by primitive, preliterate peoples laid the basis for civilization and all the higher cultures. They invented and developed all the basic tools, weapons, and utensils. They developed the major arts and crafts, such as the ceramic and textile arts, and initiated the art of metallurgy. Food and fiber plants were brought under domestication by them, and they developed the techniques for their culture. They originated the domestication of animals…Thus during the first hundreds of thousands of years of culture history, primitive peoples were acquiring realistic and matter-of-fact knowledge and originating and perfecting rational and effective techniques. This age-old process of accumulation and development culminated in the Agricultural Revolution, which profoundly transformed the whole cultural tradition.

As much as we’ve inherited all this materialism and practical ingenuity, much knowledge and wisdom isn’t material at all but cognitive or symbolic, a lot of which has likely been forgotten, ignored, or erased over the millennia. Uncovering this nonmaterial realm of culture is also the domain of anthropology. 

Again, are we so sure that we’ve constructed a society that aligns with who we are?

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What could be more advantageous for societal and individual well-being than the analysis of who we are and how we got here? I can’t help but think these are among the most important questions we may ever ask and seek to answer. What are we constructing a sustainable society for, if not for all of us to eventually be free to explore our world both in body and mind?

We cannot all just be moneymakers, profit-maximizers, and conspicuous consumers into the indefinite future. Those hollow pursuits will only lead to a future world devoid of meaning. We need at least a few of us to step outside our normal routines to contemplate and attempt to answer some of these big questions, in the hope that we may unexpectedly discover improved ways of thinking and being in the world that we can then relay to the rest of us. Thus, consider this a defense of the humanities and social sciences, which, when scrubbed of their recent descent into intellectual bankruptcy, still possess the potential to provide us with immense understanding and meaning for humanity.

It can seem like academics, scholars, and other intellectuals are merely pompous elites. Assuredly, some of them are, but not all of them are like this. They are human too and swayed by their egos and political biases, but there are a few in the bunch that know something about the long arc of human history and our place in the cosmos. These are very privileged positions to have, and they should be taken seriously by those who occupy them, all the while recognizing they are in service to the public, not to some ideology, fringe activist group, or political agenda.

In my view, the significance of anthropology is the amount of knowledge it has amassed about who we are as a species. While there will always be a need for more research, I sense the more pressing issue is how we figure out how to better synthesize and distribute all this information to everyone. How do we better engage the public and show the significance of what this subject has been telling us about ourselves? That is another task for the anthropologist. As I’ve argued previously in The Role of the Anthropologist in the 21^st Century,

Given the dubious nature of what direct value we provide to the world at large, I believe the one thing we have to offer is our honest perspective on the human condition, the good and the bad. The only way to demonstrate that value then, is for us to learn better means of communicating, engaging, and interacting with the public. For those anthropologists interested in this project, we are tackling a monumental question—what does all of this accrued knowledge and data of humanity mean for all of us and how do we best preserve, curate, and share it with all those who care to listen?

The investigation into the material objects we leave behind (archaeology), the spread of language via writing and speech over time and space (linguistics),  how humans evolved (biological anthropology), or the differences and similarities between various societies and cultures (social and cultural anthropology) are all under the umbrella of anthropology. This is an immense and overwhelming field of study, and it can appear as something only for pompous intellectuals to care about. But I would argue this is, by definition, a domain of knowledge for everyone and should always be in service to humanity as a whole. Whether we realize it or not, we are all contributing to this discipline in one form or another through our behavior, speech, and thought patterns. All of us are a part of the story of anthropology—one that is never-ending in its quest to figure out who we are.

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Years ago, while living in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, I was working on Mount Werner for the ski resort, hauling food and beverages up the mountain on snowcats in the evenings. Hilary and I had recently moved from our home state of Indiana to Colorado and were just getting settled into our cozy one-bedroom apartment. A couple we had met while backpacking the Appalachian Trail a few years before contacted us to see if we’d be willing to host a fellow backpacker they knew who would soon be coming through Steamboat on the Continental Divide Trail (CDT). Of course!

They stayed with us for a couple of days, hanging out in our still barren apartment, enjoying pizza, and telling us all about the CDT—a monumental trail running from Canada to Mexico straddling this colossal geological feature of the Continental Divide of the Americas. This was the first time the CDT entered my mind, and I’ve been dreaming about it ever since.

The following spring, I came very close to venturing out to do the New Mexico portion of the CDT that runs for approximately 700 miles from the Mexican border, crossing the Chihuahua Desert and multiple national forests before entering southwestern Colorado. I had already eagerly booked a shuttle service that would take me to the border. I had all my gear prepared and had purchased a guidebook, New Mexico’s Continental Divide Trail.

However, as I began to research more thoroughly in the weeks leading up to my intended departure, I realized this portion of the CDT required a lot more logistics than the Appalachian Trail, namely navigating across open desert and coordinating water caches across the parched landscape. It dawned on me that I was being premature in my planning, and eventually reality set in and I made the decision to cancel my excursion for the time being. I took a solo road trip across the southwest instead, which turned out to be an enthralling journey in and of itself.

I’ve been thinking about the CDT off and on for almost a decade now. That trail feels like the big fish that got away. In the last few years, I’ve been slowly piecing together a grand adventure in my mind: A dream journey that begins in an Amtrak train terminal in Chicago’s Union Station on July 1, 2039. I am standing in the terminal with nothing but a backpack, my cherished hand-carved hickory walking stick “Wiseman”, and beside me is my 18-year-old son Walden, who will have graduated from high school only a few months before. We are about to depart on Amtrak’s famed Empire Builder route to Glacier National Park, where we will begin our southbound journey to hike from the U.S.-Canada border to the U.S.-Mexico border for half a year or more for 3,100 miles through mountains and desert, eventually making our way back to Santa Fe, and then finding a return train back home.

That is the general model in my mind so far anyway, and I could just leave that happy dream where it is. However, lately I’ve been realizing that if I am serious about doing this one day, I need to be planning now and being more deliberate with my time if I ever want this dream to manifest.

Walden is only five years old right now, and while he’s becoming quite a traveler and hiker already, it will take some convincing and finessing over the years to keep him hooked on the outdoors, especially long-distance backpacking. I plan to try our first backpacking trip this fall on one of Indiana’s “long”-distance trails—the Tecumseh Trail—which runs for 42 miles through nearby state forests and would likely only take us a long weekend to complete. Then it occurs to me, “What if he ends up hating the outdoors and becomes yet another adolescent addicted to the internet and video games, only wanting to while away his teenage years in Mark Zuckerberg’s 15^th version of the Metaverse?” How tragic would that be? I think it’s unlikely…

Assuming Walden will live up to his namesake and he wants to pursue a simpler and more deliberate life than losing himself in cyberspace, what else do I need to be thinking about? How does one ultimately plan something that is 13 years out anyway? And what if all my dreaming and planning falls apart in the end and it never happens?

Staying in shape and keeping my knees strong will be high on the list of priorities. I know I can maintain an active lifestyle by continuing to do things like training jiu jitsu, running, hiking, and biking as I’ve been doing for many years now.

Savings will also be an obvious priority. Perhaps I can be more frugal and build a separate “grand adventure” fund in the meantime. Accruing enough savings to take a six-month hiatus from work will be challenging, but budgeting over 13 years should make it much easier and less anxiety-ridden. Initiate the Excel spreadsheet!

Keeping up to date with backpacking gear and supplies. There’s plenty of gear and supplies that I could be researching and gathering too in the meantime, and I’ll also want to stay aware of all of the news affecting the CDT (I am already a subscriber to their newsletter).

These three broad objectives seem easy enough to plan around, but what about all the uncertainties I do not have the power to foresee that could completely sideline this grand adventure I’ve imagined? After all, there are far too many contingencies to contend with (so it goes), and I can get derailed by too much “what-if” thinking: what if I get seriously injured or lose my job in the coming years? Maybe my knees are destined to be completely shot by the time I’m 50. How much could all these potential scenarios thwart my dream journey?

And a lot could change between now and then. Will we even want to be separated from the rest of our family for that long? My solo trip to Ireland a couple of years ago made me realize just how challenging it is to be away from home and family for even a short period of time. The thought of being separated from my family for six months or more is already unthinkable…

In the coming years, I know there will be a lot to ponder, but I think maybe the greatest thing to help keep me at ease is, ironically, to accept that maybe this grand adventure won’t happen at all. Perhaps that sounds too defeatist or fatalistic on the surface, but I believe there is something edifying here. I will obviously continue to plan physically and mentally for this grand adventure. Still, we should not underestimate the emotional training that is often neglected in planning our adventures, especially when plans fall apart.

I used to tie myself up in knots when things didn’t work out exactly as I'd planned. I was rigid and hard on myself. Like a child throwing a tantrum because I didn’t get my chocolate bar as a treat, I’d be enraged with myself or blame it on others or often “the system,” some abstract entity that had wrecked my plans. Yet through these many iterations of travel plans going astray, I was forced to accept my folly, temper my reactions, and choose an alternative route of adventure. In time, this painful lesson has sunk in.

I’ve since learned that f***ing up one’s travel plans only invites unexpected adventures. You have to cultivate the right attitude and mindset. That’s part of maturing, I suppose. However, even mature people fail to grasp this lesson. There is a kind of superpower to be learned here: You can pivot when things don’t work out. Like water over stone, you can learn to flow with much more ease around obstacles and train yourself to be better composed and clear-headed in the midst of the unexpected struggle or unplanned roadblock, which is perhaps one of the most edifying lessons of life.

So if I put 13 years into planning a grand adventure and it never comes to fruition, I will end up not having staked everything on it happening. It took me too long to realize that in all my planning for my trips, I never factored in the possibility of something not happening, and that only led to a great deal of mental strife. I’ve already permitted myself to imagine alternatives. Maybe we’ll be doing something else entirely different come July 1, 2039, and that will be okay too, even if it isn’t all that “grand.” Maybe we’ll be on a road trip, or hiking somewhere else, or visiting another country, or perhaps we’ll just be harvesting summer crops in the garden at home just as we were the other day.

I’ve now learned that the earlier we accept that the big fish we were desperate to catch may forever remain out at sea, the sooner we can begin to live a more equanimous life. Once you’ve traveled for a while and been on numerous adventures, you begin to realize that things rarely go according to plan and you must be flexible and adaptable if you want to remain adventurous. I think this is where mindfulness practice and meditation have also helped me considerably: That we can be simultaneously working toward something or improving ourselves and entirely accepting that things may never come to fruition in the end. To accept things exactly as they are or will be, all the while striving to manifest our dreams, is the beautiful paradox of life.

For consideration:

• What’s the grand adventure you’ve been dreaming of doing?

• How do you think of preparing yourself for it?

• How would you feel if you never achieved your dream adventure?

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Related articles:

• On F***ing Up Your Travel Plans, Left Turns, and Unexpected Adventures

• Walden: What’s in a Child’s Name?

• To Plan or Not to Plan: How Much Should One Prepare for a Visit to Another Country When We Value Spontaneity?

• The Adventures Close to Home: What Can We Accomplish Right Where We Are?

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Greetings, fellow wanderers,

I am fresh back from a wonderful road trip and am diligently working on two new posts and another Featured Wanderer article. So today, I am once again republishing another post from the archives—one of my favorites I’ve written, I should add.

As Those Who Wander has officially surpassed 1,000 subscribers (wow!), I recognise that many newcomers to this Substack may not have access to or be familiar with some of my initial writings. With over 150 posts in the archive, I aim to make some of the paywalled posts more accessible to a wider audience.

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An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is a first-person account of backpacking the Appalachian Trail that dives into anthropology, travel, fear, and the meaning of adventure in culture and society. If you love social science, adventure, and travel, this book will be for you. Subscribe and stay tuned for more updates and upcoming events.

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Now onto today’s archived post, What Ancient DNA Reveals About the Deep Past of Human Wandering

Since about the middle of the 19^th century, our collective quest—usually at the behest of only a few intrepid scientists and scholars—to understand who we are as a species and how we got here has been an extraordinary one. Though Charles Darwin’s 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species was the monumental text for evolutionary theory, his 1871 publication of The Descent of Man is one of the first major instances where we begin to see modern evolutionary theory applied to humanity.

For roughly the last 150 years, the primary fields of study to examine our shared human past have been through disciplines like archaeology, history, paleoanthropology, and linguistics. Studying artifacts, ancient texts, bones of extinct human relatives, and the interrelationship and spread of languages have been our main lines of evidence to interpret fundamental questions of who we are and how we got here.

As a scientific field, genetics has been around for nearly as long as the theory of evolution as presented by Darwin1 with its founding credited to the late 19^th-century Moravian monk Gregor Mendel. However, in only the last few decades, a new science known as paleogenomics has emerged. Refined field and laboratory techniques and innovative technologies now allow for the analysis of ancient DNA—intact strands of the human genome preserved in and recovered from old bones and teeth. The oldest recovered ancient human DNA to date measures approximately 430,000 years ago from a significant archaeological cave site in Atapuerca, Spain known as Sima de los Huesos or “Pit of the Bones.” 

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Older DNA from the molars of mammoths have been reported in Siberia and dated to around one million years ago and sediments dating to around 2 million years ago have been reported in Greenland. However, there is a limit to how far back genetic material preserves and it likely doesn’t exceed much beyond the 2 million-year-old threshold—sorry to break the news, but there will likely be no real-life Jurassic Park. Nonetheless, this nascent field of science has been providing revolutionary discoveries and insights about human movement across the globe during the last 100,000 years…and then some.

American geneticist David Reich’s 2018 popular publication Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past synthesizes an impressive amount of recent research on ancient DNA and what it reveals about our human story at a much higher resolution than previously known. To get to the punch line, “who we are” is a single species comprised of incredibly mixed and interrelated populations of humans in terms of our genomes. “How we got here” is through many more populations of humans wandering via migrations back and forth across the continents—far more than we could have realized just a few decades ago. As Reich sums up at different points throughout his work,

The story that is emerging differs from the one we learned as children, or from popular culture. It is full of surprises: massive mixtures of differentiated populations; sweeping population replacements and expansions; and population divisions in prehistoric times that did not fall along the same lines as population differences that exist today. It is a story about how our interconnected human family was formed, in myriad ways never imagined.2

More succinctly,

This means that our genomes hold within them a multitude of ancestors.3

More poetically,

The power of tracing this multitude of lineages to reveal the past is extraordinary. In my mind’s eye, when I think of a genome, I view it not as a thing of the present, but as deeply rooted in time, a tapestry of threads consisting of lines of descent and DNA sequences copied from parent to child winding back into the distant past. Tracing back, the threads wind themselves through ever more ancestors, providing information about population size and substructure in each generation.4

As to the implications,

We now know that nearly every group living today is the product of repeated population mixtures that have occurred over thousands and tens of thousands of years. Mixing is in human nature, and no one population is—or could be—“pure.”5  

What is ultimately upended and tossed to the wayside in these revelations from ancient DNA are not only once reputable but now outdated scientific hypotheses on human relatedness and migrations but also genuinely racist “theories” of once “pure” human lineages. One hopes paleogenomics will soon, as he states, “put the final nail in the coffin” of such retrograde and baseless ideas.

Not since the advent of radiocarbon dating in the late 1940s—which allowed researchers to date organic materials and essentially put a range of time stamps on archaeological sites and cultural material—has a scientific method radically opened up vast potential for human insight into our shared past. And yet, ancient DNA, as Reich argues, is even more groundbreaking than radiocarbon dating, 

It is tempting to view ancient DNA as just one more new scientific technology that became available to archaeologists after the radiocarbon revolution, but that would be underestimating it. Prior to ancient DNA, archaeologists had hints of population movements based on the changes in the shapes of ancient skeletons and the types of artifacts people made, but these data were hard to interpret. But by sequencing whole genomes from ancient people, it is now possible to understand in exquisite detail how everyone is related.

The measure of a revolutionary technology is the rate at which it reveals surprises, and in this sense, ancient DNA is more revolutionary than any previous scientific technology for studying the past, including radiocarbon dating. A more apt analogy is the seventeenth-century invention of the light microscope, which made it possible to visualize the world of microbes and cells that no one before had even imagined. When a new instrument opens up vistas onto a world that has not previously been explored, everything it shows is new, and everything is a surprise. This is what is happening now with ancient DNA. It is providing definitive answers to questions about whether changes in the archaeological record reflect movements of people or cultural communication. Again and again, it is revealing findings that almost no one expected.6

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Many academic researchers and scholars once assumed the past to be a far simpler and more isolated time. While people may have moved regularly, they were thought to conservatively try to guard and maintain their presence in a region after they had discovered virgin territory and were believed not to be in contact or connected over vast distances by long-distance social networks. One can be forgiven when you are looking at tens or hundreds of thousands of years, and all you have to go on are fragments of bones, pottery, and stone tools. Inferring the past from archaeological data from such minimal scraps of evidence can only get you so far.

Nevertheless, these presumptions are steadily being challenged through genomics and other academic fields that attempt to explore social interaction and exchange networks over large distances in the past (something my archaeological thesis focused on).

My takeaway from all this, and what I hope every one of us can come to appreciate and keep in mind about who we are and how we got here, is that humans have always been drawn to movement, for we are a wandering species. While there are many motivations for humans to move, e.g., acquiring food, meeting other mates, gathering resources, averting conflict, and many other risks, they are not just out of necessity but because we are also an exploratory species interested in maintaining connections with our world and others over vast distances—that too is in our DNA. As the famed astronomer Carl Sagan once opined about the importance of becoming a multi-planetary species,

It is important for us, humans, to be out there…we are an exploratory species, the last ten thousand years we’ve been sitting around in civilization, before that, for the last 100,000 years we were wanders, explorers, nomads, and that is in our blood.

While the general outline and paths of human migration have been known for some time–something I poetically map out in my debut Substack post, Our Ancient Narrative–this new way of tracing ancestry is giving us a far more refined and higher-resolution look into the frequency of those movements. In nearly every corner of the world, we see not just single migrations by single populations setting up camp and staying put, but multiple migrations by multiple populations moving in, sometimes staying, pivoting after a few thousand years, and then moving elsewhere before starting the process again.

The results are truly astonishing, and reveal other fascinating insights that strengthen arguments in long-fought debates about human origins, e.g., that the ancestry between some groups that were once thought to share little are much more closely related and that phenotypes of skeletons–the physical manifestation of genes–are not always adequate at inferring ancestry.

Reich’s work also provides us with a powerful snapshot into an imminent future where we come to understand the resolution of human history in far more detail which ought to give us a calm reflective pause followed by a reorientation in our collective understanding but will, one worries, simultaneously challenge many peoples’ deeply entrenched views of their origins. What is presently being revealed by paleogenomics substantially builds upon what many anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists have been meticulously trying to piece together with pottery sherds, stone implements, languages, fragments of bones, and ethnographic stories for centuries. It is one of the more enticing books I’ve come across lately and one that demonstrates why a multipronged approach to understanding the past is vitally important.

Overall, the book is refreshingly honest, moderately accessible, and appropriately sensitive where necessary. It is a work that also revitalizes a thread that has been, to my mind, lost in recent years within the discipline of anthropology (at least within the United States, which I’m more familiar with than elsewhere in the world). As with many other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities in countless departments across the nation’s most esteemed academic institutions, anthropology—unbeknownst to much of the lay public— has become embarrassingly sectarian, dogmatic, and, frankly, too exhausting to participate in at the moment—but if you know, you know…

However, the central theme of anthropology that has always kept me going, and remains kindled in Reich’s book, is that we are a single resilient species with an incredibly rich and diverse history and we all have a right and duty to take an interest in our shared past. This is what Reich labeled as our “common condition.” Our common condition of who we are and how we got here is a truth as real as gravity that every one of us either learns to grapple with and reconcile or, I fear, will only lead to sustained strife and division for the foreseeable future.

Grappling with history isn’t for the faint of heart for it is bleak and peppered with too many dark eras of violence, slavery, depravity, and inequality but it is also an eternal story of human resilience, cooperation, and progress. As I’ve written previously,

We should neither be in the business of romanticizing the past nor glorifying the present, but humanizing who we have been and who we are so that we have sound foundations to build better worlds and realistic expectations of who we can become. Human well-being and life satisfaction, I would argue, ought to be some of the more important metrics by which we measure “progress.”

The most salient underlying lesson demonstrated in a work like this, however, is that the learning and teaching of history need not be a morbid exercise. Just because history can be grim, unjust, and downright depressing doesn’t mean it needs to be taught as such. If we can make amends for the sins of the past, we obviously should, but recognizing our limits in that project is warranted too. You need not channel the worst threads of human history in every lecture, podcast, book, or protest for people to understand the gravity of inhumanity in the past and present. Bear in mind, that there are also many positive and uplifting threads in the tapestry of our human story to draw inspiration from and take refuge in as well. Perhaps those lessons may even draw more powerful changes than the guilt-ridden tactics of late.

There is a kind of cosmopolitanism embedded in our DNA—a deep story of interacting, mixing, and migrating through the millennia on this planet—in a word, we are a mosaic of many past populations, and we should act accordingly with that knowledge in hand. We are a rich tapestry (another wonderful metaphor) of cultures and ideas that are only left begging to be discovered, understood, and appreciated by all of us—I can’t help but feel that’s the only way to approach a mature study of human history, one with an eternal sense of awe, wonder, humility, and intrinsic curiosity as our defining principles. 

Whether we collectively come to understand this truth about ourselves and embrace it seems dubious at the moment as we witness intense factionalism all around us. Maybe it’ll take a few more centuries for us to wise up. Perhaps it’ll never happen, and we’ll lamentably revert to evermore division and thinking our differences, rather than our shared humanity, are what define us. Nevertheless, while it remains debatable whether one can derive an ought from an is, I believe we should embrace this fact of cosmopolitanism in our DNA which is at the core of who we have been all along and who we will continue to be.

A synthesis of a synthesis can hardly do justice to anyone’s work and a topic as rich and full of nuance as genetics requires careful consideration as to its implications. Thus, there is no easy way to reduce the contents of Reich’s book to a mere Substack post, and it deserves far more than time can allow here to unpack.

Nevertheless, there is a whole host of wonderful graphs and illustrations to keep you wondering while you digest one remarkable discovery after another. So if you want to learn more about the latest insights into human-Neanderthal interbreeding; what a “ghost” population is; the spread of agriculture and diseases like that which caused the Black Death; the spread of the Indo-European language; the peopling of Eurasia and the Americas; and plenty more on the vast migrations of our humanity, I encourage anyone interested in this topic to seek out this work and take it to heart.

Additional Reading:

Two other fantastic books that can get you up to speed on some of the latest insights into past human migrations and paleogenomics are the American anthropologist David Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language which focuses primarily on the linguistic and archaeological evidence of human migration as it relates to Indo-European migrations, and Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo’s Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes which reveals more details about the genome revolution and the author’s work sequencing the Neanderthal genome. 

Also, I have plenty more anthropology and archaeology books and articles I could recommend, so for those interested please feel free to reach out for suggestions at baileyjs08@gmail.com.

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Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow!

Cheers!

-JSB

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Notes

My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

To learn more about the book, please visit here, and you can listen to my latest conversation about the book on a podcast with the New Books Network here and on Spotify:

Subscribe now

Greetings fellow wanderers,

I am off this week as we head for the east coast to visit family in Rhode Island and Maine. I’m ecstatic that I’ll be celebrating the 250th Fourth from an island in Narragansett Bay and dining on plenty of fresh seafood all week long. We’ll hike some trails in Acadia National Park and check out the Puffins and all the other splendid wildlife Maine has to offer. I’ll be working on another Featured Wanderer interview soon and a few more new posts. So stay tuned!

Last week, I celebrated three years on Substack and wanted to reiterate the special deals for both a subscription to Those Who Wander and discounts on my new book.

Special Deals!

Now, until the end of July, you can get 25% off my newsletter ($3.75 per month or $37.50 a year):

Get 25% Off Those Who Wander

Also, you can get 25% off my new book ($19.99, $14.99):

Get 25% Off Book

Here are the benefits you receive from becoming a paid subscriber:

• Access to the full archive of my articles (150+ posts to date).

• Access to all excerpts from my new book (12 excerpts to date).

• Access to all open debates (14 debates).

• Access to all Featured Wanderer interviews and a chance to submit to be a Featured Wanderer.

• Exclusive paid subscriber discount on my new book (35% off my new book ($19.99, $12.99). (A link to the discounted book purchase will be sent to your email upon your paid subscription to Those Who Wander).

Know someone who might enjoy Those Who Wander? You can gift a subscription to someone as well.

Give a gift subscription

Unable to subscribe? You can also give a one-time donation and buy me a coffee at whatever amount you prefer.

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Recommended Posts

If you are new to Those Who Wander and looking to get caught up on some of my writing, might I interest you in some initial posts?

• Consider starting with Those Who Wander’s About Page to get to know a little about me and what I’ve been up to in archaeology and anthropology.

• Read about the Motives of Those Who Wander and Motives of Those Who Wander Revisited: Expanding on Why.

• Read my first post and the first published excerpt from my book, Our Ancient Narrative.

Check out some of my favorite and popular posts of late:

• For a look into our changing culture and possible future, see The Future Depends on Reimagining Our Lives Now: Where is Society Going in the Wake of AI Hype and Transformation?

• On wandering close to home, see The Adventures Close to Home: What Can We Accomplish Right Where We Are?

• On pilgrimage and mindfulness wandering, see The Pilgrimage of Matsuo Bashō: Poetic Wandering in 17th Century Japan

• On escapism in youth, see On Youth and Longing to Escape Modernity

• On what to do about brain rot, see How Do We Combat Brain Rot? Heed Thoreau’s Advice to Live More Deliberately

• On the impact of high-speed travel, see Methods of High Speed Travel and How They Shape Our View of the World

• On the need to get offline and touch grass, see Getting Offline and Touching Grass: How Do We Encourage Others to See the World Differently?

• On the dangers of travel and adventure, see The Grim and Dangerous Side of Seeking Travel and Adventure: The Appalachian Trail as a Case Study

• On how I was inspired to become an archaeologist, see Mesa Verde and the Power of a Place: An Archaeologist Dwells On Human Memory and the Meaning of Our Past

• And for an in-depth look into hunter-gatherers and our problems evaluating human progress, see Hunter-Gatherers and Human Resilience: An Homage to the OG Wanderers and the Problem of Assessing “Progress”

Browse the Full Archive

Thanks for being a fellow traveller with me. I’ll be back next week. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB

Share

Get 25% Off Those Who Wander

Want to read more from Those Who Wander?

My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

To learn more about the book, please visit here, and you can listen to my latest conversation about the book on a podcast with the New Books Network here and on Spotify:

Subscribe now

Greetings fellow wanderers!

I am delighted to be celebrating Those Who Wander’s third anniversary on Substack this week! A lot has happened in the last year that I am very proud of.

Here are some of the more interesting stats on Those Who Wander:

• I have published over 150 articles to date.

• Those Who Wander hit 1,000 subscribers in early May!

• Those Who Wander is read across 46 US states and 66 countries.

• We’ve had 14 open debates here and launched a new series, Featured Wanderers, which has been incredibly fun, interviewing fellow travelers.

• Also, I published my first book, An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture, which recently won its first award!

There is a lot to be grateful for, and I want to take a moment to thank everyone who has subscribed and supported my work over these last three years. Your support means everything.

I cannot thank you all enough.

Cheers to all of you for your support!  

Special Deals!

I would like to take a moment to offer some special deals:

Now, until the end of July, you can get 25% off my newsletter ($3.75 per month or $37.50 a year):

Get 25% Off Those Who Wander

Also, you can get 25% off my new book ($19.99, $14.99):

Get 25% Off Book

Here are the benefits you receive from becoming a paid subscriber:

• Access to the full archive of my articles (150+ posts to date).

• Access to all excerpts from my new book (12 excerpts to date).

• Access to all open debates (14 debates).

• Access to all Featured Wanderer interviews and a chance to submit to be a Featured Wanderer.

• Exclusive paid subscriber discount on my new book (35% off my new book ($19.99, $12.99). (A link to the discounted book purchase will be sent to your email upon your paid subscription to Those Who Wander).

Know someone who might enjoy Those Who Wander? You can gift a subscription to someone as well.

Give a gift subscription

Unable to subscribe? You can also give a one-time donation and buy me a coffee at whatever amount you prefer.

Buy Me a Coffee!

Recommended Posts

If you are new to Those Who Wander and looking to get caught up on some of my writing, might I interest you in some initial posts?

• Consider starting with Those Who Wander’s About Page to get to know a little about me and what I’ve been up to in archaeology and anthropology.

• Read about the Motives of Those Who Wander and Motives of Those Who Wander Revisited: Expanding on Why.

• Read my first post and the first published excerpt from my book, Our Ancient Narrative.

Check out some of my favorite and popular posts of late:

• For a look into our changing culture and possible future, see The Future Depends on Reimagining Our Lives Now: Where is Society Going in the Wake of AI Hype and Transformation?

• On wandering close to home, see The Adventures Close to Home: What Can We Accomplish Right Where We Are?

• On pilgrimage and mindfulness wandering, see The Pilgrimage of Matsuo Bashō: Poetic Wandering in 17th Century Japan

• On escapism in youth, see On Youth and Longing to Escape Modernity

• On what to do about brain rot, see How Do We Combat Brain Rot? Heed Thoreau’s Advice to Live More Deliberately

• On the impact of high-speed travel, see Methods of High Speed Travel and How They Shape Our View of the World

• On the need to get offline and touch grass, see Getting Offline and Touching Grass: How Do We Encourage Others to See the World Differently?

• On the dangers of travel and adventure, see The Grim and Dangerous Side of Seeking Travel and Adventure: The Appalachian Trail as a Case Study

• On how I was inspired to become an archaeologist, see Mesa Verde and the Power of a Place: An Archaeologist Dwells On Human Memory and the Meaning of Our Past

• And for an in-depth look into hunter-gatherers and our problems evaluating human progress, see Hunter-Gatherers and Human Resilience: An Homage to the OG Wanderers and the Problem of Assessing “Progress”

Want to read more from Those Who Wander?

Thank you all again for your support, and to another year of Those Who Wander! And to everyone celebrating Independence Day, may you have a safe and adventurous 4th of July!

Cheers!

-JSB

Share

Leave a comment

Want to read more from Those Who Wander?

My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

To learn more about the book, please visit here, and you can listen to my latest conversation about the book on a podcast with the New Books Network here and on Spotify:

Subscribe now

Greetings,

Today, I am excited to introduce readers to Hilary Hirtle for this month’s Featured Wanderer. Hilary is a fellow Substack writer and author of Storybound, an enchanting Substack that details Hilary’s unique blending of story and travel.

As you will read, Hilary covers some of the most intriguing topics in anthropology—our connection to landscapes and sacred sites, the meaning of ancestry and history, the significance of pilgrimage, and the courage that can only arise after one has dared to venture and take on new challenges.

Please enjoy this interview and check out her Substack, Storybound, to learn more.

Previous and future guests of Featured Wanderers can be found here:

Featured Wanderers

About Hilary Hirtle

Hello, I'm Hilary. Over ten years ago, a novel inspired me to take a solo trip to Scotland, leading me on a journey through landscape, history, and heritage.

I believe there's a power to stories, whether they're written in the pages of a book or woven in the landscapes around us. Through StoryBound, I share the ongoing, unfolding journey of where books, creativity, and landscapes continue to take me.

Justin to Hilary: I’m always curious to know what the origins of people’s wanderlust are and what moves people to move. Also, it often makes for a great first question. So, Hilary, what inspired your initial wanderlust? Did this occur at an early age or more recently? What later compelled you to live abroad in Britain? Tell us, what was it that made you choose Britain above other countries?

Hilary to Justin: From a young age, I was always curious about travelling, but growing up, travel was unaffordable and out of reach. As a child, I satisfied my initial wanderlust by consuming the “Countries of the World” book series, learning about different countries and their cultures. I also watched a lot of Globe Trekker and Rick Steves’ Europe on PBS. There was also a National Geographic show called “Living Wild” that I watched faithfully as a kid. It featured these amazing wild places and their wildlife. So yeah, a lot of living vicariously through travel and wildlife shows or “visiting” places via books for most of my childhood and teenage years. It wasn’t until I left home that I satisfied my own wanderlust and actually travelled. The first place that I ever travelled to on my own was Chicago, which, to the 19-year-old me at the time, felt like it was a world away from the corner of Ohio that I grew up in. I just remember arriving there and being so overwhelmed by the size of the city and just feeling so small.

When I was an undergraduate student, I really wanted to study abroad, so I applied to study creative writing for a semester in Scotland, but the costs were just too much, and I couldn’t make it financially work. But I never forgot about that dream, both of travelling to Britain and of studying there as well. Britain has always been special to me, and it’s hard to give a single reason why. It’s given me some of my favorite books, and I was sort of always “there” in my imagination, if that makes sense. My world was very small growing up, but these books expanded it. I also partly lived with my grandparents growing up, and they were big consumers of BBC dramas, and so there was this huge cultural influence of British stories and storytelling that I grew up with. There was also the ancestral connection, as many of my ancestors immigrated from Britain to the United States, and I was always curious about my ancestral heritage.

I could never have guessed that I would eventually live there, even if it was just for a year. My dream of studying abroad came around again, and this time it worked out, and I found myself as a postgraduate student at the University of Manchester.

Justin to Hilary: Your writing is very sensory-based and homes in on things like the sounds of birds and the “chime and churr of cicadas” in the summer, the feeling of the elements, or the experience of walking through an old town. I especially enjoyed your article Communing With the Past: Walking in the Footsteps of William Shakespeare. It reminded me very much of a post of mine about how certain places have a remarkable power to not only inspire our thoughts but even change our personal histories or even the entirety of human history, as you illustrate so well in your piece.

What has inspired your writing style most? Is it the books you’ve read, the places you’ve traveled, your educational experiences, or a combination of these factors and more?

Hilary to Justin: I think it’s a combination of these factors and more. Books have always been faithful, influential companions. Education led me initially to study creative writing, and I entered a phase of consuming a lot of poetry and literature from the Romantic era, and also that of the classic Gothic genre. There are many layers to these works; a lot of focus on atmosphere and the psychological and emotional experience, tossed in with a bit of awe and melodrama here and there. I’m condensing for the sake of this article, but the emotionally-layered, symbol-heavy works that resulted from these movements hugely influenced my own approach to writing. My graduate studies also heavily influenced a practice of looking deeper, asking questions, making connections, and observing that has also shaped my writing.

Outside of academia, I’d always been scribbling something, even when I was a child. I’ve faithfully kept a journal for 26 years! That habit has really ingrained a practice of observation and reflection of my own life experiences that I’ve applied to writing outside of my journals.

And then, on a more personal note, about ten years ago, I suffered a loss that affected me deeply. I thought more about spirituality and became hyper-aware of the natural world. I began reading works that were more contemplative and reflective on the natural world, or ones that shed light on a new way of being. Some of the most influential books to me at the time that reshaped my thoughts but also my own approach to writing were Kathleen Jamie’s Sightlines, Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous, Sharon Blackie’s The Enchanted Life, and Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With the Wolves.

Justin to Hilary: Another post of yours I thoroughly related to was Where the Stones Speak: A Journey to Stonehenge. You mention how some people find such places as Stonehenge (of all places!) “dull,” yet you were overcome by emotion standing in the presence of these stone giants. I’m an archaeologist and have loved history since the third grade, so I’m completely enamored with historic places and archaeological sites as well, and often find myself emotional and enchanted at such sites, too. I, like you, find it perplexing how some of us have no interest in these kinds of places.

How do you explain such discrepancies in our reactions or attitudes toward such places? Why are some of us struck with awe and wonder while others are completely indifferent or find such things dull?

Hilary to Justin: This is a good question, and a potentially difficult one to answer. With the Stonehenge example, some of the indifferent responses I’ve heard focus on the commercialization aspect because it’s a “must-see” sight, there are probably a lot of tourists, and there’s an entry fee associated with it. So there’s this commercialization aspect that seems to be off-putting.

As for indifference and boredom, I think that it’s because some of these ancient sights are associated with the past (especially a distant past). I think to some, it’s just a site of history; something from the past and stuck in the past with no bearing on the present or future. Whereas, to others, I think this past is very relevant to how they see and interact with the world. It holds deep personal, cultural, and sometimes even religious value. In the modern Western world, there can be a cultural tendency to treat history as, well, "history." It's put in a neat box labeled "the past," but I personally don't see it that neatly. These places are the ancestors we can directly interact with. It’s tangible history that we’re still a part of.

Justin to Hilary: Ancestry and heritage are deeply fascinating topics in anthropology. It seems universal that we all want to know where we come from. You briefly mention your Scottish ancestry in your article How One Book Took Me to Scotland. While you say in this post that Outlander had an outsized role to play in compelling you to travel to Scotland, do you think it was also your heritage that compelled you to travel here?

Also, in this piece, you mention something close to my research on fear and travel, which I discuss in my book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture. You mention that people thought you were “crazy” to want to travel alone here. How much do you think fear plays a role in our decisions to travel or not, and what did you learn traveling solo that you’d like to share with others who may be cautious to venture abroad by themselves?

Hilary to Justin: Years before I even encountered the Outlander series, I had tried to specifically study abroad in Scotland. The university I was interested in had a great creative writing program, but other countries with amazing universities had just as great programs, too. It was something about Scotland that just pulled me in and would not let go, even after I had to recognize that I couldn’t go there to study and really had no other financial means to get there at the time. I had to shelve the dream, but it never really went away, this pull to go there. It was like a repeated knocking on the door that sometimes would go quiet, and I would put it out of mind for a bit, but when I picked up Outlander, years after that failed attempt to study there, the knocking came back louder than ever, and I was like, “Right, I’m making this happen no matter what.”

It didn’t fully register within me until I got to Scotland that, to my knowledge at least, I was the first in my family to return to Scotland since that ancestral branch of my family came to the States. Maybe there was an ancestral pull taking me there. I like to think things happen for a reason, sometimes in ways I don’t understand. It’s interesting to think about, but there would be no journey to Scotland without that ancestor’s original journey from Scotland.

Travel always involves a certain level of uncertainty, and I think that uncertainty and the unknown can be uncomfortable and unsettling to people. Fear is a healthy response to those feelings. It’s okay to feel some fear when travelling to a place you’ve never been to before. It’s okay to fear getting lost. It’s okay to fear being lonely. But don’t fear learning. Don’t fear growth. That’s what comes with these experiences. It’s a journey. Embark on it.

Travelling solo gave me such a perspective on my own courage. And I’m coming at this from a woman’s perspective, where I’d repeatedly been warned not to travel solo for safety reasons. Fears around safety are valid. But what I also hope others see as valid is questioning this long-held narrative, often directed at women travelling solo. I will admit that I personally got tired of hearing all the warnings about safety and even loneliness. There are just constant unknowns in every choice you make. Risks exist everywhere, even at home. I can only logically prepare for so many. I just got to a point where I wasn’t going to wait around for others to grant me the life I wanted to live for myself, and so I just went for it. For anyone thinking about travelling solo, particularly women, all I can say is use common sense and go and do it. Also, I wholeheartedly believe that some solitude is a very good thing.

Justin to Hilary: Something I love about how you end each of your articles on Storybound is by showcasing a book you’ve read recently and one you are currently reading. They have all sounded so enchanting, and I’ve added several to my list to read. While I have not read them, they all seem to hover around this theme you write about of “stories that inspire journeys.”

Do you think stories are the primary means to inspire others to travel? What’s one book that you think any aspiring traveler should read?

Hilary to Justin: I don’t know if I would say primary, but I would say an integral part in inspiring travel. I think stories, whether that’s a book or even someone’s memory, allow us the gift to imagine what was, what is, and what could be in our own lives. We can step outside our own narrative and enter another. Through a story, we can start picturing ourselves in a place, and I think that’s where the magic begins.

So many books I could recommend! But I would have to say Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. To me, travel is not just about the outer journey, but the inner one as well, and this book beautifully captures that theme.

Another theme of Storybound is the pilgrimage. What makes pilgrimage important? What’s a future pilgrimage you’re dreaming of doing one day?

Hilary to Justin: To me, pilgrimage is important because it’s all about the inner and outer journey working in tandem (and when I mention “pilgrimage,” it’s in a more secular sense). A pilgrimage starts with a personal question or intention. And with this question or intention, you’re about to co-create a journey of personal meaning with the landscape you move through and the encounters you make along the way. You’re co-crafting a story through your journey every step of the way.

A future pilgrimage that I’m dreaming of doing would be to Yellowstone National Park. Excitingly, there’s a plan to make this happen this September, and I cannot wait. The landscape and wildlife of Yellowstone have captured my imagination since childhood, so it feels personally significant to me to be journeying there at last. Sometime in the future, I would like to undertake one of the ancient pilgrimage routes in Britain. Which one it would be and when, I will have to wait for that to be revealed to me in time.

Justin to Hilary: What’s a lesson you’ve learned in your travels so far that you couldn’t have learned if you’d never traveled?

Hilary to Justin: It’s honestly courage. Travel comes with many unknowns. It’s taught me that I can take risks and figure things out if things don’t go according to plan. It’s given me the courage to ask for help, to be vulnerable, and to connect with others. It’s given me the courage to challenge my perspective and to leave my comfort zone.

Justin to Hilary: Is there anything else you’d like to share, highlight, or emphasize about your work?

Hilary to Justin: When I talk about travel, I’m not talking about vacationing at a resort or something similar. To me, it’s deeper, and it’s based on learning about the world, about yourself, and about others, both human and non-human. There’s a privilege to travel that I don’t take for granted, and there’s a responsibility that comes with it. I don’t travel all the time, but I travel a lot through stories. Landscape and nature, of finding yourself a part of a lineage and a cycle and circle of life, are something that I reflect a lot about. I’d love to connect on StoryBound if any of these thoughts and themes are resonating.

It’s been delightful to learn about Hilary and her writing. Many writers and readers have made the observation that books are a kind of simulator and one of the best mediums that allow us to momentarily step into the mind of another person. Stories often catapult us into travel and action, and Hilary perfectly embodies the idea of how books and stories can be those catalysts for our adventures.

I hope you will find some time to check out what she is writing at Storybound.

Leave a comment

Previous and future guests of Featured Wanderers can be found here:

Featured Wanderers

My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

Thanks for being a fellow traveller with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB

Share

Support Those Who Wander

Want to read more from Those Who Wander?

My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

To learn more about the book, please visit here, and you can listen to my latest conversation about the book on a podcast with the New Books Network here and on Spotify:

Greetings everyone,

This week’s post is more of a traditional newsletter, as I wanted to give a few updates on what I’m working on for the coming weeks and make an announcement:

• First, I am thrilled to announce that my newly minted book, An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture, won the National Indie Excellence Awards for Best Nonfiction in the Midwest. This is my first award for the book, and it feels amazing to have received this recognition. I’m grateful for everyone out there who’s read, reviewed, and supported my work over the years. Cheers to you all!

• I’ll be on a trip in a couple of weeks, taking a road trip out to Rhode Island and Maine to visit family and celebrate the 4th of July on the East Coast.

• July 7, 2026, will mark the third anniversary of Those Who Wander on Substack, so I will have a special celebration post along with some deals for prospective subscribers.

  Subscribe now

• Lastly, I’ll be working on a few new posts in the coming months and will soon be publishing another wonderful Featured Wanderer article.

Stay tuned for more updates and announcements, and have a wonderful weekend wandering.

Cheers!

-JSB

Leave a comment

An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is a first-person account of backpacking the Appalachian Trail that dives into anthropology, travel, fear, and the meaning of adventure in culture and society. If you love social science, adventure, and travel, this book will be for you. Subscribe and stay tuned for more updates and upcoming events.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

Can’t subscribe right now, but want to do a one-time donation? Buy me a coffee!

Buy Me a Coffee!

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow!

Cheers!

-JSB

Share

Support Those Who Wander

Want to read more from Those Who Wander?

My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

To learn more about the book, please visit here, and you can listen to my latest conversation about the book on a podcast with the New Books Network here and on Spotify:

Greetings, fellow wanderers,

Today I am republishing another post from the archives. As Those Who Wander has officially reached 1,000 subscribers (wow!), I recognise that many newcomers to this Substack may not have access to or be familiar with some of my initial writings. With over 150 posts in the archive, I aim to make some of the paywalled posts more accessible to a wider audience.

That said, if you have been enjoying these ramblings on travel, adventure, and anthropology, please consider supporting my writing, which grants you full access to everything I’ve written on Substack, including excerpts from my book. The book is now available for order on all major online retailers, including Amazon (here), Barnes & Noble (here), and Bookshop (here). If you’ve recently read the book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is a first-person account of backpacking the Appalachian Trail that dives into anthropology, travel, fear, and the meaning of adventure in culture and society. If you love social science, adventure, and travel, this book will be for you. Subscribe and stay tuned for more updates and upcoming events.

Subscribe now

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

Can’t subscribe right now, but want to do a one-time donation? Buy me a coffee!

Buy Me a Coffee!

Thank you to everyone who has subscribed and supported my work thus far.

Cheers!

-JSB

Now onto today’s archived post, To Plan or Not to Plan: How Much Should One Prepare for a Visit to Another Country When We Value Spontaneity?

There’s something that almost always happens to me when I travel somewhere. At some point, I wonder if I truly got the most out of my time in a place. What did I miss? Should I have prepared more? After all, it is more than probable that this will be the last time I set foot in a new country. Did I truly make the most of my time here? How do we not only physically plan for an upcoming trip, but mentally prepare as well?

In two months, I’ll be taking a solo trip to Ireland. My flight and hotel have been booked for months, and yes, I’ve since renewed my passport this time and don’t plan on f***ing up my travel plans like last year. Before I arrive, I’ll have plenty of Euros in hand, a tour booked to some archaeological sites that require reservations, and a distillery or two added to the itinerary. Other than that, I sincerely do not want to plan for much more. I want my trip to be as spontaneous and flexible as possible. But is that wise? Will I be repeating history soon enough and wondering if I should have planned more? This is the paradox I, and many other travelers, I presume, often wrestle with—how much to plan or not plan, that is the question.

Though we all fall on a spectrum when it comes to planning, to my mind, we lean toward one of two opposite poles, with there being essentially two kinds of travelers: the ultra-planners and the carefree serendipitous ones. Where we are going and for how long are typically the biggest factors that will dictate which of the two we will be. I, like many other travelers, have inhabited both of these mindsets. For instance, I spent months researching, planning, and physically preparing for a 2014 backpacking trek on the Appalachian Trail. When it comes to extensive adventures, one can’t help but become obsessed with planning, given how high the stakes are.

By contrast, on many of the solo road trips I’ve taken over the years, I’ve often done little more than pack some bags and camping gear, hop in the car, glance at the map from time to time, and let the open road determine where I go and what I see. I love the thrill of not knowing where I will end up at the day’s end. When I get tired, I find a campsite, typically near a national forest or state park, and rest my weary head waiting for the next day to repeat the same pursuit of serendipity.

My wife, Hilary, is much more the planner and exquisite at it (although she, too, loves being spontaneous). I admire this ultra-planner in her, and I also benefit from her efforts because a lot of the time I get to be the clueless serendipitous one being surprised by her meticulously crafted itineraries. However, with Ireland, I will be on my own, and I’ve been dwelling on just how much mental effort should go into trying to predict the future. But I don’t want to be a soothsayer trying to anxiously predict all future moments of my trip. As I wrote in a previous post on applying the adventurous mindset, I want the world to pull me along for the ride and allow my travels to unfold however they will.

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I agonize—perhaps too much—over the fact that we live in a world where more and more of us are expected to plan everything ahead of time. Weddings are no longer the only RSVP-mandated event these days. Dinners, movies, oil changes for the car, and children’s two-year-old birthday parties. By the time I reach 40, I’m guessing someone will come along pressuring me that I need to soon reserve my 450-square-foot room in a senior living community, along with my burial plot. I presume there will be a package discount of 20% off my funeral expenses, and you must act now! Besides, all the 40-year-olds are doing it, and the deal is simply to die for!

I get the reasons to plan. But I still hate it most of the time. It eradicates any hope for spontaneity and tamps down the chance for serendipity. When it comes to many national parks, timed entry tickets are now becoming more common than I’d like and are required for certain dates and times just to enter the parks. While I understand the need for places to better organize and control the massive crowds that flock to these wonderful places, at the same time, one can’t help but feel a bit of coercion and a sense of loss in our ability to travel unencumbered without having to plan and control everything ahead of time. In my freshly minted book, I lament this style of traveling we may unwittingly fall victim to by saying,

Those of us who do make the effort to venture out tend to bog down a lot of the thrill a new place offers us by overly obsessing over the costs of bus fares, plane tickets, hotel accommodations, weighing the restaurant options, and placing reservations here and there. We become all too consumed by this ordeal of planning. We plan out which beaches and monuments and historical places we’ll check out and for how long, snap a few quick photos of us being there to make sure we earn our social status for social media postings, then quickly rush to the next hotspot to repeat the whole process as if we’re in some frantic race to get the experience over with. What’s the point of this?

We let go of all sense of spontaneity and uncertainty, which are important parts of what adventure is all about. Rather than simply packing up a few reasonable essentials, booking the plane ticket, and letting our tale unfold and allowing whatever happens to happen, we systematically attempt to plan every detail out in a work-schedule fashion. By the end, the mystery and suspense of our experience are all predetermined and there’s a part of us that may feel a bit cheated, though we know not why. We know exactly where we will be and when we will be; what things to expect; for how long we can enjoy our time always peering down at the wristwatch; and what we’ll be wearing to dinner on this or that night.

The experience is completely predictable and no time is set aside to just simply explore and wander and let yourself become lost and enchanted by the unexpected with what a new place has to offer us. We try our hardest to control every detail. Instead of letting the experience mold and shape us, we try to mold and shape the experience. 

While I recognize that some planning and concern over safety are paramount when traveling (as I certainly wouldn’t advocate being completely mindless while in unfamiliar territory) I still worry about how many of us compromise our experiences with this style of OCD traveling—our minds being locked in a loop of constantly planning for the imminent future rather than taking a breath to appreciate what is before us in the present.

I continue to mull over the cultural origins of this in the book,

This overall style of experiencing a place feels anxiety-ridden and depressing. All this worrying is likely because we’ve allowed our time to be constrained by all of modernity’s endless expectations, demands, and fears; the overwhelming commitments, responsibilities, and anxieties we’ve become absorbed by; insurmountable debt, bills, rent, mortgages, schooling, jobs, house chores, another appliance to replace or add to the household, car maintenance and repairs, pets and children to care for, tomorrow’s impending storm, terrorist threats, this week’s theme in the neverending culture wars. All of this cultural neuroticism weighs heavy on us and pours into our psyches all at once, shaping our behaviors and how we see the world and each other.

This constant need to control every circumstance we find ourselves in is, I suspect, a bad habit instilled in us over a lifetime by a culture and society obsessed with time, and efficiency, and that prescribes a cookie-cutter list of things to do to obtain the wealth and status we all desire. At some point, we must learn to unconstrain ourselves—if only for a while—to let go of some of our worries, and more consciously minimize and declutter our lives a little, so that we may once again learn the art and peace of wandering in this world—the only one we’ll ever know.

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I try my best to keep the place I am visiting somewhat mysterious. I’ll look at the map to familiarize myself with a place, read some history and literature of the country, and maybe gander at a few blogs and photos to try and anticipate cultural customs and social norms. And I’ll keep abreast of the U.S. State Department’s travel map and pay some attention to the local news of the place I’ll soon be. But like a good meal, I don’t want to spoil my appetite. I want some suspense about what I’m going to experience. Our world has created the means to neurotically attempt to foresee experiences before they happen, as if we’re under a spell too enchanted by oracles desperately trying to prophesy our future.

Dublin has been dubbed a “walker’s city,” and so I feel compelled to treat it as such and will aim to experiment in my pursuit of spontaneity as much as I can in my upcoming trip to Ireland. I look forward to putting theory into practice and seeing how much spontaneity I can ultimately get away with before I regret not planning more. To be continued…

For consideration:

●      How much do you typically plan for an upcoming trip?

●      In what ways do you prepare to visit another country?

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Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow!

Cheers!

-JSB

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Greetings fellow wanderers,

In August 2024, I introduced a new feature at Those Who Wander—a Those Who Wander Open Debate. Instead of a weekly post, I’m posting a monthly debate question, focused on various travel and adventure topics.

The format is simple. I will post a question for debate and pose a prompt about it. Then, there will be a poll and an opportunity to leave a comment to expand on your answer. Please feel free to respond as long as you like.

I will also repost the stats from the previous debate poll. In our last debate, I asked, Are Adventures More About Escapism or Renewal and Change? with 55% answering ‘Escapism,’ 27% responding with ‘Renewal,’ and 18% answering ‘Something Else.’ Thank you to everyone who participated and shared your thoughts!

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Now, onto today’s question and prompt: Can travel cure xenophobia?

I’ll begin by stating something that may, to some, read as controversial: all societies since time immemorial have likely harbored some background levels of xenophobia or the fear and dislike of outsiders. Some would say this is a part of human nature—something innate drives us to, at the very least, be suspicious and cautious about those “others” not in our in-group and to be wary of unknown individuals who could do us and our loved ones harm. In modern contexts, this can take extreme forms like nativism and jingoism that often promote conspiracy theories, draconian laws or policies, aggression, and outright violence against foreigners, all purportedly to protect a national identity.

However, today I’m not here to unpack the history or sociology of xenophobia, but to ask the broader question of whether travel can cure xenophobia. In previous debates, I’ve asked similar questions: Does travel promote empathy, and do travel and adventure make us less fearful?

On the one hand, travel can often expose us to many ways of seeing the world and open our minds to realizing that there isn’t just one way to do things. More importantly, the more we travel, it eventually dawns on us that humans and culture are incredibly mixed. There’s no such thing as a “pure” society, culture, or race, and to fall for such delusion and mythmaking is to ironically set yourself apart as a pariah to be pitied by the bulk of your own society. To be a traveler in a foreign land is to humbly confront our ignorance of how vast and diverse humanity is.

On the other hand, how would we know that travel cured someone of their xenophobia? Xenophobia often shackles a person in place (physically as well as mentally), and a person fearful or wary of other people and cultures is very unlikely to have even thought, much less actively tried, to test the hypothesis of travel curing their xenophobia. The best we have are anecdotes of people (often early on in life) being placed in a very different environment, whether traveling or through a cultural exchange program, and having their minds radically changed about another place and group. Maybe a friend or relative encouraged someone to travel, or perhaps they were inspired by a book or film to venture abroad. Nevertheless, it seems nearly impossible to know how often a former xenophobe was ever inspired enough to travel and then became transformed by their travels, thus “curing” their xenophobia.

As the world becomes evermore integrated, it seems inevitable that people and cultures will only continue to blend and interact. It would behoove us to learn how to encourage more of us to travel, if only to help temper the fears and prejudices many still have about the “other.”

Perhaps the answer lies in a nuanced form: Travel may only preemptively “cure” us of a nascent or weakened form of xenophobia similar to how taking an early vaccine inoculates us against virulent diseases. Thus, the best we can try is to encourage and facilitate programs that allow more of us to travel early and often.

What are your thoughts on this? Can travel cure xenophobia?

Expand on your answer in the comments:

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Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB

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My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

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To learn more about the book, please visit here, and you can listen to my latest conversation about the book on a podcast with the New Books Network here and on Spotify:

Greetings, fellow wanderers,

Today I am republishing another post from the archives. As Those Who Wander has officially reached 1,000 subscribers (wow!), I recognise that many newcomers to this Substack may not have access to or be familiar with some of my initial writings. With over 150 posts in the archive, I aim to make some of the paywalled posts more accessible to a wider audience.

That said, if you have been enjoying these ramblings on travel, adventure, and anthropology, please consider supporting my writing, which grants you full access to everything I’ve written on Substack, including excerpts from my book. The book is now available for order on all major online retailers, including Amazon (here), Barnes & Noble (here), and Bookshop (here). If you’ve recently read the book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is a first-person account of backpacking the Appalachian Trail that dives into anthropology, travel, fear, and the meaning of adventure in culture and society. If you love social science, adventure, and travel, this book will be for you. Subscribe and stay tuned for more updates and upcoming events.

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Now onto today’s archived post, The Purgatory of Modern Travel: When is Travel Not Worth It?

Travel and adventure are often riddled with mishaps, miscalculations, and bouts of misery. No journey exists without something going wrong. In some cases, the things that go wrong are what define an adventure and make for an amusing story to tell others later. But in these moments of extreme stress and frustration, we usually aren’t laughing, unless it’s the manic type of laughing where we’ve completely pulled our hair out and lost our senses. How long until we throw up our hands and say enough is enough? This isn’t worth it?

I’ve never actually abandoned a trip, but recently I desperately wanted to. I kept a record of all my grievances to tally up to see just how many irksome moments I encountered while attempting to get to Mexico for our friend’s destination wedding. In the grand scheme of things, I understand this was not an extraordinary dilemma by any measure, and I’ve experienced plenty of similar setbacks, so I know it will likely happen again and again.

Nevertheless, this formula is becoming more common for the modern traveler, where we are careened into airplanes like sardines: a delay leads to missed flights, to being stuck overnight in drab hotels, squandering our precious money and time on lousy, overly-priced food. And yet, we continue to do it. Why do so many of us willingly put ourselves through this gauntlet of misery to reach our destinations?

For American travelers, flights are really the only quick and easy option, and in our case, we wouldn’t dare miss our friend’s destination wedding, and so the answer isn’t that perplexing, but I suppose my question can be refined to: how did modern travel become such an anxious and forsaken purgatory? And can anything even be done about it?

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Here are some of the grievances I noted while stuck in my latest travel purgatory: 

Our flight was originally delayed by one hour, which prevented us from making our connecting flight. We were in the back of the plane once we landed, as we always are, with no direction from flight attendants to administer a helpful call for other passengers to let those with connecting flights out first, nor sympathy from anyone else to let us pass.

We waited our turns like the chivalrous and unconfrontational Midwesterners we are. We finally escaped the plane, and with luggage in tow, my wife and I attempted to sprint across the entire airport because, of course, our terminal was at the opposite end of the airport as it always seems to be! And if you’ve been to the Atlanta airport, you know how big this place is. We made it just in time…that is, to watch our flight close the gate and taxi away as the expressionless ticket agents tell us, “Sorry, there’s nothing we can do for you.” Okay, we’ll wait for the next flight this evening…as if we had some choice in the matter. 

We spent the next five hours in the airport, dawdling around, twiddling thumbs, and spending too much money on crap food under migraine-inducing white light ($62.50 on bar food to be precise). Oh, and the only other flight for the day to our destination is already booked, and we’ll be on standby, hoping someone else had the misfortune of having their flight delayed so we could steal their seats. Alas, we’re still playing musical chairs at this stage in life. If we don’t make this flight, then we’ll be staying the night in Atlanta and will need to get up early once again before even the meager breakfast options in the hotel open. No plastic-packaged cinnamon roll for me this time.

I angrily shuffle over to the bar, thinking a bourbon will somehow make me relax a little. As I tried not to let my rage bubble up, I sipped my mediocre glass of bourbon, trying to think happy thoughts like “no one else cares about my problems, why should I?” That only lasted about three minutes until another expressionless face behind the bar slid me my bill…$16.50 for this toxic injection! Another eye roll and I was instantly back in purgatory with the onset of a migraine rapidly rising in my head from this terrible place—a purgatory indeed where you’ve momentarily lost all sense of agency, and your life depends exclusively on an apathetic system with the only job of delivering you to a place like a UPS package in semi-functioning condition.

My wife, Hilary, appeared in my recurring stupor of annoyance to deliver more wonderful news. Delta wasn’t going to be paying for our hotel reimbursement after all (even after we were reassured by another Delta representative that we would) because somehow the original flight delay wasn’t their fault due to the weather. Oh, of course, let the weather be our scapegoat. More money wasted. You know what? I should just burn the rest of my money right here and let them cart me off as a terrorist, I thought. At least I’d be out of this airport and could get some much-needed sleep, perhaps.

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After what should have been a one-hour flight followed by a 2.5-hour connecting flight turned into a 30-hour journey from an all-expenses trip provided by our dwindling bank account: through the airport back and forth shuttles from the drab hotel to finally getting on our early morning flight, to a taxi, a ferry, and finally yet another taxi. In times like this, I envy those who do not wander and wonder if I’m actually the sucker, being lured by the false hope of the romantic adventures and smooth, relaxing trips I keep conjuring up in my head.

We finally made it to Isla Mujeres and were now expected to put on our happy faces and pretend like I hadn’t lost 3,000 brain cells in the last 30 hours. And again, as much as I realize this isn’t the worst that could happen to someone traveling, I am still left wondering why this is the new normal of travel. How did we get here?

When I am sent spiraling down a series of unfortunate and tedious events like this, I’m sometimes left begging for home. Am I the intrepid traveler I imagine myself to be? Or just another whiny person who can’t get through some minor inconveniences? When is travel not worth it, though? How is everyone okay with walking this gauntlet of misery time and time again? As an anthropologist, I know deep down we’re apes with easily goaded trigger points, so how the hell do so many of us keep it together? Don’t we all have our breaking points? Is this style of modern travel even deserving of being labeled travel?

So many great adventurers tell tales of being lost on islands for years, scorched by the desert heat, or being bedridden with malaria and other deadly diseases on years-long excursions into the unknown. Could I endure that? I can’t even seem to stand having a flight canceled, let alone being lost in the jungle full of poisonous and dangerous critters lurking about to nip at my heels in the dark.

But there does seem to be something distinct between these traditional adventures and travels I’ve read so much about and the modern purgatory of airport travel that seems the stuff of an existential philosopher’s nightmare—a complete merry-go-round of absurdity with no way of getting off the ride. Your agency is momentarily stolen from you today, and you simply must endure at the hands of apathetic souls and a seemingly mindless techno-wonderland of unaccountability. This kind of modern travel often feels eerily like stepping through a portal into a Twilight Zone episode.

Traveling can be great, but it can often disappoint. At worst, it can show you a world that is unkind or at least cares nothing for your problems. You are merely one in a legion of other faceless souls meandering through some misbegotten underworld. When things aren’t going your way, everyone’s face seems apathetic to your plight. An expressionless face can even seem to be taunting you. It enrages you, depresses you, and makes you wonder what the point is of putting yourself through it all. 

At what point along our severely compromised trip would I push a magical button to return instantaneously back home and gleefully abandon this trip? Some trips feel like traps, and the sunk cost fallacy reigns supreme, whereby we keep pushing on, hoping that eventually things will get better, only to be angered time and time again by yet another setback. 

I know that I get perturbed easily, much to my wife’s frustration. But, despite what she and many others think, I do try very hard to keep things contained, and I do think I’ve gotten a little better at anticipating the misery that will be coming each time I travel—for I know I will have to endure many more gauntlets of misery if I want to keep traveling. And I do!

That said, I can’t help but harp on the fact that the process of getting to our destinations these days isn’t all that glamorous or fun to me, as should be more than apparent by now. As I lamented in a previous critique of modern travel,

“Modern transportation technology has given rise to something unique in our time: the ability for us to arrive without traveling. With planes, trains, and automobiles, we have the extraordinary capacity to obliterate space and skip everything between points A and B. “Destination weddings” have become popular in recent years and entire transportation industries promise to deliver us as efficiently as possible to wherever we need to go on the planet. We may say the unconscious motto of the day is, “It’s all about the destination, not the journey…Traveling and attempting to have adventures in a modern context is not easy. Time, money, and many of life’s uncertainties inhibit our wanderlust. And when we do find the time and means to explore, our mechanized system of transportation can demoralize us and make us feel as though we are little more than Amazon boxes needing to be whisked quickly across the globe to our destinations—to arrive without traveling.”

Although I realize how great it is to be able to hop on an air machine and get to just about anywhere on the globe in a matter of hours, I still contend that we are little more than parcels to the airline industry, and we’ve sucked a lot of fun out of traveling in the modern world—that is my argument. And yes, I know I romanticize the travels of the past, but I genuinely believe there was something much more adventurous and enjoyable about charting paths through the jungle or over mountain passes, even if it meant risking life and limb.

Despite how insane it may sound to many modern readers, there is a part of me who’d gladly exchange the tediousness and absurdity of modern airport travel purgatory for a much slower means of transportation if the structure of our society allowed for it. I’d walk just about everywhere if I could. Hell, even a horse and a small knapsack and all the risks it would entail traveling in such a rugged manner would somehow be far more enjoyable in my mind.

Alas, we made it to Mexico, and something rather magical happened once we dropped our luggage off at our cozy little Airbnb and walked across the street for food and drinks. The minute a drink of mezcal with a side of grasshoppers was placed in front of me, I smiled, and all the stress and anxiety of the previous 30 hours or so evaporated. I was instantly in a stupor of glee and relaxation...perhaps amnesia was quickly overcoming me. All of it was in the past now, and from this vantage point, what we had endured wasn’t so bad. Indeed, it was trivial. We’d escaped purgatory to find ourselves in paradise, and we ended up having a marvelous time with our friends.

Had I been able to push the magic button to return home, I would have missed out on this epiphany—one I’ve had time and again and yet keep forgetting. We endure the gauntlet of misery because we know what awaits us on the other side. The destination can be all we’re aiming for. As much as I wish the “traveling” part of modern travel was more exciting and less tedious, at least there are still plenty of wonderful destinations to quickly lift us and make us forget our travel purgatories…that is, until we set our sights back home and must endure it once more.

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Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow!

Cheers!

-JSB

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My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

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Now until June 7, receive 30% off your subscription, plus 35% off my new book ($19.99, $12.99). (A link to the discounted book purchase will be sent to your email upon your paid subscription to Those Who Wander).

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To learn more about the book, please visit here, and you can listen to my latest conversation about the book on a podcast with the New Books Network here and on Spotify:

Greetings,

Today, I am excited to introduce readers to Cole Grady for this month’s Featured Wanderer. Cole is a fellow Substack writer and author of Cole’s Field Notes with two collections of writing: The View From Here, which focuses on street and travel photography to explore anthropological insights, and The Peach Blossom’s Gale, which focuses on Cole’s motorcycle trip through Vietnam.

As you will read, Cole has a fascinating background and has followed a unique career in the NGO world, pursuing conservation and development work in a wide variety of settings across the globe.

Please enjoy this interview and check out his Substack, Cole’s Field Notes, to learn more.

Previous and future guests of Featured Wanderers can be found here:

Featured Wanderers

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About M. Cole Grady

I’ve fallen deeply in love with the jungle. My work in grassroots NGOs and community movements has taken me all over the world: peanut farmers in north-western Zambia, immigration activism in Edinburgh, coastal clean-ups in Mumbai. My current home is at the edge of Sumatra’s Leuser Mountains, the last place on Earth where wild orangutans, rhinos, tigers and elephants coexist. Here, I manage operations for a small community conservation and education centre. Being in nature is my ultimate form of meditation, and I’m honoured to spend this chapter of my life sharing that with others.

My written work stems from a love for places, and my education in social anthropology and international journalism has given me the tools to explore the cultural and intellectual weight they carry. I currently run a small publication on Substack, Cole’s Field Notes, which has graced me with a creative outlet through which I can make sense of the world. I always find myself circling back to the ethics and aesthetics of travel, and the reciprocal relationship between ourselves and the places we visit. I am currently in the final stages of publishing my notes from a recent motorcycle trip from Ha Noi to Ho Chi Minh City. Writing keeps me sane, and I adore having Substack as my creative outlet :)

I’d love to connect with all the thinkers, travellers and writers out there! Feel free to introduce yourself at mcolegrady@gmail.com or join me over at Cole’s Field Notes.

Justin to Cole: You’ve had a really interesting career and travel trajectory, and you’ve lived, worked, and journeyed in some wonderfully diverse places abroad—from Edinburgh and Mumbai to Vietnam, Indonesia, and many other places throughout Southeast Asia. I’m deeply curious about the origins of people’s wanderlust. What prompted your initial wanderlust, and what compelled you to visit these particular places, many of them being in Southeast Asia?

Cole to Justin: I’ve always been curious about the world! My first time descending into Edinburgh, where I would spend the next six years of my life, I was aghast at the bird’s-eye view of cobblestone hedgerows separating plots of land. My teenage mind imagined those demarcations going back centuries; even by witnessing them from a plane window, I felt like I was somehow participating in their history. In a sense, I’ve become part of Scotland’s history. I’ve participated in social and environmental movements, I voted in general elections (how cool that I was legally allowed to vote as a non-citizen!), I watched as the body of Queen Elizabeth was escorted down the Royal Mile. Places change you, too; they become part of your story. Without knowing it, you begin to absorb the values and lessons of the places you grow to be a part of —they linger.

Southeast Asia was a happy accident. I found myself on the wrong side of a visa issue and had to leave my previous work behind. I saw that my current organisation was hiring and made the decision to move to rural North Sumatra. In that sense, I guess my travel habits are more opportunistic than anything else! Regardless of where, it’s always an honour to be changed by these places.

My current home is on the edge of the Gunung Leuser National Park, one of the few remaining biodiversity hotspots on the planet. As time has passed, my love for the jungle has grown, and so has my character. One of the things I admire most about the lifestyle here is nongkrong: relaxing and doing nothing with people close to you. Having lived previously in the UK and America, where social isolation and loneliness are byproducts of almost puritanical ideas about individual productivity, it’s an important lesson. Wherever my journeys take me, even if I can never bring myself to slow down, I’ll carry that feeling in my heart.

When you become part of a place, when you become part of its story and let it alter yours, a special relationship forms. I’m fortunate enough to have built a career that enables me to do this! It’s hard for me to imagine any other life. Of course, you cannot demand this bond with every place, especially if you’re only visiting for days or weeks at a time, but the simple act of exploration makes me feel connected to the stories that shape our world. In that sense, I suppose wandering is a form of meditation.

Justin to Cole: You currently operate a conservation/community development NGO in Sumatra. What influenced your decisions to pursue the social and environmental projects you’ve been a part of? What have been some of the challenges and rewards of pursuing these projects, especially as a foreigner? And can you share with us what your NGO is primarily focused on at the moment?

Cole to Justin: Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to do this kind of work. At the risk of getting too political—then again, I don’t think this is a contentious statement—the systems governing the world enable profound human suffering. I believe that every person has a responsibility to try to rectify that. My passion is conservation, but there are so many different ways to achieve that end: restoration ecology, activism, socioeconomic development, education, and so many more! It is less a single practice than an underlying ethos.

My current organisation works mostly through education and community development. We currently run a range of programmes: business co-operative development for rural farmers, ecofarming & regenerative agriculture courses, youth conservation classes, literacy classes, English language support, women’s groups and early childhood education.

Intellectually, I am drawn by questions of ethics and best practice. I’m not working for a company; there is no financial bottom line. Everything we do is intended to better people’s lives, but through which means and to what end? I think it would be lofty to say that our—or any—work could live up to such a claim. You settle on doing the best you can and always strive to do better.

As a foreigner, these ethical questions are even more acute. I’m not blind to just how problematic my life in Sumatra could be. We are an internationally-funded NGO that must reconcile the requirements of UK-based funders with the needs of our beneficiaries. How can we strike an ethical balance? Can foreign money ever do justice to local civic needs? Can I justify working here when I know that there are Indonesians far better suited for my role? I carry progressive values accumulated over years of working in global cities, and I’ve suddenly found myself in a conservative Islamic village. How do I bring all I can into this job without enforcing my values upon others? I’d be lying to say that these questions are not constantly whizzing around my head, but when something clicks—when you have even the smallest win—the clarity is immense.

Compared to the ethical challenges, the practical concerns are negligible. Power outages are frequent, and I miss hot showers, but we are more adaptable than we think we are. When I first landed in Sumatra, somebody told me that learning Bahasa Indonesia was like eating chocolate; I still pucker up speaking the language more than I ever would eating a bar of Cadbury’s, but it’s a joy to be able to connect with people in a new language. I chuckle when I travel to other parts of Indonesia, and people say that I have a regional accent! It’s always a privilege to slowly become part of a place’s story. When the call to prayer carries over the rice paddies and ricochets off the mountains, in those fleeting moments of beauty, you know you’re exactly where you need to be.

Justin to Cole: The central thesis of my recent book, An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture, is how much fear—prompted in large part by media and culture—influences our behaviors. How much do you think fear plays a role in prohibiting many of us from meaningfully exploring our world? To your mind, what’s the key to inspiring others to overcome their fears, anxieties, uncertainties, prejudices, or hesitancy for travel, especially as it pertains to other people and cultures abroad?

Cole to Justin: To a very large degree! I grew up in a small town in the American South while the country was still reeling from 9/11. I watched over my mom’s shoulder as sensationalist conservative journalists demonised Muslims; I watched heavily armed, self-proclaimed militias parade around our town square when construction plans for a mosque were approved. I even received warnings before moving to the largest Islamic country on the planet. The history of empire tells us that little is more effective at controlling people than invoking fear, and unfortunately, that has captured people the world over. What better way to combat a story than with a story?

In conservation work, the first step towards long-term behavioural change is always to inspire short-term empathy, and I think the same applies to dismantling cultures of fear. As storytellers—not just writers but anyone with a platform, no matter how minor—we must find a way to weave empathetic narratives, those that challenge dogma and invoke wonder. Once you set people on the path to discovery and encourage them to take their first step into an unfathomably massive world, the rest comes naturally.

There’s not much I’m optimistic about in this world, but people’s inherent kindness is one of them. My politics are infused with leftist values, but I’ve managed to find common ground with the religious right—not only in America or Britain, but all over the world—by appealing to just that. We shape the world through the stories we tell about it; although breaking down narratives of fear and hatred is a herculean task, it’s not impossible. Exposure through travel certainly has a role in this.

Justin to Cole: Outside of academia and the world of NGOs, not many are likely familiar with the field and concepts of human ecology. In general, it’s an approach to understanding and planning human development and infrastructure that is more in line with both the existing environment and our relationship to the natural environment. Basically, it’s trying to have us be more mindful of how we continue to build things so that we’re not polluting the environment more than we have. From your experience, how do you think of human ecology and conservation in your daily work? More broadly, are you optimistic about conservation and sustainability work across the globe and the environment?

Cole to Justin: As I’m writing this, I am overlooking the Bahorok River on the edge of the Gunung Leuser ecosystem, one of the most complex and biodiverse ecosystems left on the planet. I’ve seldom experienced such beauty, such vivid complexity and interdependence, as I have exploring that forest. We take great pride in the idea that we exist outside of nature, that humans are ungovernable by the same rules that govern the rainforest, simply because we define ourselves as such.

Two-thirds of Sumatra is now being used for palm oil monoculture. The jungle is kept on life support by ecotourism profits and marginal public investment. Illegal logging is destroying the forest from the inside out. We’ve positioned ourselves as masters over the nonhuman world, but the effects on life in Sumatra are immense: seasons are becoming irregular, rivers are drying up, and once-in-a-generation flooding now occurs annually. Our human world is not necessarily distinct from the nonhuman; we must accept our role as inhabitants of the jungle.

We must also consider the realities of environmentalism. When people rely on palm oil to put food on their table, you cannot simply shame them for doing so and hope that it stops. So many of the banal systems we rely on are killing our planet, and shifting away from that will require radical social and economic transition. Very few places on the planet illustrate this quite like Mumbai. In a momentous geoengineering project, eight islands merged into a single peninsula, and on it a city was established. Now, as sea levels are rising and monsoons are becoming unpredictable, the City of Dreams may once again find itself underwater. Just last year, one of the potential heroes in this crisis, the city’s mangrove forests, was illegally cut down to construct a coastal highway. We can clean up a beach, we can erect levees and have conferences about sustainable tourism, but the engines still roar.

Creating sustainable material change is only part of the solution—we are not going to ‘fix’ the world by imposing our will upon it, no matter how many rooftop gardens we build. I believe the way forward is one that respects the agency of the nonhuman world. It’s common to hear about technological advancements being inspired by nature. Socioeconomic development can also draw similar inspiration from the nonhuman world; responsible social and economic development works much like the jungle. If we’re aware of the role that we play in the world as a living system, if we are attuned to its poetics, I believe that we can inspire this change.

I’m not optimistic about the large-scale impacts of small-scale sustainable practices. There’s overwhelming evidence that the mechanics of climate change rest in the global exchange of goods and capital and the material needs of a heavily militarised world. While those systems stand, I’m afraid that no number of rooftop gardens or orangutan sanctuaries or banana leaf packaging will solve the climate crisis. However, they have real, small-scale benefits; when a farmer in the corner of North Sumatra chooses to reduce chemical pesticides, when someone decides to recycle their plastic instead of burning it, when they choose to grow watermelon instead of oil palms, it creates a healthier local human ecosystem. That has to mean something.

Justin to Cole: I really enjoyed this article of yours, You Fight the Tide, the Tide Fights Back about this small community group in Mumbai that cleans up all the garbage washing up on this little beach every Saturday. It sounds like a monstrous and disheartening task—as humans, we often make such a horrendous mess of things, not realising until after the fact that it’s so much easier to break things than to fix them.

However, your piece does a marvellous job of capturing both the devastating and careless impact humans have on the environment, along with something powerfully optimistic in their efforts to fight against this seemingly endless wave of garbage. One of the volunteers you spoke with said something quite beautiful:

“We know [the beach] will be dirty, so it’s not that we are coming with the objective that ‘oh, the beach will not have that much trash’. Our benchmark is very different.

The fact that we see sand on the beach — that itself is a success.

The fact that there are two new faces on the beach — that itself is a success.

The fact that people are walking away with a consciousness to not use plastic — that itself is a success.

The fact that you can come and discuss the problem of sustainability for those two hours — that itself is a success.”

It can often feel like our economic systems, political structures, and general human carelessness have done irreparable damage to the planet, but we’ve seen remarkable changes happen, and our planet is quite resilient. How do you personally remain focused on sustainability practices in the face of seeing so much apparent destruction of the environment? What keeps you hopeful and not succumbing to cynicism or misanthropy?

Cole to Justin: It’s pretty difficult for me to remain optimistic, if I’m being honest! Community-level work has an undeniable impact. The greatest honours of my career have been witnessing those moments: people of vast differences banding together for a common cause, someone meeting the jungle for the first time, locally owned farms adopting sustainable practices, and a child playing on a clean beach. Where our day-to-day work is concerned, there is much to celebrate. Up to a point, I think it’s healthy to focus on these victories.

As part of a holistic environmentalism, we may begin by encouraging empathy and oneness with the nonhuman world, and that can only happen on the scale of the individual. When you encourage someone to reduce plastic consumption or plant a garden of native wildflowers, it’s not under the pretence that it could solve the climate crisis. These behaviours allow us to build and demonstrate empathy for the nonhuman world, a tiny act of resistance. Sometimes, though rarely, that inspires real change. When I was working in Mumbai, our work got the attention of local journalists and policymakers, and it helped bring marine waste into mainstream conversation. Has it stopped the city from flooding or saved the old-growth mangrove forests? No. But it’s something to celebrate.

No matter how large the win, however, doubt always follows these celebrations. No matter where in the world I’ve worked, the questions have always been the same. Are we doing enough with the resources we have? Are we actually affecting any real large-scale change? Is it ever enough to just put a smile on people’s faces? How could we ever break down the global systems of power and consumption that are destroying our planet? Does community-level conservation work do anything other than place blame on the victims? I’m not the first to grapple with these questions—conservation work opens your eyes to just how immovable these destructive systems can be.

So, how do we keep focus? I think the answer is different for everyone. For me, I think it would be a shame for us to lose the world we have without fighting for it. We contend with cynicism every day, but how dare we succumb to it?

Justin to Cole: There’s sometimes a contradiction pointed out in the idea of encouraging more people to travel. On the one hand, travel can be (but not always) an enlightening experience and make us more aware of our impacts on both cultural and natural landscapes. On the other hand, mass travel exacerbates the use of fossil fuels and contributes to a whole host of issues like overtourism and environmental degradation, regardless of how sustainable we attempt to travel. To cut to the chase, should we be encouraging more people to travel? Given the consequences of mass travel and tourism, what do you think are the ethical considerations for travel writers and those of us who do encourage others to travel?

Cole to Justin: I struggle ethically with my own travel habits; as my values and practices have changed over the years, I can say without shame that I have not always been a model tourist. I often travel via plane and have certainly contributed to gentrification. I’m messy; I still make mistakes. If I were to offer a single piece of advice, it would be to stop treating travel as an experiential commodity. That is to say, we must not explore the world as though it were Disneyland. Take part in the mundane; walk in step with the people around you; hold onto your values, but do not do so at the expense of your host. Be humble and let the world change you as you explore it—there is nothing to be afraid of.

Everybody who shapes this world’s stories has a profound responsibility. That’s why, in my own travel writing, I try to escape the general tropes plaguing the genre: top-10 lists, ‘othering’ verbiage, and overly authoritative voices. Nobody can ever truly know a place or a people, and I believe that we should be telling stories of exploration and the process of discovery. Travel—the way our bodies and minds adapt as we move across physical space—is a profoundly personal experience. I believe that documenting this process, even if it requires more vulnerability than I am sometimes comfortable with, is one way we can build empathy towards the world around us.

It’s not just the responsibility of travel writers to share this message. Teachers cannot only share knowledge; they must also impart a love for learning. Conservation work is as much the art of storytelling as it is science, sociology or economics. Journalists determine what is in the public interest, and they must choose which facts, voices and angles to represent in a story. Poets and novelists infuse our lives with morality. Representing the world is one of the most ethically complex undertakings imaginable, and it is everyone’s responsibility to tell our stories responsibly.

Justin to Cole: Are you willing to share a harrowing story from your travels abroad and/or a story that made you more hopeful about humanity?

Cole to Justin: I was extraordinarily underprepared for my recent motorcycle trip from Ha Noi to Ho Chi Minh City. My clothes, funds, ability to ride a bike and language skills were not what they needed to be! Nobody warned me (perhaps they did!) about the physical toll of driving 200+ kilometres per day on a bike in the freezing rain. I had my lunch—two cold steamed buns and a bag of squashed mandarin oranges—stuffed in my coat pocket. Not exactly the lunch of champions, but it was the best I could do. I stopped at a roadside coffee stand to eat them, and a grandfather invited me in for lunch with his family. We argued over Google Translate about whether his tobacco pipe was less toxic than my cigarettes, and I taught his grandson how to use my camera. It’s a memory I hold dearly. I’ll share the rest of the story here for those who want to read the full piece.

Loneliness emerged as one of the central themes throughout these journal entries. In a single hour, that lunch took a hammer to the illusion of isolation. The previous week of driving through the cold and rain had stiffened my body and my heart, but that family warmed me to the core of my being. In moments like that, the world reveals itself as something quite outstanding. That lunch was comparable to all of the natural beauty I saw driving through Vietnam’s countryside. People are, despite all we hear, fundamentally kind; it’s a cliché for a very good reason.

Justin to Cole: What’s a lesson you’ve learned in your travels so far that you couldn’t have learned if you’d never travelled?

Cole to Justin: Everything in this world carries an element of the mundane. I’ve observed that people have this habit of viewing different lifestyles as inherently strange or unknowable. Being able to find wonder in the banal is one of the most important skills that a traveller can have, especially when they step into the role of the ‘other’. Carrying yourself with humility and adapting to the world around you opens so many doors when you’re away from home. When you come face-to-face with things that shock or confuse you and treat them with just as much legitimacy as your own tiny world, your possibilities explode. From rural Zambia to the ghosts roaming Edinburgh’s streets to the largest city in the world, people are just trying to live their lives as best they can. There is no such thing as weird food or strange people, just our own lack of understanding! That process of discovery is magical.

Justin to Cole: Is there anything else you’d like to share, highlight or emphasise about your work? What’s the best way for readers to help support your NGO?

Cole to Justin: For all we do, we are one small team working in a quiet corner of the world. Please do follow us on Instagram and reach out if you ever plan on travelling to Bukit Lawang—but I think it would be an insufficient call to action to just ask for your support. Instead, I ask that you go out into the world—your world—and do something to make it a better place to live. Have a conversation, tell a story, plant native wildflowers!

You can follow & contact us on Instagram @bukitlawangtrust! If you ever travel to Bukit Lawang, we would love to have you around :)

Disclaimer: all opinions expressed in this piece are strictly personal and do not reflect the official views of the Bukit Lawang Trust.

It’s been so wonderful to learn about Cole and the work he’s been involved with. In his writing and from this interview, it’s apparent how passionate he is and how deeply he’s reflected on so many of these incredibly important issues surrounding conservation, environmentalism, tourism, and many of the ethical dilemmas and challenges involved.

One of the more important reasons to travel and be out in the world, as Cole has beautifully illustrated, is that one is allowed to be fully engaged with all one's senses present. We get to the ground truth of other cultures and landscapes that are not possible through distorted views on screens and out-of-touch gossip.

I do hope you’ve enjoyed this interview, and I encourage you to read more of his work by subscribing to Cole’s Field Notes.

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Previous and future guests of Featured Wanderers can be found here:

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My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

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-JSB

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Anthropologists have spent generations debating what culture is and how we change it. Though we can largely agree upon some broad definition of culture by now, many have concluded that it is a fool’s errand or even hubristic to think we have the power to change culture and society at any meaningful scale. Nearly all the major changes that have occurred in history were completely unpredictable after all.

Anyone who’s spent a lot of time thinking of all the factors that influence human behavior and cultures knows that we are embedded in “webs of meaning” as Clifford Geertz once famously observed. And yet, a part of me still believes optimistically (or perhaps naively) that if one can change the habits, values, and goals of enough people, one can gradually change culture. But a critical mass has to be reached for enough change to gain that kind of momentum. Enough of us have to be on the same page with where we want society to go in the first place.

In previous posts, I’ve highlighted what I think would make for a better, more mindful society, one in which we’ve learned to slow down and one where I envision more of us experiencing the freedom to explore it. However, the freedom to slow down and explore is dependent on the kind of world we are creating right now in how we think, act, and educate one another. As I remarked in What Does the Future of Travel and Adventure Look Like?,

Each of us who aspires to live in a world that we can see and experience more often has some duty to work on a project in the here and now that enables that world to come into existence.

With all the current hype about the artificial intelligence revolution replacing jobs, enacting universal basic income, and general debates about what jobs humans are going to be doing for the rest of this century (and for all time), it opens up a much broader discussion on the meaning of our lives and potential opportunities to shift our minds in new directions. What new possibilities are ahead of us? Are we prepared for the kind of transformation everyone seems to think we’re about to witness?

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Undoubtedly, there will be something we classify as “work” for the foreseeable future, but it could look very different from what we consider work today or even a century ago. Many of the most labor-intensive jobs are done almost entirely by machines these days, unlike in the preindustrial world, when everything was done by human backs and hands and often alongside domesticated animals serving as our “beasts of burden.” It could be that, very soon, we will be entirely unburdened from most lines of work. Hard to fathom, yes. But worth taking seriously.

Even the most optimistic outcomes of the near future leave much uncertainty before us. What will this mean if most or all of humanity one day has such an abundance of liberty and unlimited leisure time? Some of us seem incredibly bothered by the notion that we’ll be out of work. Immediate mass unemployment doesn’t sound good. And after all, many derive a great deal of meaning from their work, and it does become hard to imagine how our entire economic system would even function. However, assuming all our wants and needs can somehow be magically met, I do not know why this is necessarily a cause for alarm in the long run.

To my mind, most of us come to loathe our jobs at some point and have always been “working for the weekend,” whether we wish to admit that or not (for good measure, forget to mention that in your next job evaluation). The vast majority of jobs are not ones most of us, I suspect, would do without the incentives of pay or benefits to sustain our lifestyles. Though I can understand there are occasional jobs that do satisfy the urge for meaning and purpose in one’s life, I can’t help but think that most of us would quickly transcend this idea once we’ve been exposed to all the possibilities that would open up, provided unlimited free time and an abundance of resources.

Think of this scenario as only applied to our personal lives for a moment. Are we truly so unimaginative that we couldn’t think of how to fill our 40+ hour workweek with other favorable and productive activities? One would presume we wish to spend more time with friends and family, or cultivate our hobbies, improve our education, or read books we’ve never had time for, or travel and have all those adventures we dreamed of partaking in one day.

There is something cynical about assuming many of us would just sit around and do nothing without the sticks and carrots of our society pressuring us to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow. Woodworking, gardening, fishing, hunting, gathering firewood, and learning a language or two are just a few things I’d love to do more of, and of course, travel much more! Some, if not all, of those activities certainly involve a lot of sweating, and I suspect many out there would also find these activities and more highly fulfilling in the absence of routine work and other money-gathering exercises. Can we not reimagine a world beyond the current economic, political, and social structure we currently inhabit?

I think we can.

The fundamental prerequisites of any advanced human society with billions of us scattered across the globe largely depend on energy and technology to produce an abundance of food, water, and other resources. Additionally, we obviously also need systems of health, medicine, and domestic and foreign security in place to prevent disease, famine, and outbreaks of violence so that we have the opportunities to reach our full potential and can partake in all the things we ultimately find meaningful—the peak of self-actualization is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Until we’ve fully figured out how to adequately satisfy these underlying needs of society, we will never be able to transcend to a truly prosperous and liberated world.

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And we should bear in mind that this reimagined society will not be a utopia, just a future state that has figured out how to properly utilize the human knowledge that already exists. By this, I mean that there is little new knowledge yet to discover as far as human well-being is concerned, i.e., the conditions for what makes humans live long, healthy, and meaningful lives. This isn’t a mystery. Millions of us have known how to do this for centuries.

Our main problem in a global society is figuring out how to distribute and allocate resources fairly and conveniently to more people, and utilize knowledge in ways that allow everyone the opportunity to seek and obtain a flourishing life. In some sense, I think we all know what our equation is to the good life. Putting it together is the hard part.

We must first imagine different models for how society can operate and allow more time, incentives, and finances for the things that truly benefit our well-being, like I suspect adventure and travel do. Most of us are prohibited from extensive travel and adventure today, mainly because it is often too costly in both money and time. If the parts of the AI hype that are optimistic turn out to be true—where we are granted an abundance of time and resources to truly do what we all deep down want to do with our single life on this planet—then what will hold us back from “seeing the world” as so many of us have claimed we want to do?

I’ve argued in my recently published book An Anthropology of Wandering that, as a species, we humans are inherently curious to explore our world. What holds us back the most is the present structure of society. While, historically speaking, society is in a far better state, arguably better than it’s ever been, it still manages to keep most of us largely sedentary, bound to jobs most of us do not like, and wishing for an alternative to life where we do not spend the bulk of our time, attention, and money merely “getting by” or living “paycheck to paycheck” but ascending to our full potential.

The writer and speaker Alan Watts once famously asked us to meditate on this valuable question: “What if money were no object?”

How might we learn to reimagine living our lives?

The ensuing artificial intelligence revolution may soon force us all to truly confront and grapple with what a world will be like without money dictating so much of our decisions and behaviors. When one begins to think about it, it is quite extraordinary how much of our lives is ruled by money. Can we actually envision living a life where money and jobs become obsolete? What would your day look like? What would the rest of society look like if we all simultaneously won the lottery in this way? That may essentially be what happens in our lifetime.

While I am skeptical of a lot of the AI hype about ushering in a complete utopia, I remain hopeful that it will at least cause many of us to reorient our thinking about the meaning of our lives. If the day ever comes when our lives are radically transformed, and we are all basically permanently retired while all the machines take care of all the mundane work, we’ll then be left in a phase of humanity with many scratching their heads, bewildered about how to now spend our time. I don’t know if we’re quite ready for that dramatic a change, but I do know humans are resilient and adaptable, and we can figure things out as we’ve done many times before.

There is still a great need right now to plan wisely for what is coming and to do our best to navigate the unknown. It turns out, this is how it’s always been for humans throughout history—staring the future in the face, unsettled by what may come. And it will remain this way regardless of whether or not the AI revolution causes money, jobs, and all our worries to vanish overnight, because we will still be left with the fundamental problem of learning how to find our meaning and lead a satisfying life. No machine is going to figure that out for us.

Let us not lose sight of the fact that we must remain mindful of how we spend our time and attention, right now. How we think and act in the world today sets in motion the world of tomorrow. So what kind of future do we want to wander in?

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Related articles:

• The Case for Slow Travel and Slow Reading in a Fast-Paced Society

• What Does the Future of Travel and Adventure Look Like?

• How Travel and Adventure Factor into an Equation of the Good Life

• The Hope of Travel and All We Say About It

• The Hope of Travel, Part II: Does Travel Have the Power to Piece the World Together?

My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB

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My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

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Greetings, fellow wanderers,

I am amazed to see that Those Who Wander has now reached 1,000 subscribers! I’ve been writing on Substack for nearly three years (anniversary will be in early July) and am still overjoyed by everyone who continues to read, comment, share, and support my work.

I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been graciously supporting my work over the years, and also to offer some special discounts on both Those Who Wander subscriptions and on my new book, An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture.

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A Big Thank You!

I am incredibly grateful to everyone who is supporting my writing. As an independent author and publisher, it’s a bewildering experience to not only craft one’s writing in the digital age but also navigate how to sell and promote it. I am still learning all the tricks of the trade, but I am trying my best, and it makes things much easier and far more rewarding with your support. I sincerely thank you all for taking the time to reflect on my words and support my writing in all the ways you have.

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Thank you all again for following my work. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at baileyjs08@gmail.com with any comments, questions, or concerns.

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My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

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My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

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Greetings everyone!

I’m thrilled to announce that my debut on a podcast was with the New Books Network and is online now!

It’s strange to hear my own voice on a podcast. Still, it was a wonderful experience to discuss my new book, An Anthropology of Wandering, with Professor Amisash Bakuri at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her questions were thought-provoking, and I am incredibly grateful for the time she spent reading my work and compiling these wonderful questions.

I hope you get a chance to listen to the interview and share your thoughts.

You can download and listen to the episode directly below, visit the website, or find the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

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Here’s a summary of what to expect:

“In a culture saturated by speed, safety protocols, and mediated fear, what might we rediscover by walking or hiking slowly into the unknown?

In this episode of the New Books Network, I speak with Justin S. Bailey, author of An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture, published by Those Who Wander Press in 2026. Drawing on his Appalachian Trail journey, Bailey offers a wide‑ranging reflection on wandering as an ancient human practice, one tied to resilience, trust, and the shaping of perspective.

Our conversation explores how fear is culturally produced and amplified, particularly through media and information overload, and how embodied experiences of movement can recalibrate our sense of risk. Bailey also reflects on the social world of long‑distance hiking, where shared hardship fosters community, vulnerability, and unexpected forms of solidarity.

At the same time, the interview raises broader ethical and structural questions, who is able to move freely, whose mobility is celebrated, and whose is constrained or scrutinized. We discuss migration, gendered safety, and the responsibilities that come with movement through landscapes shaped by inequalities.

This episode will be of interest to listeners working in anthropology, sociology, migration studies, psychology, archeology, religious studies, and anyone reflecting on fear, movement, and what it means to live well in an uncertain world.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.”

An Anthropology of Wandering is available on most online retailers, such as Bookshop and Amazon, or you can request a copy from your local bookstore or library. The book is available in paperback and e-book formats. Please leave your reviews on Goodreads or wherever you leave your book reviews.

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Greetings, fellow wanderers,

Today I am republishing another post from the archives. As Those Who Wander approaches close to 1,000 subscribers (wow!), I recognise that many newcomers to this Substack may not have access to or be familiar with some of my initial writings. With over 150 posts in the archive, I aim to make some of the paywalled posts more accessible to a wider audience.

That said, if you have been enjoying these ramblings on travel, adventure, and anthropology, please consider supporting my writing, which grants you full access to everything I’ve written on Substack, including excerpts from my book. The book is now available for order on all major online retailers, including Amazon (here), Barnes & Noble (here), and Bookshop (here). If you’ve recently read the book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is a first-person account of backpacking the Appalachian Trail that dives into anthropology, travel, fear, and the meaning of adventure in culture and society. If you love social science, adventure, and travel, this book will be for you. Subscribe and stay tuned for more updates and upcoming events.

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Now onto today’s archived post, The Prospective Traveler: Encouraging Others to Wander

A central question I address in my new book is: What differentiates those who wander from those who do not? Is there a limited number of us who are naturally born with some vague and mysterious substance we call “adventurous spirit”? Does traveling and being a traveler ultimately come down to identity and values, where some of us simply love travel and adventure just as someone becomes enamored with sports, art, or hunting?  

There are plenty of good reasons why many of us may not travel. Many things in society operate to keep us in place: mortgages or rent; finances and bills; age; physical and mental ailments; relationships with family, friends, and our communities; career responsibilities; and perhaps the overall comfort and security of a place. 

There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to travel the world because we cannot afford it, or we love being with our friends, family, or community more, or simply enjoying where we are and what we’re doing. I too love being a homebody nowadays nearly as much as traveling.

The urge to travel often feels like a tug-of-war between seeing new places and doing all that I love at home, like reading and writing on Substack! So I sympathize with those who’ve found their place in life and would rather cultivate experiences at home.

Travel is not for everyone and that is fine—I’ve come to accept that we don’t all have to value travel and adventure (as much as I think we should because it is one of the best forms of education). But I digress. 

Thus, it is important to remember that not everyone can or wants to travel. That said, there are plenty of people who eventually change their minds. They go from not thinking much about travel or actively disliking it as an “anti-traveler” to suddenly loving it overnight. How does that process happen? What convinces someone to all of a sudden change their behavior like that? Is it something someone says to them? Or perhaps they happen upon an inspiring film, podcast, book, or news article that injects wanderlust into their veins? Are these the best mediums to get someone moving on their adventures or are there more direct approaches?

And what about those of us who inhabit a kind of travel purgatory—those who may already be eager to explore the world, yet for some reason do not? Maybe we are overly cautious and fearful or simply don’t know how to travel or where to begin. Those of us who have traveled a lot may forget that it is not always easy traveling and it can be an unsettling and anxiety-ridden experience at first while thinking about and planning our excursions. So how do we encourage others to overcome their anxieties and start seeing the world?

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I once conducted an archaeological survey in eastern North Carolina on some farmland that produced a variety of crops throughout the year from cotton and soybeans to corn and peanuts. The fields would soon be converted to a solar farm, hence our survey work. The landowner, an inquisitive middle-aged man, approached every other day to ask how we were progressing and if we had found anything “interesting.” This typically translates to the archaeologist’s ear as, “Did you find anything that is going to hold up the development of our project and prevent me from getting my money sooner?”

Nevertheless, he was still interested in learning about archaeology. Our crew told him the nature of the work we did and how we had all worked throughout the country and the conversation eventually led to travel abroad. The man had a glimmer of envy, maybe even disbelief, in his eyes as we relayed many of our stories of travel and adventures. At one point, he remarked how anxious he was to see the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico but how he couldn’t find anyone who wanted to go with him (I’ve noted people typically want others to go with them on their travels, which is understandable but also seem to use that as their main excuse for not traveling—it’s someone else’s fault).

Based on our sporadic conversations over the month, I surmised that the farmer’s family was already financially well-off, he was in good health with what appeared to be plenty of time on his hands, and had some of that “adventurous spirit” going for him. He had all the prerequisites to wandering and yet remained just a prospective traveler. Why?

We all told him he should just go and gave him tips on resources he could consult on the internet as he was somewhat older and perhaps not as adept online as us tech-obsessed millennials. In a smooth southern drawl he then pointedly asked, “But aren’t y’all scared considering how dangerous things are today?” In listening to countless exchanges like this over the years, I often wonder, “Dangerous compared to what or when?”

This was around the fall of 2017 and although I wasn’t up to date on the social and political climates happening in Egypt or Mexico, I have yet to meet someone equipped with things like crime statistics and a reasonable explanation to justify their anxiety and fears about not going somewhere. It’s always just some vague gut feeling we have but I think it all stems from a general sense of uncertainty and inexperience more than anything.

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As argued elsewhere, I do think uncertainty and fear play an outsized role in our decision-making and help explain why many of us do not travel all that far from home even when we have all the prerequisites and interest in doing so. I’m skeptical we are going to convince someone who is outright opposed to travel to value it, but how might we encourage the prospective would-be travelers to do so and should we?

And getting someone to travel isn’t just about getting them to value travel and adventure, but also getting them to overcome some of their fears, anxieties, and misperceptions about the world. This makes it much harder to convince others to simply have an adventure if they suspect the world to be a dangerous place because, lo and behold, the world can be a dangerous place.  

I’ve also argued that travel and adventure provide us with many benefits as well as challenges and consequences. Given these pros and cons, how do we make a strong case for encouraging more people to wander? Can it be accomplished without being too sanctimonious and pushy and done in such a way as to not overwhelm someone with all the modern ethical concerns of travel? 

I believe it can be done in theory, but I am still skeptical in practice. There are a lot of demands placed on travelers and adventurers these days from climate concerns to over-tourism and personal challenges of saving enough money, taking time off from work, family and community responsibilities, and the many other physical, mental, and emotional struggles in our lives we’re all simultaneously juggling.

In light of all this context, how do we manage to find creative ways to encourage people to experience travel and adventure for themselves? It is a challenging case to make. Nevertheless, I still believe strongly that the benefits of wandering far outweigh the concerns. Yet the method remains somewhat elusive to me. Do I just keep writing and waxing poetic about travel and adventure, sending it out into the ether, and hope my words convince others to do so in time?

For all that I’ve written about travel and adventure, I don’t know that I’ve ever directly influenced someone to travel. I’ve been told I’ve inspired some friends to write which makes me feel good but I suspect many people who read travel newsletters, blogs, and books are already familiar with some amount of travel and adventure. So I am left wondering what the best medium is for reaching the audience of the would-be traveler without becoming a pompous evangelist and eventually reaching the anti-traveler without being confrontational.

Perhaps the best one can hope for is to serve as a helpful sounding board to anyone curious to explore and do my best to encourage them when the moment arises. I do hope that the North Carolina farmer eventually made his way to see the pyramids in Mexico or Egypt, and I hope he found someone to join him.  

For consideration:

• Did someone ever directly influence you to travel? What convinced you?

• Have you been successful at encouraging someone to travel? If so, what do you think it was that convinced them?

• How much do you think fear and uncertainty influence people not traveling or even those who are explicitly anti-travel?

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My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB

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Want to read more from Those Who Wander?

My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

Greetings, fellow wanderers,



Today I am republishing another post from the archives. As Those Who Wander approaches close to 1,000 subscribers (wow!), I recognise that many newcomers to this Substack may not have access to or be familiar with some of my initial writings. With over 150 posts in the archive, I aim to make some of the paywalled posts more accessible to a wider audience.

That said, if you have been enjoying these ramblings on travel, adventure, and anthropology, please consider supporting my writing, which grants you full access to everything I’ve written on Substack, including excerpts from my book. The book is now available for order on all major online retailers, including Amazon (here), Barnes & Noble (here), and Bookshop (here). If you’ve recently read the book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon or on Goodreads.

An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is a first-person account of backpacking the Appalachian Trail that dives into anthropology, travel, fear, and the meaning of adventure in culture and society. If you love social science, adventure, and travel, this book will be for you. Subscribe and stay tuned for more updates and upcoming events.

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Thank you to everyone who has subscribed and supported my work thus far.

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-JSB

Now onto today’s archived post, The Wanderer’s Insatiable Appetite: Why Do I Always Want More Out of My Travels?

If I were immortal with unlimited funds and zero responsibilities, I am confident I would travel every square inch of our globe—and once I was done globetrotting, I’d begin the project all over again. Alas, I am but a mere romantic mortal with bills to pay, a child to raise, and endless tasks on my to-do list piling up as the years go by. Nonetheless, I am still suffering from an insatiable appetite to wander. Why do I feel this way?

My wife often observes that I don’t seem to be fully content with the days allotted to many of our excursions—that I can’t seem to appreciate the time granted to a weeklong vacation. And she’s right. I am often bothered that our travels couldn’t be extended another week or two. At some point, I’m rambling on about how next time we visit we’ll have to do x, y, and z too…and spend more time doing those other things we already did. That isn’t to say I didn’t thoroughly enjoy my time. I almost always do. And deep down, I realize there likely won't be a “next time” either.

Then there are times I can’t wait to get home and go back to my cherished routines because I often love playing the role of a homebody almost as much as wandering if such a seemingly contradictory thing is possible. But then there are certain times when the places I travel to instill a deep feeling in me to want to inhabit them longer.

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Lately, I’ve tried to reflect on this question of why I always seem to want more out of my travels and adventures. Am I perhaps just being greedy and not able to simply appreciate the time allotted to me? I should be grateful that I get to travel as much as I do. Many people don’t have such luxury. Perhaps I’m just naturally restless and being too idealistic. Should I try to adopt a more stoic attitude to overcome this malady?

However, I believe this powerful feeling of wanting more out of a trip arises because some places feel like therapy to me, or that I’ve only just scratched the surface of a place that is destined to satiate some curiosity I have. There’s always a heart-pumping feeling that just around that corner, through that brick-ladened alleyway, I’ll discover another piece of the puzzle or understand another small riddle about this world.

There are many places we come to discover, often in nature, that strike us as so special that we instantly feel a pang of regret that we cannot venture further within them because we are somehow restricted from doing so. Time isn’t often on our side. From the moment we arrive in a place, the nagging countdown of a stopwatch somewhere hovering around our head starts to tick. On top of this, we know that we can’t be healed or discover what a place has to fully offer us in a mere handful of days. To truly reap the benefits of these special places, we know we’d have to be immersed in them much longer.

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The author Alain de Botton observed in The Art of Travel that

Even if we allow how beneficial contact with nature may be, we recognize that its effects must surely be of limited duration. Three days in nature can scarcely be expected to work a psychological effect lasting longer than a few hours.

I view a lot of the places I travel to like great works of art or films. One wouldn’t go to an art gallery for ten minutes or only watch a half hour of a renowned film and report that they were nourished by that experience. It would feel rushed and disappointing—an insult to both ourselves and those who designed and choreographed this artwork to be appreciated in a moment of timelessness. You have to see it through. But unlike art galleries and films, there is no distinct ending to a place, and one could be lost in it forever. Sometimes I yearn to be lost in them forever.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, here and here, this is what I mean when I say the structure of our society is not fully conducive to how we’ve been psychologically and physically primed in our long evolution as humans. We’re often too far removed from the natural environments we evolved in. Being out in the world with no deadlines and fewer responsibilities allows for something restorative to happen. We evolved as wanderers and yet have boxed ourselves in with the many demands of modernity. Our society’s obsession with time and being punctual unsuspectingly slips over us like a straitjacket, creating a suffocating feeling for many of us. And we wonder why so many of us report feeling anxious, depressed, and lacking meaning. I feel this most acutely while on a trip because I know it must soon end, and I must get back to “regular” life like a responsible adult should.

As much as I appreciate many of the things our modern society allows—and I do indeed live a moderately cushy existence that I wouldn’t easily trade away—the anthropologist in me knows deep down that we still have a long way to go until society comes to terms with who we are and who we’ve been as a species. There is a vast amount of knowledge, meaning, and depth we have yet to rekindle from our past, and I do not believe it will be acquired while in the midst of working a frantic 9-to-5 schedule for 40 years. Can we learn to balance our preferred mode of being—individual autonomy and desire to slow down—with a society and economy premised on ever-demanding efficiency, growth, and productivity?

And perhaps I may be asking myself the wrong question. Maybe it is not that I necessarily want more out of my travels after all. When I reflect further, I simply want things to slow down. As I pondered in an excerpt from my book, The Case for Slow Travel and Slow Reading in a Fast-Paced Society,

Our society places a premium on efficiency. Whether it’s coffee in the morning to get us going, Amazon packages arriving at our door in a single day, or getting to work “on time,” we value expediency a lot in our society. We even now demand this of our information. Until recently, news cycles were not 24/7 but we have rapidly transitioned into an information and knowledge economy that requires constant processing. Efficiency and expediency have obvious benefits, but seldom do we ask whether efficiency is an intrinsic good. What might we be trading off for its sake? Is technology truly liberating us or are there unforeseen restraints being placed on us? And how do we better slow down in our world? Do we even have a choice in the matter?

The only time I was truly allowed to wander unencumbered was backpacking the Appalachian Trail in 2014 and I think ever since those days I’ve been wondering how I can get back to that sense of liberation and timelessness I felt—how we all can learn to better structure our lives and society to allow more opportunities to slow down and ignore all the stopwatches hovering around our heads. Being human in today’s world means we have to confront the tyranny of time. How do we reconcile our limited time with our innate yearning to wander?

For consideration:

• Do you struggle with the limited time you have while traveling? How have you learned to cope?

Leave a comment

My book An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture is now available!

Read more about it here and enjoy an excerpt from the book here.

Order 'An Anthropology of Wandering'

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB

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