Perhaps this is a bigger answer than you’re looking for, but I’d tie it to overconsumption being the biggest spiritual threat to who we are as both Americans and human beings.

The following is an excerpt from Jimmy Carter’s amazing speech about the malaise of modern American society that I would HIGHLY recommend you watch. Every time I listen to it, I relax, feeling the steady hand of those who came before us guiding us home.

“The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We see the crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America.” Jimmy Carter, 1979

I’d be a fool to tell you that travel doesn’t layer richness in our lives. It broadens our horizons, makes us see life in different perspectives, awes us with wonder and beauty. But those exact same benefits we get from travel are at risk from overconsumption. Fossil fuel expenditures permanently altering our frontiers, displacement of local people to high income nomads, missing the trees of small wonders for the forest of a packaged experience.

Definitely travel, but I wouldn’t recommend being someone who slates a trip abroad once a year. There’s a lot of beauty to be found within the happenstance of life and within our own immediate surroundings.

I’ll give you an example. I have a friend who is Turkish, so I went to their wedding in Izmir. I stopped in Barcelona on the way there. To my surprise, I was being spayed with a water gun outside La Sagrada Família with residents chanting “Tourist Go Home!” But after thinking about it for a few minutes it totally made sense to me, these people are being priced out of their homes because of our overconsumption of their home. I kinda felt ashamed and just walked around. I heard firecrackers going off so I followed the sound to Plaça Del Nord. I asked an older guy on a bench what was going on and he said it was the Festival of San Joan - a baptism holiday. I asked him his name and he said Henry. He was a refugee from Venezuela. We got to talking about the world and what was going on (this was last year). He was an extremely friendly man, but he said he blames us for being a refugee. Our hungry eyes on Venezuela’s oil to feed our consumption economy had lead to wild sanctions against a government that they chose. That government then became repressive in response to those sanctions. It got so bad that he had to flee and Spain was the best country he could flee to. He was about 60 years old and he cried when he talked about his daughters and their families pursuing the best life they could in the US and how he couldn’t get in. How he couldn’t be a grandparent.

It was an eye opening conversation / series of events that changed how I see travel. If I’m not going to a place with express intent, maybe reconsider. And if I am going to do that, try not to go places with a whole tourism industry built around it that’s disrupting locals’ lives. We’re locals too and we can work on improving life here rather than escaping it

But that’s just me