Again, for the millionth time: The choices you make at home directly impact your travel options. We know this.
If you’re committed to the asylum of long-term travel, it helps to spend “at home” time in travel-conducive housing. In other words, to live with minimal anchors.
The article Men Who Jump the Picket Fence in today’s New York Times touches on this connection, albeit briefly.
First, in the case of Alan Berks, home ownership is an obstacle to connecting with a place. It gets in the way of spontaneous walks around town, restaurant drop-ins, nightlife, and so on. Foreign travel is portrayed as a bonus made possible by unloading a house (hey honey, we won six months in Honduras, sweet!) rather than a priority which should have precluded the purchase.
Second, in the case of Kirt Greenburg, business travel is seen as an agent provocateur, a gateway drug which leads perfectly good workers to dump almost-perfectly good real estate and start daydreaming about the south of France (there’s that bonus again).
But hey, it’s nice to see the Times giving a nod to the how-should-I-live questions that we put so much thought into.
There’s a lot more to dig into here, but for now I’ll restate the takeaway: From no-longer-on-the-corner cafes to seems-so-far countries, home ownership ties you down both locally and globally.
(Unless you just can’t let go and want to make things super-complicated and expensive. Then you can just take a 36-hour nap and outsource the whole mess to your Virtual Assistant in Dhaka.)
Tags: 2 Comments
You pretty much captured exactly how I feel about home ownership. Being from the Bay Area, where housing is ridiculously expensive, I’ve pretty much given up on the idea that I’ll ever own a home. Not owning a home is, to me, like quitting a corporate job to go travel the world–it’s something I’m never gonna have in the first place! Ah well, at least there’s decent tenants’ rights laws around here…
I agree that the place you live can hinder your ability to travel. One of my recent goals was to shed my expensive apartment and get something cheaper. All in all it was a good choice since I actually ended up somewhere better and cheaper. One thing that you can do is just become a full blown nomad and give up living somewhere altogether and just live in various places as you travel. I’m still working my way to that.