I thought I would talk about top, big near and dear to my heart.

And it is about why I stopped traveling.

We're drinking instant coffee today.

Oh, that's fun.

Now, one of the great things about being a software engineer is that you can work remotely and that gives you the ability to travel a lot like you could be traveling all the time and working on your own little projects for years, which is something that I had done.

And if you've seen some of my older videos, you know that I've talked about this before and I've even mentioned about how to do it.

But I haven't really talked about why you want to do it and about my reflections about that time.

And, you know, the reality is that it may not be as fantastic as you might imagine it to be.

Don't get me wrong, It is great.

But I want to talk a little bit about some of the things.

The subtitle things that you may not think about and the first point to know is that I'm not sure if I was ever really a traveler at heart, even though I've done quite a number of trips in the past.

And, you know, I've spent months living in other countries, but one that the first thing is to know here is that the destination that you choose is going to matter.

It took me months, for example, to decide to go into the middle of Utah to just look at rocks.

Right.

And there are National Park that you taught the Arches, National Park, grand circle canyons, lots of rocks and cool rock formations.

I had to essentially disappear off the face of the earth for three weeks to do that trip.

And the thing is, for any young person, ambition stands in your way.

You know, whenever you take a trip, you kind of disappear and you put one of two things on hold and maybe both.

You may put your career on hold as you do your trip, and you may also put your dating life on hope.

And for a young person, both of these are really top of mind.

You know, these are two things that are going to craft and decide your future.

So the first thing is a lot of people who may just quit their jobs and he's had to go travel.

I think that's one of the worst things to really do, because as you're traveling, you're going to be really stressed out and just anxious about feeling guilty.

Like should the night be working now?

All my peers, I see they're progressing.

Their careers there are getting forward.

And yet I'm just messing around here, traveling around, watching other people live up their lives.

And yet my own life is not progressing.

I'm just watching you succeed, watching you fail, watching your try watching you move.

I'm just spending a ton of money in my own time just watching that.

I'm not progressing my life at all.

Well, as a software engineer, and if you can find your own project to work on, then you can at least off this career aspect.

You may not be advancing your corporate career so much, but if you have a pretty neat project idea that you want to pursue for a few months, then sure, yeah, I could justify that to myself.

And I feel I don't feel guilty, at least about working one way to get around.

The guilt about career is if you're switching jobs, you know you may be able to give yourself a month or two in between jobs, and that's actually a really great time to travel, because you could be doing that guilt free so that when you're doing your trip, you can just relax and just focus on the trip.

You don't have to be trying to send out your resumes.

However, There's also that dating aspect.

And if I were to just say disappeared to South America for a few months and work remotely from there, you know that would also limit the group of people that I would be dating.

And it might be knee actually to have met some really sexy Brazilian women, for example.

But I don't speak the language and I don't understand the culture, and I'm not sure we would have necessarily all that much in common.

I don't know, maybe we would, but just to satisfy my own sense of guilt, I might pick travel locations that would be also good for dating, and that really limited the number of traces I could go to like I may not choose Third World countries, exotic locations, even places like, say, Hawaii or tourist destinations.

Because you know that everybody you meet there, they're just gonna be random tourists.

Um, not really local is not really normal people.

And essentially, that meant that I had to just pick locations like, say, New York, parts of Canada, maybe Tokyo.

You on these sorts of places would be areas that I would mostly hang around that as my home base.

And then from there I might take vocational day trips here and they're out and about.

But from that sense of perspective, I think you could say that maybe I never really did travel in that sense.

You know, I would only pick areas that I felt could still progress my sense of either career or dating life.

And that helped me back.

I think, like it would have been so much fun to just say I don't care about dating and just go get lost on, like, a three month track through South America.

You know, that would have been may be interesting, but generally, if you can get to this level of, say, success, you're going to be pretty ambitious, and you're not going to be want to be falling behind in terms of your personal life or your professional life?

The other thing on over here is for a long time I had embraced the idea of a world citizen somebody who would just be traveling around all the time.

And I would just try to live out of a suitcase and my suitcase would be all set up.

Everything I owned with fit inside this one suitcase and I would learn to live extremely mobile life.

But over time you soon realise humans were not meant to live out of a suitcase.

It really limits you.

I think, you know, like a lot of hobbies need a lot of equipment, Right?

Life is just so much more comfortable and richer when you're able to have a lot of stuff.

And once you have like a baby, for example, you'll see that kids need so much random stuff and equipment and like bathtubs and baby seats and clothing and blankets and a crib and all sorts of equipment, and just doesn't really work out anymore, like the holy image of being able to live with just a backpack and being world citizen and traveling around with full mobility.

That illusion just ceases as soon as you find, like, maybe you need to have a family.

It works fine if you just like a single person.

But even then your options are going to be limited.

And the funny thing is, you go around.

Maybe you're trying today somebody once you actually meet somebody, then you got to support this person, too, when you go traveling around and then all the costs shoot up right?

Like costs become maybe twice as expensive because then you have to just start getting twice the number of food for everybody.

Twice the train tickets, twice the airplane tickets, twice everything.

And it's all gonna be supported by yourself and further this other person who's going around with you, they're going to be sustaining the same amount of career risk that you are.

You know, it may include two people quitting their jobs to go traveling around.

It's just pretty risky to be doing that sort of thing unless you know that you've really got things down and even the personal risk, right?

Like in case things don't work out, you're pretty much stuck with that person.

Both people are heavily invested already in this trip in their lifestyle.

And you, once these two people have a kid, then travelling is all off.

So you won that the best times travel.

Maybe when you've met this other person at that time.

For me, it was kind of like a honeymoon phase.

And I traveled a lot with my wife now, and we went to all sorts of places, and that was a good time.

But I would say that things were just more expensive and we had to stay at nicer hotels and things.

Getting out and about just took longer because the other person may take time to prepare themselves.

You just have the way around for other people more often, but the same time traveling with a buddy is really useful.

For example, if you're at the airport, someone can be watching your stuff, why you go to the bathroom.

Someone can wait in line for train tickets while the other person is watching the luggage, you know, just really helps to have a second person traveling and let me get you a lot of freedom.

And some of the best times I've had was like when I was traveling alone in Europe, going around the house stills, backpacking around, writing Frayn's Full freedom.

So much fun at the same time.

It's a little bit more dangerous, too, because you could lose directions.

You could lose stuff and you don't have, like, a second backup or somebody around there to help you figure things out without second person.

You also don't get to share memories, but it's actually not too much of a problem because you, me, a lot of people along the way in hostels, and it's actually still pretty fun.

So I have spent some time working out of London and Hawaii as well, and those were not really that fun.

In fact, after working remotely in London working on projects, I kind of told myself, I never really wanted that again where I'm just working and trying to vacation because most of the time I found I was just working stern that the computer in the remote cafe in the Starbucks Cafe pretty much I was not exploring the city.

I was not sizing.

I had learned nothing really about the environment I was in.

I was just in a Starbucks, the whole time it was mostly stressful.

Wasn't really fun.

Hard to find Internet.

And also, I might mention that when you're out working remotely, you don't have a budget.

You don't give that to yourself.

You know, in normal daily life, you don't go around spending hundreds of dollars a day on hotels, on sightseeing, on good food.

You just go around the eating fast food like McDonald's or something like that, and you tried to keep costs down like normal.

And so when you go out working remotely with a budget like that, you don't really get to enjoy much.

And then when you compare that to people who actually go out on a two week vacation and they splurge and they're going out to all the good dining restaurants, they're using their time highly effectively.

Things are expensive and their costs explode.

But you see them going on all the attractions, going to other day trips, just spending tons of money on this stuff.

But they're in and they're out in two weeks or even one week, and they do everything.

They've seen everything, and within that short amount of time, they've already done more than I've done and say three months of living in a certain location.

And you know, that brings me to one realization that have, which is that there's two types of travel, right?

There's the long term backpack in travel, which most young people are fantasizing about.

You know, you go backpacking really cheap on the shoestring budget, staying in hostels, and that's fine.

That's great and gives you a sense of the general location around you.

But there's some certain trips that just cannot be done, even on a medium budget.

Yeah, I'm talking about like a $10,000 African safari.

You know, a trip to Antarctica where you're under cruise ship, you know, maybe spending a week in the bungalow in Tahiti.

You know, some of these trips are not meant for people who travel and work remotely.

Some of these trips are meant for people who work a stable career, and they only travel like twice a year or something like that.

And during that time they splurge.

But it's okay because they've been earning a stable salary to rest of the year, and that makes it all worthwhile.

And those types of trips you know you need like a stable job for something like that.

And I might also include certain other trips that just happened to require a lot of equipment and planning and preparation.

You know, something like, say, hiking to mount ever space camp.

You know, you're not gonna be doing that while you're happening to be backpacking around Asia, right?

Like you're gonna want equipment.

You're gonna want a few months preparation.

And even though it might not necessarily break the bank for you, you're gonna wanna at least have access to equipment, maybe even the gym, such that you can prepare yourself so that when you actually do the trip, you're gonna have a good time.

And so what?

I'm saying certain trips just don't really work out.

If you're backpacking around remotely, some of them only work out.

If you are actually not traveling around full time when you're actually sitting in a job most of the time you're based on what I have seen of the world.

A lot of it does seem globalized.

All the same big brands, the same foods, the same stores.

You know, it's really funny that no matter which city you go to in the world, the best thing that you can eat.

There is a prime rib steak, and that's like the best thing that any city in the world has to offer you.

You go anywhere.

It's just like steak.

Yeah, that's that's the best.

And it's funny, like I don't even like steak and you have the best thing you can buy.

Probably go to Louis Vuitton.

Pick up a bag.

They got one in every single major city, and that's where everybody in the world is craving after some.

Believe me, Tom Bag or something like that, you know, it's just pretty boring.

Like I thought when I went to Iceland, there would be something else, something interesting.

But when I went there, everybody was still interested in the same stuff, listening to the same American music and interested in the same big brands eating the same food.

That's not to say that there's nothing more left to explore, but does make the world a little bit more boring.

And especially these days with the Internet and like sites like Google Earth, you can already explore much of the world and want you to videos of places.

It's almost false to say that you want to travel for the purpose of learning?

Because if you really wanted to learn, you would just read a Wikipedia page about the place.

You want to go read a book or watch a video, you're gonna be learning a lot more that way.

So if you're go is you wanna learn something, that's not really a great reason to travel.

You gotta find another reason for that.

And, you know, I would say one good reason actually might be that it helps you open your mind, perhaps right when you experience different cultures, meet different types of people in all walks of life with different standards of living different ways of thinking different, like especially the whole idea of a different culture where values are different.