Finding Ourselves

My young friend recently returned from 6 months in Japan. A school exchange.

“What changed you?”

She looked at me politely, almost confused.

“The food was amazing,” she said. “And the train system.” Also, “the education system is different.”

Her answer stayed with me.

Because when I was young, travel was supposed to rearrange your soul.

When I was in my twenties I went to Papua New Guinea looking for villages untouched by the modern world. That phrase alone now sounds suspicious, colonial even, but at the time it felt noble, adventurous. I wanted to stand somewhere unspoiled and discover something true. I wanted difficulty. I wanted to become someone.

Later I went to India and found a spirituality that altered the architecture of my inner life. Not instantly. Not theatrically. No guru on a mountaintop touched my forehead while sitars played in the background. It was slower than that. India dissolved certain assumptions I didn’t even know I carried. It made me porous. More uncertain. More alive.

Travel back then depended on mystery.

You arrived ignorant.

You unfolded paper maps that were already obsolete. You slept in places with no reviews. You trusted strangers because there was no alternative. You disappeared for months and your mother simply worried quietly at home because there was no way to track your blue dot moving through Rajasthan. Remember “Poste Restante?” and lining up for hours to call home when your passport and money got stolen?

Loneliness was part of the ticket price.

And loneliness, though painful, was also the doorway.

Now a young traveler can stand in the middle of Marrakech while simultaneously reading Reddit warnings about scams, watching TikToks ranking the best Hammam, texting selfies back home, checking restaurant ratings, translating signs instantly, and reproducing the exact photograph they already saw online twenty-seven times before boarding the plane.

The modern traveler often arrives before they arrive.

I wonder if that changes something essential.

Not long ago I saw an image online: hundreds of tourists standing shoulder to shoulder at a famous viewpoint near Mount Fuji, all holding phones at precisely the same angle, waiting to reproduce the identical cherry blossom photograph they had already consumed a thousand times online.

Pilgrims once traveled toward revelation.

Now many travel toward replication.

But maybe I’m being unfair.

Every older generation eventually reaches the age where it mistakes its own youth for universal truth. Perhaps I will call it, “the old fart syndrome.”

Perhaps Papua New Guinea did not change me because it was uncontaminated. Perhaps it changed me because I was still unfinished.

At twenty-three my identity was still wet cement. The world left fingerprints easily.

Maybe today’s young people are not less curious. Maybe they simply have different burdens.

A young person now inherits a world that feels economically narrow and psychologically crowded. Rent is astronomical. Careers are precarious. Every year must be strategic. Every decision optimized. They are told to build résumés before they’ve built selves.

These same young adults grew up supervised, scheduled, GPS-tracked, emotionally risk-managed and in constant contact with parents.

Gap years and OEs (oversea experience for New Zealanders) once looked romantic.

Now they can look financially irresponsible. And due to our bombardment by instant bad news, impossibly dangerous.

And there is another change too, one harder to admit.

My generation often traveled carrying an unspoken belief that somewhere else possessed a purity we lacked. We went looking for authenticity among poorer people. Spirituality among simpler people. Wisdom among “untouched” cultures.

Today’s young people are more suspicious of that impulse. They hear the language of privilege, extraction, white saviorism, cultural voyeurism. They question whether their search for enlightenment is someone else’s daily hardship transformed into aesthetic experience.

Fair enough. They are not entirely wrong.

Still, something valuable may also have been lost in all that self-awareness.

A willingness to wander foolishly.To be naïve.To be changed by accident.

And then there is the internet itself — the great devourer of distance.

When I was young, the world felt enormous because parts of it remained unseen.

Now a teenager in suburban Canada can watch monks chanting in Nepal, riots in Paris, sunsets in Zanzibar, ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru, and street food tours in Hanoi before breakfast.

The world has become simultaneously more visible and somehow less real.

Perhaps that is why so many young people now seek transformation inward rather than outward. Therapy instead of pilgrimage. Identity exploration instead of geography. Online communities instead of physical wandering: creative subcultures, gaming worlds, activism, wellness culture, intentional communities. Psychedelics. Mental health language instead of spiritual language.

They are still searching.

Just on different maps.

And yet I don’t believe wonder is dead. Human beings cannot survive without wonder. We only relocate it.

In fact, I suspect a quiet rebellion has already begun.

You can see it in young people deleting social media for a month and calling it liberation. In twenty-somethings walking ancient pilgrimage routes with no headphones. In the hunger for wilderness, analog hobbies, silence, cold water, monasteries, gardens, vinyl records, handwritten journals, slow cooking with fresh unprocessed foods. Non-alcoholic parties in saunas and in bed by 10 PM.

Perhaps after decades spent digitizing reality, people are beginning to miss reality itself.

Maybe that is the cycle.

An age of mystery produces exploration.

Exploration produces maps.

Maps produce mastery.

Mastery produces exhaustion.

And exhaustion sends people searching for mystery again.

So perhaps the desire has not vanished after all.

Perhaps somewhere right now a young woman is boarding a bus toward somewhere difficult and uncertain with no idea who she will become on the other side of it.

And perhaps that is how it always begins.