A Nomad’s Icarus Moment [FF Vol. 13]
As of my time writing this, I am now back stateside. After just over 300 days on the road, I hopped off my last Amazon riverboat, spent a wholesome final night out featuring churrasco and samba in Manaus, and boarded my midnight plane to head north. It hasn’t been long since being back, and there is plenty to still write about. They say the return home is a challenge in and of itself after a while abroad. I’ll detail that bit once I have more time feeling it out. Until then, here are my thoughts on one of vagabonding’s oddest challenges, a friend’s thoughtful breakdown of some of the other challenges, and a nerdy article about Latin languages. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
Too Close to the Sun
Burnout. The only word on my foggy mind as I walk the familiar, buckling cobblestone road back from my gym. Neon orange clashes with a deep purple in the evening sky above me, another brilliant Natal sunset formed by sand swirling off the dunes that characterize the area. It’s the end of my fourth week working at a hostel in the northeastern Brazilian city. Throughout the last month spent here, I’ve kept myself busy. When not working, my free time has been spent jumping from thrill to thrill. Scuba diving, solo cycling, surf towns, beach bars, samba nights. But I had a dilemma: for the most frustrating reason, none of them evoked the same exhilarating novelty that similar adventures would have evoked in my initial days on the road months ago.
Biking down the coast for the day, thrill seeking (Natal, Brazil)
Now, I’m just tired. My feet shuffle as I walk home as I’m still coming out of a weeklong bout with dengue fever. The last few days I passed in a hammock, head spinning, covered in the virus’s telltale rash, and physically incapacitated down to 20% body battery. Among a stolen phone and a botched blonde-haired era, the dengue fills out another square on my Brazilian BINGO card. My strength is back enough, finally, for some light sweatwork, but my brain still feels as foggy and disconnected as when the fever was at its peak. Unfortunately, the only piece of clarity I retain now is the sickening question I face: How can I be burnt out?
Yes, burnout exists, even in wandering the world with little responsibility. To avoid caveating every coming sentence, I’ll just do it once here too: this is an extremely privileged “challenge” to encounter. But it’s an integral piece to the nomadic lifestyle and long-term traveler evolution worth sharing. Without it, it’s easy to forget that life, in any form, will have friction and disappointments. In the highlight-driven world shared on social media, it’s important to acknowledge the existence of the downs if we’re so overtly eager to share the ups. I find it fascinating that it exists, even within Western society’s privileged vagabonding community.
Matt Kepnes, the author behind the popular vagabonding website Nomadic Matt, describes travel burnout (aptly) as feeling like “the ultimate ingratitude”.
I’ve spent almost a year doing the exact thing I want to do every day of my life, and I’m over it. How can it be? Yet, that was the feeling I almost certainly felt in Natal in June of 2023. In addition to being “switched on” every day in the face of constantly changing new environments, I had run myself into the ground straining between exploring, language study, volunteer work, creative projects, and adventures to an unsustainable point of discontentment. Even more, I felt guilty as I sensed myself becoming less appreciative of where I was, who I was with, and what I had the potential to do. Determined not to waste my days on the road, I looked for a way to fix it.
Calling in support
As it turns out though, travel burnout existed long before the term popped into my dengue-fueled fever dreams. It comes in many forms to different travelers, but over the millennia, history shows consistent traces of discontent among those who travel for too long, too quickly, or for the wrong motives.
For decades, unconventional travel media has thrown around the idea of “Cathedral Fatigue”, best known for its onset in the high-paced sprints tourists make through Europe’s glut of religious sites. Cramming as many tours into short periods brings a rush of excitement at seeing the Sistine Chapel in Rome, lightly sustains the interest through the halls of Paris’s Notre Dame, and can suddenly dump the visitor into a sort of unimpressed malaise by the time they make it to the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. For anyone, when an environment or stimulus becomes too familiar, it loses its curiosity and edge.
Another study conducted more recently by Salman Yousaf examined pilgrims returning from Iran to their homes in Pakistan during COVID. Although the pandemic was a rather extraneous or acute risk to the travel world, the results of the study were still telling.
On the journey home, pilgrims began to report feelings of being tired and overall being done with traveling, even though they were returning from an enlightening religious pilgrimage. The study identified three potential causes of the burnout these pilgrims experienced: an inability to adapt to constantly uncertain travel plans, a failure to control emotions in the face of these fluid situations, and a generally defined travel “exhaustion”.
Thinking more about it in my case, I didn’t feel as much like the first two factors could have much bearing on me. My nine months prior had been completely devoted to uncertainty as I intentionally practiced the ability to handle uncertain situations at the moment. My itinerary was never set, nor was my day-to-day schedule. I had also spent ample time facing and working through emotions of loneliness, anger, defeat, embarrassment, boredom, and fear to the point that I was more capable of recognizing them when they started to dampen my travels. This wasn’t one of those cases. But the word “exhaustion” did resonate.
Another day, another bus (Vitória, Brazil)
Travel exhaustion manifests in many forms from homesickness to physical overexertion to feeling antisocial to contracting illness to even boredom in new places. Indeed, I was sick when I finally pinpointed the source of my recent stress on the road, but the tell-tale symptom of travel burnout to me was my creeping disinterest in my surroundings. I had, faster than I ever anticipated, started to become numb to novelty.
Becoming numb to novelty is a disappointing reality. Having been in such a dynamic lifestyle for so long, I was not as enthralled by the idea of exploring my new homes the same way I did when I first stepped foot on the continent months back. In Santiago, I bounced around the streets of the Chilean capital without a phone, genuinely thrilled to speak with anyone I could meet. Whether it was asking for directions to the best nearby restaurant or meeting a fellow traveler at my hostel, I buzzed with the anticipation of knowing the answer to “What if I ____?”.
Approaching a year later, in those same situations in Natal, I had become jaded and unmotivated to treat this chapter the same. Men on converted motorcycles playing old-school hits from blown-out speakers wheeling through a restaurant seemed almost normal by now. Normal, too, had become a day at the beach, monkeys coming down from trees for my lunch, and that all-too-identifiable sewage stench one passes walking an empty Brazilian street in the scorching afternoon sun. Unwilling to face the reality of what these feelings meant, I pursued constant stimulation in the form of tours, dancing, and weekend trips to new places. The result was physically running myself into the ground without much newfound curiosity to show for it.
Long journeys have their downtimes. Although perhaps different than the rough patches of conventional life, it’s worth noting that in being away from home for long enough, traveling ceases to be the alternative and settles into the place of what we consider normal. In my meditations on my own travel burnout, I reminded myself that, just like my former lifestyle back in the States, not every day could be extraordinary. It was okay to have ordinary days. I struggled with that for as long as I had been on the road and still do now.
Resting was the last thing I would let myself do, worried I would be wasting my days if I did. When presented with the blessing of decision freedom, it’s hard not to lay down on the pedal and take advantage of every moment until the tank runs empty. But that’s a lot more doable in a trip of a week or month than an open-ended, aspirational one. Then, the responsibility falls on the traveler to stop moving.
Slowing down (Itaparica Island, Brazil)
At some point in a long-term journey, it’s necessary to step back and take a critical look at the direction it's heading. Some travelers I meet have predetermined return dates, be it in three months or a year. Yet, like myself, many nomads in this community set out with no idea when they will return, if at all. If the return does manifest, what dictates the end of a journey is typically a budget.
“When the money runs out, it’s time to come home”, they tell you—I put myself in that boat for a while too.
As I went on though, I found that predicating an end to travel as a sort of financial, Icarus scenario is ill-fated. The goal of aspirational travel isn’t to fly so close to the sun as to burn up just because the savings are available to spend. It’s to effectively use our time and money to extract the most out of life.
Yet, most peers on the road will speak about their travels and finances hand-in-hand, ignoring other factors that may indicate that a change in tack is necessary to maintain an appreciation of the moment. What is already a privileged dilemma to experience (in speaking of travel burnout), can only be made worse if a traveler were to continue traveling without fully engaging and appreciating where they are.
Continuing to move for the sake of… continuing to move is inherently unproductive and unsatisfying. Movement is addictive for a vagabond. Flush with exciting options, potential adventures, and the constant freedom to just go makes staying put feel unnatural. Failure to temper that freedom, though, is precisely what leads to travel burnout. The more we move just because we feel like we should, the easier it becomes to slip into an unintentional, incurious state, and waste our blessed experience.
So what’s the fix? Mindfulness is always helpful in these situations, but answers like meditation and journaling can only go so far I found. Reframing motivations, and reminding ourselves why we’re on the road in the first place—those are productive steps forward too.
Another option is a change of pace or environment. If the majority of travel is taking place in urban areas, hit the dirt road and get rural. Vice versa, if there’s a serious vacuum of social interactions from extended time in the mountains (something I ran into a couple of times), then maybe it’s time to dive right into the chaos of a metropolitan hostel.
As for pace, slowing down is OK. There, someone said it. No need for a 3-day limit somewhere just because Lonely Planet said so. Park the bus, stay in one place, get to know the neighborhood like a hometown, and maybe even get a temporary job to get involved and build a routine. Sometimes the mind and body need some recuperation from constant stimulation.
Or recuperation from food poisoning… guiltiest (and cheapest) prato feito I ever did find
In Natal, I tried to find solace in a routine, fitness, and sleep, but those weren’t quite achievable in the face of night schedules and constant guest flow. Random tours weren't giving me the same novel excitement they used to. Journaling was as rewarding as it always is, but it wasn't fit for this case. Coming out of my stupor and regaining mental clarity, I landed on a solution. It was the decision that no traveler would ever dream of making in their first few weeks setting out. The option that no one, even someone with travel burnout, would dare to admit.
If all attempts to reignite the travel fire fail, then it’s probably a signal to go home.
The Labors of a Vagabond
Using struggles to spotlight blessings like traveling is a bit like someone complaining about having to fly business because the first-class cabin is booked up. Sure, it may be personally inconvenient. But no one really gives a damn. And it’s hardly a problem.
My close friend and fellow vagabond Zane Jarecke recently published Part One of a four-part series on some of these “struggles” and the best ways to quickly banish them to the depths. Perspective is important in this lifestyle, and without it the “you think my life is great, but it’s not” backpacking influencer is no better than someone having a cheery photo shoot at Chernobyl.
Zane Jarecke (Aug. 11, 2023)
The Portuguese Chicken or the Spanish Egg?
First off, both sound delicious…
I once witnessed an entertaining, fiery debate between a Brazilian and an Argentinian about whether or not the Portuguese or Spanish language came about first in history and influenced the other. As with many Latin debates, there was little resolution. I always assumed they evolved parallel, personally. Then, a few days ago, my Dominican Uber driver told me that Spanish was the basis for Portuguese because Portuguese stemmed from Galician which stemmed from Spanish. My language-nerd senses tingled again. I decided to investigate.
Technically, my Uber driver was loosely correct. However, more accurately, neither stemmed from the other. Both are considered dialects of Vulgar Latin. Check out this article on how Vulgar Latin split into modern-day Spanish and Portuguese:
Unravel Magazine (Nov. 13, 2015)
If you enjoyed this edition, be sure to share it with someone. My goal is to have this newsletter reach those interested in traveling unconventionally and long-term, without requiring much cash. Or, at the very least, be an entertaining narrative of times on the road. Either works for me.
Until next time,
