If you’re new here, welcome – please feel free to begin with issue N°1: Genesis, or N°2: Plurality. These contain the mission statement of this publication.
This issue is going to be emotionally difficult for some, but it is the most important thing I have to share with you. In the interest of your own empowerment, I beg your forgiveness with me now.
If you've been putting off adventure for 'some day when I (or we) have time' let me remind you right here:
Hiking the Great Wall of China – or even hiking the hills of Montmartre in Paris – simply does not get easier with the passing of years.
Far from it. The might and vigour of youth is quite simply capable of taking in a lot more of the world than the frailty of old age can cope with. Intuitively, this makes sense, but I assure you it seems quite abstract until experienced firsthand.
I have seen this play out consistently, over and over again. It is a deeply sobering experience that not many people have had the way I have.
I spent over a decade working in cultural tourism with tens of thousands of people abroad, exploring all corners of the world. Many of my guests were quite elderly, and I learned rather a lot about what that means in reality.
This edition follows up with end of Issue N°2, where we introduced the notion of:
Memento Mori | Remember That You Will Die
I don’t know how else to make it explicitly clear just how essential it is to take stock of your time & health as a finite resource you can never get back.
Here’s what I learned about the elderly in over a decade
They fall asleep. Constantly. They need help with their bookings, phones, medication, and any language they don’t speak makes life borderline impossible. Often they can barely walk. Instead of being able to walk, they fall asleep on air-conditioned tour busses looking out tinted windows at the great wild world with all its sensory marvels and beauty that they are now simply too frail to properly experience.
If you are already an elderly person, or almost one, and I’m making you nervous, there’s a little section further down where I write a bit about some ideas for you.
Most of the revelations that can be gained from travel require you to have agency over the rest of your life in order to be meaningful beyond entertainment value.
It’s not about what restaurant specifically you eat at, or what specific places you see. It’s about the pursuit of experiences which epitomise the values which a place and culture have to offer. Your goal is to fuel your understanding of the world and change your life1
As a young(er) person who travels, you can discover a new favourite dish that simply cannot be replicated without direct access to the sea, (for me this was spaghetti a vongole, and an issue on this is coming!), or a new cuisine entirely. You can find out that you love a certain climate you’d never experienced, or the way that a particular culture curates its living spaces, or public spaces, or conversations. A new look at how people dress, or expresses human affection and connection collectively can be utterly profound. You can then act on these revelations and change the shape of your life and career and dreams accordingly.
All of these precious insights, both unimaginably great and poignantly small are valuable beyond comprehension, and impossible to replicate remotely.
They must be experienced, and there is no substitute. Please read that again.
Without having these experiences during the more formative years of your life, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to be particularly meaningful later. As life progresses, the value of exposure to new experiences decreases asymptotically towards zero because you have less time to act on them and fewer cascading events to impact.
This is an asymptote; a mathematical curve that gradually progresses towards zero or infinity, getting ever closer without ever touching it. It’s a kind of poetry:
This next part is going to be really grim for a moment, and it’s going to escalate as I share some stories with you. But you need to hear this.
Imagine going to Japan so old and set in your ways that you are a mix of afraid and unwilling to try the food. You refuse to eat anything you don’t know there and instead end up eating KFC the entire time in a country that is one of the world’s great culinary gifts. Too frightened to even try local Japanese fried chicken (karaage), which is vastly better than KFC anyways.
This is a true story about someone I met, by the way.
It sounds like a humorous outlier, but take it from me: it’s vastly more common than you might think, and this behaviour is not limited to particular cultures or countries of origin. My heart breaks encountering these people. They’ve missed the point of literally everything in life, and it’s too late now.
Once, someone died on a 3h bus ride on the way to meet me for an excursion. Died. Vacation over, dead. Another had a heart attack in the middle of a big European capital, fell, put a tooth through a lip, and ended up in hospital for days.
Countless others had minor injuries that stopped them in their tracks. Money cannot buy you back mobility in time to rescue your two week holiday when you have injured yourself.
One time I carried someone down three flights of stairs on a stretcher and accompanied them in an ambulance to a hospital. We were in a small village on the steep slopes of one of the great continental rivers – a popular tourist route – and several elderly people fell on the steps. They were easy steps, btw, not the monstrous Great Wall of China.
This experience stuck with me particularly, and here’s why: at the hospital, after the guest had been taken away for x-rays I sat down to help fill out the accompanying paperwork on behalf of the injured person. The staff went through the motions and had enormous stacks of forms especially for foreigners, to the point where I was compelled to ask them whether this was perhaps not the first time.
“During the season,” they said in the local language, “this is a daily occurance. So many old people. They can’t walk, and they’re constantly getting injured.”
On my way back from the hospital in a cab, the driver (who, because it was a small town, already knew what had happened) dropped another gut-wrenching remark on me:
“I don’t get it,” he said (again in the local language), staring straight ahead. “They’re eighty years old. What are these people looking for, at the end of their lives? Why come at all? They should have travelled when their brains and bodies still worked2.”
I’m not trying to frighten you. But for the love of God, whatever it is you are thinking about, do it now.
I nearly lost my left arm from the elbow down in an accident in 2017. I'm eternally grateful to have that arm, through the miracle of modern medicine.
The accident and extended (painful) convalesence is burnt into my mind as a reminder of just how quickly life can change, permanently. The thought that it might have been a leg sparked an intense sense of urgency in my life, and the huge scar from the surgery and residual pain make sure I never forget.
Make memories that will shape your life that you can treasure forever after. It's too late all too soon to explore so many places as fully as you could have.
And by the way:
The answer is not to cram as many sites into as few days as possible in a desperate race to see everything.
That’s a surefire way (pushed by the arms race of tour company marketing departments) to have a lot of photos and few actual memories. Don't make your life experience a blur of exhausting marathon days, compromising on things like cuisine, relaxation, and contemplation (the things that actually matter) during what was supposed to be a vacation.3
Your only goal is to soak up the experience of being somewhere and being with people there, and make sparkling, crystaline memories of these moments.
Please read that again. Get it tattooed on your inner forearm if it helps, I don’t know. Whatever it takes. It is essential that you have these memories that you can call up again in your mind later to remind you of your calling and to preserve your JOY.
Dum Vivimus, Vivamus | While We Yet Live, Let us Live.
Just in case you happen to be an elderly person reading this, and you haven’t travelled much, I don’t want you to feel too disheartened. All of what I have shared above is true, and for a lot of things, it is now too late for you. But it’s also important to know that there are still adventures to be had, and as my mother always says, ‘take what opportunities you can, and make the absolute best of them.’
But what I would most like to communicate to you is the value of your influence on others. I’d encourage you to instill anyone young around you with a sense of wonder, and perhaps suggest that the most powerful thing you can do in your life is to help those people remember not to delay their own adventures.
That way, when they are your age (as of now – barring Miraculous Medical Intervention – frailty is still coming for us all), those young people you encouraged to take off and be wild and climb the mountains, and seduce the person they met in a café and hopefully married later can spend their autumnal years gently pottering around in a garden somewhere that they truly love…
…Instead of trying to manage the difficulties of foreign countries in a high-speed world they no longer understand, and which is anyways now too big and physically demanding to conquer.
Fortis Fortuna Adiuvat
To close, although this old Latin maxim is ordinarily rendered in English as ‘Fortune favours the bold’, this is not accurate.
Most precisely, the phrase actually translates as ‘Fortuna helps the strong’. It’s worth letting that sink in for a moment. It comes from an old world where the Goddess of fortune – named Fortuna, an unruly mistress to be sure – is the physical personification of luck, and a beautiful & formidible aid in battles of all sorts.
All this just to say: Godspeed, wherever your adventures may take you. Push harder to have them now; slow down, and breathe deeply of all the wonder and glory there is to be had once you’re there.
Savour every bit of it.
People clamour after these infuriating lists because it allows them to quantify something that they then use to reassure themselves that they’ve ‘done it right’, or show status to their peers or aspirational peer group. Ergo the absolute epidemic of people who think that travelling is a personality. Dating app studies and anecdotal info – just ask your friends if they are on dating apps – will give you an idea of how bad this has actually gotten. Travelling can inform a personality, but you have to work for it: checking boxes on tour itineraries or taking selfies in places or restaurants that you’re ‘supposed to’ doesn’t cut it.
Actually, that’s not quite what he said. What he actually said was '“Why didn’t they travel when their brains and cocks still worked?”. But, you know, I’m trying to paraphrase to convey maximum value, not strict accuracy. Try not to be too offended by this little particle of truth, please.
I’m in the process of writing an entire article to help you understand how to relax and enjoy yourself. It seems tough. Here’s a thought: leave the apple watch at home; get a nice mechanical one that just shows you the time to keep you off your phone. That’s plenty.