6 Reasons You Need To Travel While You're Still Young (And Never Stop)

It’s difficult for me to imagine not being able to travel regularly. I’ve always loved traveling – ever since I was a little lad. I was never one to be scared of leaving home.

Hell, I moved to Europe for a bit, just for the heck of it. Now I’m lucky enough to travel to Turkey a few times a year for business.

Traveling is more than just a distraction from your regular life. It’s a learning experience every time you hop onto that plane. Traveling can teach you more in a year than most people will learn in a lifetime.

You don’t only learn about parts of the world and the people who live there. Most importantly, you’ll learn about you.

You’ll see yourself in a way that you have never seen yourself before. Being alone in a strange land is the best wakeup call one can have. But, to get the full benefits of traveling, you gotta travel when you’re young.

1. You get to meet people your age and see how they are living.

This is much more difficult when you’re older, as just about everyone will have jobs and/or marriages. The working and married life looks very similar in most parts of the world.

With age comes responsibility and with responsibility comes a lack of leisure. It’s best to travel when you know you’ll be most likely to meet people who will have time to hang out, to show you around, to talk to you and share thoughts with you. People seem to be less interested in meeting new people the older they get.

2. You can do all the crazy things you know you’ll probably regret.

Luckily you’re young enough and have time to forget them. You’re young and still believe that partying until the break of dawn is a good idea.

Don’t let that mindset go to waste! YOLO it all out until you are forced to find enjoyment in the simpler things.

Not to say that you can’t party it up when you’re older, but chances are that you won’t be as keen to party it up when you’re older. And if you are, the consequences are likely to be grander.

3. You can fall in love with the wrong exotic person and be happy you did.

Let’s be honest with ourselves: We love to travel because we hope we’ll meet some beautiful and exotic person to be our lover for a short duration of time.

We want that Euro-fling. Falling in love with someone you can barely communicate with is really something special – I’m not joking. It shows you how human beings can communicate no matter what language they speak.

4. You can see the world with eyes that have yet to be tainted by false beliefs.

Being open-minded relies heavily on being constantly introduced to different varieties of the same thing.

We have to understand that some of the simplest things, things that we may very well take for granted, are done differently elsewhere.

The older you get, the more set you become in your ways and the less you’ll be open to trying new things and looking at things from a different perspective. There may always be right and wrong, but there is also the simply different.

5. You can eat and drink like you’re in your 20s because you are in your 20s.

From what I hear, our metabolisms will go to sh*t in the next two decades or so. That may change with advancements in medicine, but I wouldn’t bet too much on it.

When you’re young, you can still eat like a pig and drink like a fish with minimal damage and ensuing regret.

Your stomach can take all that spicy, fatty, hard to digest foods now. It can guzzle down a half-liter of sake.

Unfortunately, that probably won’t be the case once you hit 40. You can’t taste life if you can’t taste what life has to offer.

6. You’ll be a better, fuller person for it.

You see, it’s not just about what you learn, but when you learn it that makes a huge difference. Life and the reality you experience is a cascade of sorts.

You are influenced by everything that you experienced and everything that you are currently experiencing is influencing what you will in the future experience. With each new experience comes a tweaked filter to process information through.

Being exposed to diversity at a younger age will literally change the way you see the world and change your life.

This is less of the case once we hit our 30s because we already have lived through so much and have adopted certain habits and ways of thinking.

We should travel and learn at a younger age and then continue to do so throughout our lives – always learning new things from our travels.

Photo Courtesy: We Heart It

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