Vitamin TRAVEL: the nutritive experience that improves mood, creativity, and adaptability; provides more options, can be shared with others
“Instead of looking at travel as a frivolity, we can equally appreciate it as a necessity in order to educate ourselves about the world and the options that exist for us. People who cannot justify their own happiness are generally highly skilled in justifying their negations and misery and equally skilled in justifying misery and negations onto other people. Our willingness to be happy and free makes us more likely to facilitate the happiness and freedom of other people.” DrV
“The people who really love you are the people who cherish and protect you in the present and who teach and prepare you to live a bigger, better, and freer life in the future.” DrV
I’ve had to think quite a bit about travel lately because I coordinated a family trip recently with nine other people and so I had to herd a bunch of cats in the rain for a few days. That process forced me to become aware of each component and sequential step. I plan to make edited and embellished version of this spontaneous video to provide more detail, insight, logistics and technical skills, but in the meantime, here’s the raw video to get started. Of course, this conversation is related to some of my previous posts on travel, moving on and international relocation:
After making this video, I had a few more insights that I would add and so I will indeed add those to the raw video provided here sometime during this wonderful month of March 2026. I’ll start by making this list of insights and additional comments and I will continue to extend these for the next few days/weeks.
“Good traveling” is an essential life skill, these days on par with basic cooking skills, bookkeeping/taxpaying, legal negotiations, and mechanical/repair skills.
Unlike those other skills, good traveling hasn’t generally been considered essential for survival, except for escaping military conflict, pandemic lockdowns, societal instability and economic collapse.
As I mention in the video, pursuing and maintaining life stability via international flexibility firstly requires competence in traveling, since this is the only true means of learning which other locales and cultures might be a good fit for us in the event that we actually have to relocate in a permanent basis.
Traveling is thus “micromoving” and a way for us to “try out” a different living experience before fully committing.
“Parents who do not teach their children how to travel successfully are thereby consciously or unconsciously trapping their children into a life where their options will be limited and where travel will be at least uncomfortable if not dangerous for them.” DrV
Essentially everything can be ranked in terms of a hierarchy, and traveling skills can likewise be ranked:
Level 1—beginner and novice: You have a passport and you know how to buy a plane ticket and choose a good hotel. You’re responsible enough to get yourself to the airport on time and to anticipate next steps. At this level of travel, you probably have no idea what you’re missing because you don’t know how to appreciate the nuances between different cultures, so your trip is going to feel complete even though you don’t know what you missed out on.
If you think “Spanish” is the only official language spoken in Spain, then you’re at the beginner level; if you have any foundational appreciation of Spanish culture, then you would know about Catalan, Gallego, and Euskara.
Level 2—skilled: You can plan multinational travel for you and your partner/friend. By now you are noticing that different cultures are actually radically different from each other.
Spaniards are radically different from Colombians, and both are further different from Chileans, Argentinians, Mexicans, and Uruguayans.
If you go to Colombia without appreciating the difference between ajiaco and changua, then you’re not ready for Level 2 yet. You cannot visit Colombia without appreciating the daily and cultural importance of food—and the songs they sing about food.
![Beautiful witty Irish-Colombian song [VIDEO] about respecting food, its origins and caretakers](https://substackcdn.com/image/youtube/w_728,c_limit/8RZeHO7gBJk)
Level 3—mastery and teaching: By now, you are able to teach other people about travel and coordinate large travel groups including managing their hotels, excursions, food and other activities and necessities. Very importantly, you can “read the scene” with regard to population personality, market quality, and financial stability to know whether or not you could actually relocate if you ever had to leave your current city or country.
Insights about travel:
The traveling itself is not the payoff: Even if you hate traveling, you can still become a good traveler. I am aware that some people actually claim to enjoy the process of going to the airport and being on an airplane, etc; I personally get no enjoyment from these activities. Quite to the contrary, I actively dislike them: waiting for banal processes, siting in uncomfortable places, noise, etc. I certainly don’t travel for the sake of traveling, and I expect that most people would probably admit that they don’t like the processes. Most of us travel for a reason and we travel to be at the other destination, even if we don’t have a specific reason. We travel for work, we travel to visit friends or family, or we travel to explore new cultures and new possibilities for expanding our scope of appreciation of the world and the possibilities that exist somewhere “out there.
Travel teaches us to be flexible, humble and competent; this is a unique combination because most of the time we associate skill-building and confidence with more egotism instead of more humility. Anytime you travel, especially to a foreign country, you’re going to have experiences that you did not anticipate and this is obviously even more true if you don’t speak the local language. However, as I mentioned in the video above, even if you speak the local language, you may be surprised to find yourself in a group of tourists from yet a third location, and therefore you may find yourself adapting to a language that you don’t understand. The best and most proper thing to do in a situation like this is just to relax and not get stressed out about it because if you allow yourself to get anxious or offended, then you’re going to reduce your intellectual capacity to deal successfully with what might actually turn out to be an enjoyable situation– when I found myself in a group of people who only speak Portuguese, I just relaxed and allowed some of the crossover between Spanish and Portuguese to provide me a sufficient understanding of the situation. Because of that approach, I was able to enjoy the experience, relinquish any need for control or for things to go “my way“ and in the end realize that I could manage the situation quite well. I think situations like that provide us the opportunities to understand that we don’t have to control things to be happy and that we can be a fish completely out of water and still survive the experience – as such, giving up control and going with the flow proves that we actually can be competent in such a strange environment while at the same time, allowing us to relax and enjoy the ride.
If somebody else screws up your travel plans by forgetting an object or making a bad reservation, you’re gonna find out really quickly about your childhood abandonment issues. You are responsible for your items no matter who is doing the packing.
How much tactical and emotional reserve does your traveling partner demonstrate? Traveling with a friend or a romantic partner is going to show you very clearly their level of ability to prepare for the unknown and to take care of themselves. Whether they are 20 years old or 40 years old, you may find that your traveling partner is either well prepared and supportive and flexible or that they blame you for everything that goes wrong and they regress to a childlike state because they don’t have the technical travel skills and they also don’t have the emotional ability to see that their travel is their responsibility.
