Vitamin T—lessons from recent TRAVEL

Even if you are experienced and a “good traveler“ you’ll still have problems every once in a while:

• 0. Flight delays will happen occasionally, even consecutively.

• 1. We definitely overpacked because we were contemplating two months on the road.

• 2. The more you move around with more luggage, the more exhausted you’ll be managing the weight and all the individual components. Starts to add up after you’ve been on the road for 10+ days especially if you are adding more flights, more areas, changing hotels, etc.

• 3. Your guts will commonly get screwed up when you travel even if you don’t eat anything that’s necessarily “bad“ because you’re eating things and drinking water that’s different from what you’re used to and sometimes the guts respond poorly to any change whatsoever or even if it’s relatively benign

• 4. One of my rules: any time I buy something, then I have to give away at least as many items.

• 5. Traveling provides is new images on the grand scale and also the small scale and one of those images might help you understand yourself better and provide insights that help you in your life.

Previous posts specific to travel are provided below

Vitamin TRAVEL: the nutritive experience that improves mood, creativity, and adaptability; provides more options, can be shared with others

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:

INTERNATIONAL FLEXIBILITY IS THE NEW STABILITY: video replay from June 29 of 2025

I have relocated internationally >4 times: Here is my Checklist for 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:

1. 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.

   1. 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.

2. 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.

   1. Spaniards are radically different from Colombians, and both are further different from Chileans, Argentinians, Mexicans, and Uruguayans.

   2. 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

1. 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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. Travel forces you to ignore your own country’s problems while being ignorant or indifferent to those of your host country—you are apolitical, a “good European” for a while.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. Travel unplugs you from routines, habits, obsessions, thereby “cleaning” your life; you return to your life only to engage with the necessary and the chosen, but not with the restricting or unneeded. In this way, periodic travel is somewhat analogous to fasting, autophagy or—more crudely—“a life enema” that gets rid of the habitual remnants and residues that we were holding onto, even unwillingly or unconsciously. After you’ve been gone for a few weeks, you’ll come back home to start your life over again, but you don’t have to —and you should not— continue the routines and various relationships that were stale or unnecessary.

7. Parents who do not teach their children how to travel successfully are therefore consciously or unconsciously trapping their children into a life where travel will be at least uncomfortable if not dangerous for them. As I mentioned in the video above, my own father told me I should spend the summer in France when I was 16 years old and completely clueless about life —I could barely navigate my own hometown at that age let alone a foreign country on a different continent where I didn’t even speak the language. As such, his suggestion for me to travel internationally at that age and at that time in my life—even though it sounds naively adventurous and generous—was completely inappropriate, and he was basically setting me up for a failure at best if not some type of catastrophe at worst. Only over the past year or two have I gotten into clarity on how parents sabotage their children, and I now with that insight, I’m able to understand why his manipulation sounded generous, but was actually an invitation for disaster. This becomes even more clear if you realize that my father spoke English, Spanish and French, and had received one of his graduate diplomas/certificates from studying at an internationally recognized specialty institute in France, and therefore if he truly honestly had any intention for me to understand international travel in general and France in particular then he should’ve offered to accompany me on that trip, not just send me across the ocean, completely clueless and vulnerable. My father could almost never pull himself away from work, and this opportunity that we lost —to spend a week in Paris with him showing me how to travel and to navigate the nuances of culture— will forever be what it was and is: a lost opportunity.

8. My father never really traveled much, even though he had plenty of opportunity, and he spoke three languages, and he had an appreciation of other cultures, at least superficially. I gained some insight by observing this paradox. Alpha males don’t like to travel for pleasure because their identity comes from their position and performance. As such, the idea of exploring a new culture for the sake of personal expansion and appreciation doesn’t have a meaningful metric associated with it that coincides with their values specific to social positioning. Pleasure travel for an alpha male feels like waste of time, and they feel like they are out of their zone, and also out of their league. For someone whose identity is defined by their social position, the idea of being anonymous, and even equal among a random group of travelers is disturbing and disorienting, if not slightly offensive. Outside of their habitual routine which defines who they are and maintains their rank above others, they feel lost and insecure: one knows who they are or how important they are accustomed to being perceived. Travel forces everyone to be perceived and treated as an equal, at least at many or most points along the journey. For people who are insecure and/or position-identified, the anonymity and freedom of travel are disorienting and unsettling.

9. You have to learn to keep the peace when things go wrong because you’re gonna be stuck with your job partner and you don’t wanna screw up your entire travel memories investment.

10. Mass transit moves more than bodies. Quality and efficient mass transit moves people’s minds so that they think of themselves as free, unburdened, connected, and cared for.

11. You haven’t seen the street until you’ve seen both sides of the street from both directions.

12. Travel forces us to control ourselves, maintain calm, be patient (or at least tolerant) with processes, people, delays and rerouting.

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