Over seven years of travel, I have seen almost everyone who started out with us stop traveling. I have seen waves of them, in fact, just one group after another, friends that we made for a season, and then, predictably, they move back home or settle down or get “real” jobs. The online travel community can feel like a thousand friendships rolled into one, but it’s like vapor-connections, they fade and vanish. We’re all just ghosts to each other, the memories of a certain time and place but rarely the friendships go much deeper. Travel burn out creeps up, but it’s not about too much travel, or going too fast, it’s about the aching absence of true connection, something that you get used to, a requirement of any traveler is to shake off homesickness and to numb those parts of us that miss the feeling of knowing a tribe of people. To have kin. To belong.
