Every so often, I like to write a more philosophical update of how I’m doing, less tied to where I am and more tied to how I am: physically, spiritually, emotionally. And that’s always a hard question to answer. I know I’m having all these incredible experiences — they must surely be having some effect on me — but I mostly feel the same as I always did.

I blame Galileo. It once was perfectly acceptable to imagine you were the center of the solar system, eternal, enduring, with the rest of the universe orbiting around you. Then you spend a week in Florence, visit a museum, and find Galileo’s middle finger propped up and telling you off. You’re not the center of anything. The challenge instead is to figure out what exactly you’re orbiting, and why. I keep wondering.

It’s easy to track my geographic progress. I’ve visited 24 different countries since January 1^st, 11 for the first time, assuming you count places like Kosovo and the Isle of Man and the Åland Islands as countries. I returned to Africa for the first time since 2019, and to South America for the first time in decades. I keep trying to push myself further, to visit places that force me to rethink my understanding of the world and my place in it. But there’s always so much more to see: Cuba, the Philippines, Jordan, South Africa.

It’s harder to tell how it’s changing me mentally. I don’t have any point of reference. It’s like I’m one of the astronauts in those thought experiments, traveling near the speed of light. Only time is supposed to slow down as you approach the speed of light; for me it seems like it’s speeding up itself. I’m seeing and doing all these things, and when I check back in with friends their lives don’t seem to have changed much at all. That can’t be right. I assume it’s evidence that I’ve dialed in to a different cadence, that travel is changing me profoundly enough that it’s hard to sync up to the pace I used to live at. But at the pace I used to live I was bored, tired, restless, and lonely. Now I’m just tired, restless, and lonely. Surely that’s an upgrade?

Full disclosure: at one point, way back when, I was diagnosed with ADD and prescribed what was literally a moderate dose of amphetamines to balance me out. I stopped taking them when my blood pressure started hovering in the 180/120 range. It doesn’t take a doctorate in psychology to realize compulsive travel is a pretty extreme way to achieve what the meth was supposed to be doing: overclocking my brain so it doesn’t eat itself every day. And if the meth was better at making me calm enough to sit at a desk and do a day job from 9 to 5, well, that still doesn’t sound like much of an improvement to me. So on I go.

Travel, if you do it long enough, has a way of paring away most of the illusions you have about yourself. A crisis does as well, and what is travel if not one crisis after another? You’re always trying to sprint across town because you got the time change wrong or puzzling through why your credit card is suddenly no longer working. This is just another way of restating the cliché that when you travel you find yourself, which is itself a rather unhappy thing to discover if you’re traveling to lose yourself. You can only really keep up an intensive travel schedule if you enjoy your own company. At a minimum you need to be willing to put up with your own bullshit.

I’ve found out a lot about myself since I started traveling four years ago. I have surprisingly strong opinions about shower design and water pressure. I can no longer sleep sitting upright unless I’m being propped up by pillows. I loathe plastic and wooden silverware. I get nauseous on ferries unless the water is extraordinarily calm.

I’ve also discovered — although reaffirmed is maybe the better term — that the way I think about things is almost completely alien to most people. It’s sufficiently idiosyncratic that it’s hard to even explain; if I talk in metaphors a lot, it’s because I find it’s the only way I can imagine bridging that gap. I struggle with things other people find obvious, and find much of the world self-evident in a way that other people don’t even notice. I’d say it’s like being able to see ultraviolet instead of red, but that’s not right. It’s more like having a pair of X-ray specs permanently strapped to your face. I see through things. It’s like I see the structures of things hidden beneath the surface, understand how things connect to one another in ways most people find invisible, at the cost of missing quite a lot that’s plainly visible to everyone else.

There’s an adaptation of White Noise, the Don DeLillo novel, out in theaters right now. I took that as a good opportunity to reread it. I was captivated with the novel when I first read it in the ’90s. It’s obsessed with culture, specifically American culture, and all the nervous ticks and neuroses that made up life under Reagan in the midst of AIDS and the threat of nuclear annihilation. I read it just after those neuroses morphed into the threat of terrorism and gay marriage, and I’m reading it now when those neuroses have morphed again into the threat of refugees and globalism and trans people and surveillance capitalism. Every decade has its own airborne toxic event.

Reading the book, especially in the United States, you’re faced with the uncanny recognition of yourself; the book invites you to gawk at the shallow consumerism of its characters while forcing you to recognize the parallels between you and them. Returning to it now I feel much more of an outsider. I remember being that way, once, but I don’t recognize myself in it any longer. It’s like stumbling upon an old photograph, surrounded by friends you haven’t given a thought to in ages. You can’t really be convinced you were ever so young or naïve.

Every historical era has what one theorist has called a “structure of feeling,” a manner in which the inhabitants of that era understand what’s happening to them. White Noise is obsessed with that preternaturally anxious, jittery wavelength most everyone in the United States seems to have been tuned to for the past half-century, that odd mix of triumphant jingoism underpinned by the incessant fear the empire is constantly slipping away.

But I was only ever half-listening. And having been away for so long, I’m afraid I couldn’t tune back in if I wanted to. There’s too much interference out there. From here on out, I guess I’m going to be on my own.

I get the sense, most of the time, that I’m boring. I should be interesting, I think. I’ve changed my life in part because it felt boring, and started living it in a way that lets me see and do amazing things almost as an afterthought. But I never get the sense that I’m able to communicate that to anybody. Whenever people ask me about where I’ve been and what it’s like, I get this uncanny feeling of being Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner:

• Them: So, what’s the best place you’ve ever been?
• Me: I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
• Them: Sounds cool. I bet all those hotels get pretty expensive, huh?

It’s disappointing for someone who talks as much as I do to feel I’m just not expressing it effectively. Maybe it’s altogether a fool’s errand. How do you describe breathtaking beauty, or the grand scope of thousands of years of history? The taste of a fruit you never even realized existed? A sudden transcendent moment of insight? If you could, then what would the point of travel even be?

That’s okay. Maybe I’m not all that compelling. But if I had anything I wanted to pass on, any singular insight I could leave people with, it’s how devastatingly magnificent the world is. It is glorious and heart-breaking, from its mountain ranges to its primal forests, from rural towns to bustling metropolises. I know that’s trite and unoriginal, but it’s true. And I have trouble squaring it with all the problems the world has. I don’t know how you could see how beautiful and fragile Zion National Park is and still vote for doing nothing about global warming. Or Sub-Saharan Africa and come away without feeling the need to increase foreign aid and diplomatic engagement.

As I write this I’m wearing a Ukrainian T-shirt. It was a gift from a friend from Kyiv. I visited both Kyiv and Lviv in 2019, even toured the museum commemorating Ukraine’s role in World War II. At the time I visited the exhibits were being overhauled to recognize the ongoing Russian invasion; it’s always a little startling to remember Russia’s 2022 push was an escalation of an ongoing conflict. We want history to be neat and tidy, with precise start and end dates, but history rarely obliges.

I’m obviously not so foolish as to believe that the war could have been averted if only everyone involved had visited Odessa more often. Ideology, stupidity, and greed are always going to be with us. But even then I find myself wondering: if more of the EU and the UK and the US had visited like I did, seen the Saint Sophia Cathedral and went up to the top of the Motherland Memorial, strolled through the crowds in Rynok Square and sipped the cherry liquor, would things be different? If the world had taken it more seriously back in 2014, would we find ourselves in this situation now?

There’s a natural tendency for most people to support the status quo, even when that status quo directly harms them. Social psychologists call it System Justification Theory. It’s used to explain why some people denounce unions even as their benefits are being slashed, or why people on the lower economic rungs of society often loudly defend plutocrats. It’s hard to accept you’re implicated in a system that’s hurting you. Better to believe the system is fair, that the way you’re being treated is appropriate.

Travel has always felt like a way out of that bind, a window into a broader world of possibilities. There’s so much out there, so many things which confuse and confound our ideas of the way the things have to be. We’re not inevitably trapped by circumstance. Revolutions happen. Sometimes they even win.

I always time these summaries to go out around a holiday. Sometimes I have something to say and I look for a fitting holiday; sometimes I let the holiday influence what I write. This time it’s the latter; I know I want to write something before the end of the year and that always feels, to me, like Christmas. I’m one of the few people, it seems, for which Christmas is neither particularly religious nor particularly commercial. I can understand those for whom it is — it’s certainly promoted that way by a lot of powerful forces — but for me it’s always been resoundingly secular, a holiday about family, and fellowship, and hope.

I worry sometimes these dispatches seem depressed or bleak. People seem to think I’m endlessly critical or argumentative. Maybe I am. But I experience that as trying to be precise. The world is filled with cant and sophistry; I want to cut through that in both the way I think and the way I speak. I’m trying to see the world through clear eyes, and I guess that means I’m always in the process of being disillusioned.

But in the spirit of this holiday season, let me end with a couple stories of hope. The first comes from Slouching Towards Utopia, Brad DeLong’s economic history of the 20^th century. DeLong points out that up until about 1870, virtually every technological advance was swallowed up by population growth. The vast majority of the world’s population toiled in horrific poverty. Malthus, writing in 1798, was basically right. Food production grew slowly, the population grew quickly, and humanity was doomed to always scrape along that bound with starvation and disease and infant mortality keeping the world in check.

But in 1870, something miraculous happened. Economic output became unfettered. For the next century and a half, our technological advances far outpaced our population growth. We have enough food to feed everyone. We can provide safe, comfortable shelter for all. We have enough clothing to clothe the world, multiple times over. Before 1870 there simply wasn’t enough of anything for everybody. Now there is.

It’s difficult to understate how unprecedented this change is. Nothing like it has ever happened in the history of humanity. This is new. This is extraordinary.

All that is to say we have reached the gates of paradise. Our problems are no longer inevitable, forged in the inexorable math of too few calories and too many hungry mouths. From now on our problems are all self-inflicted. They’re problems of unequal distribution, of greed and short-sightedness, failures of logistics and imagination. Those are difficult, intractable problems, but they aren’t impossible. There is no longer an angel wielding a burning sword guarding the promised land. There’s only us.

The second story I want to share with you is a small anecdote from my travels. There’s a kind of soup in Morocco called bessara, a rich, lightly spiced bean broth seasoned with garlic, cumin, olive oil, and paprika. It’s thick enough to scoop out of the bowl with bread, but not so thick you couldn’t ladle it into the bowl in the first place. It’s a comfort food, commonly sold by street vendors.

I had visited Chefchouen, a small village renowned for the brilliant blues of its old town. It’s an utterly enchanting place to visit, the sort of place where you can plunge into the medina and stumble endlessly upon photogenic souks and markets and storefronts. And while you wander you might pass a small unmarked restaurant, barely two tables and a couple of chairs. It had been recommended to me so I sought it out, and by the time I arrived it was late afternoon. The owner was sitting in the tiny kitchen, reading the Koran, a huge pot of bessara bubbling away on the stove. There was no menu and no need for one; the only things you can order are the soup and a mint tea. I ordered the soup.

It was good soup, served with a fresh, crusty side of bread, alongside a shaker of black pepper and a shaker of cumin. I’d say it was great soup but of course it’s not supposed to be, it’s supposed to be hot and comforting and filling and taste like home. It warmed me up on a rainy December day. It did taste like home, even if I had never tasted it before.

That was weeks ago but I find myself thinking about it still. For everything I’ve seen and everything I’ve done, it’s the smallest moments that stick with me. That’s what I’d like to leave you with, this holiday. A reminder that no matter how lost you are, how far you’ve wandered, or how cold and lonely you might feel, there will always be a place out there somewhere with a welcoming smile, a comfortable chair, and a warm and nourishing bowl of soup.

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