I left the United States over three years ago. In the very first entry of this travelogue I said I was terrified. It was true. It still is, a bit. The reasons at the start were more quotidian and inchoate than now — the stress of planning, complicated scheduling, worries about passport controls and border crossings, the omnipresent fear of the unknown — but it was still frightening for all its vagary. Not so frightening that I didn’t start; I still believe if how you’re living isn’t at least a little bit scary you’re not dreaming big enough. But it was frightening enough.

Most of those early concerns have faded. I know how to navigate the medical bureaucracy in at least a dozen countries. Immigration officials are far more often perfunctory than vigilant, at least if you present an American passport. Even finding safe places to stay is pretty easy; I’ve been steadily building a network of friends to drop in on when I can and connect with online when I can’t. And I’ve survived far, far longer alone than I ever want to again but emerged intact, if not unscathed.

But for all that, the past eighteen months have brought a whole host of fresh terrors to the foreground. Fears about being trapped somewhere, or alternatively being forced to leave. Fears of revolutions, of fascism and domestic terrorism, of refugee crises and food scarcity and climate change triggering floods and wildfires and droughts.

And then there’s the newly relevant fear of plague. For all that it seemed to be receding in northern Europe, my recent travels through the United States have reminded me for most of the world it’s still an ever-present reality. I haven’t personally lost anyone to COVID-19 but I have too many friends who did, who said goodbye to parents and grandparents and siblings over video chat, who never had the chance to hug their loved ones last time or hold their hand as they passed. The vaccines are mercifully putting an end to most of that, at least for the circles I travel in, but even then the continued worldwide shortfalls of vaccines and a vocal fringe of resisters threaten to unleash a new variant, throwing us right back to where we were a year ago. There are still enough surges and enough superspreader events to keep the fear of the disease always lurking at the back of my mind, even in places that have otherwise rescinded all their restrictions. We’re a long way from normalcy.

It’s Halloween, so I suppose it’s only natural that I find these kinds of thoughts coming to mind. Halloween is traditionally a time to remember the dead, bordering All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. It is a time of transition, straddling the harvest and the coming winter, and it’s often considered a time when the divisions between the living and the dead blur. We’ll know over the next few months which countries are prepared for our second winter of COVID and which ones aren’t, whether the tentative reopenings of clubs and concerts and conventions for most of us are a temporary reprieve or a genuine pardon. I’ve resumed my travels, feeling my way through the restrictions and the regulations, hopeful I can keep going. And if I can’t? I’ll figure it out when I get there.

At the moment, I’m still traveling around the United States. I was last here for Christmas nearly two years ago. I had no idea at the time it would be late 2021 before I’d have a chance to return, that every plan I made shortly after New Year’s would be canceled two or three or four times, that I’d be grounded for 12 months running. I’d have done something more to commemorate the occasion, had I known.

I should feel more relaxed, being here — this is one of the few places I literally can’t get kicked out for overstaying a visa or crossing some immigration official on a bad day — but the politics of the place aren’t any better than when I first left. I’ve been visiting friends in overwhelmingly liberal corners of the USA: New York City, San Francisco, and Portland. And the sense I get from my friends is one of helplessness. It’s not that the politics in Washington are irrelevant to their day-to-day lives. If anything, it feels relevant in ways it hasn’t for years. But it’s not at all clear what you could possibly do to have a meaningful voice in those politics.

I voted in Ohio, and not a single vote I cast had any effect on the US government. Not a single congressional race in Ohio had less than a 7% margin. My candidate for the House of Representatives lost with over a 26% margin and only 4 of the 16 districts had closer than 15%. Biden lost by about 500,000 votes. It cost me about $15 in postage and envelopes and the like to mail my ballot from overseas, not even considering the couple hours of work I spent downloading and printing and filling out and sending it. I can think of hundreds of better ways I could have spent that time and energy.

Representative democracy has always had a bit of that paradox built into it. The likelihood that any individual vote has any effect whatsoever is fantastically small so you need to put an awful lot of faith into platitudes about civic duty and how everyone’s vote counts to make it worthwhile. But with The Big Sort and gerrymandering and increased partisanship and growing voting restrictions it’s harder and harder to make that a convincing argument. Maybe the biggest reason is just the United States is so much larger than it used to be. The framers of the Constitution thought one Representative for every 30,000 people sounded about right. There’s currently one for every 767,000 people.

But if you feel voting doesn’t give you a voice in politics all your other options require far more time and energy for even less concrete results. It seems everyone I know is exhausted, either from their jobs or health issues or raising children. The people who have the free time to devote to activism are not surprisingly the people who don’t need to work for a living. And if you don’t need to work for a living, chances are you’ve got enough money to make your voice heard anyway.

I don’t know what to do about that. I’ve got plenty of ideas of what you could do about it, but it’s hard to imagine a realistic path from the present state of affairs to any of those things. Maybe the Democrats will manage to scrape together and pass a voting reform bill which fixes a few of the issues. Maybe the Republicans will overstep their bounds sufficiently that a backlash finally manifests. Maybe continuing demographic shifts will force enough of a turnover in the government to get us past the current logjams.

For most of my friends they feel like their only option is to hope for the best. Maybe you can turn out for a protest here and there, although it doesn’t feel like all the activism around Black Lives Matter turned into anything tangible. You can call your congressperson or donate to the PAC of your choice. But most people are resigned to riding it out.

I’m an exception. I know enough American expats to know I’m far from the only one. But I saw all this coming and realized I could simply leave. And so I did.

I am reminded every day by how extraordinarily lucky I am to be able to travel. It’s taxing, waking up someplace you’ve never been every week, but that constant undercurrent of surprise and delight is intoxicating. Virtually every week I get to venture someplace I’ve never been and gaze upon a city I’ve never seen. I have been exhausted and strung out, impatient and moody, jaded and depressed. But I have never been bored.

And I recognize the advantages I have which allow me to live like this, starting with being raised middle class in a rich nation. I didn’t pay for my education. I had access to technology at a young age and access to a career which rewarded that generously. I have never wanted for food or shelter or medical care. And because of my age and the way I look and the way I talk I am largely invisible to border control agents and police officers unless I choose to be seen.

These are all what you might call privileges. Most if not all are completely unearned — even if it’s possible to apply for citizenship, I was handed an American passport by the simple expedient of being born — and willfully divesting myself of most of them would range from challenging to impossible. Really, the best you’re generally going to be able to do is acknowledge them and try to work around their excesses when you can.

So while I don’t feel guilty for being white in a racist society — I didn’t get a choice, after all — that doesn’t prevent me from benefiting from being white in a racist society. I try to be aware of that. Likewise being male, or cis, or middle class. There’s no way to magically wash my hands clean from participating in a biased system; even moving deep into the mountains and surviving on grubs and tree bark means filing taxes once a year.

I had an acquaintance unfriend me over my semi-panicked refusal to return to the United States at the start of the pandemic. They saw it as an glaring case of exercising my privilege as a tourist to chauvinistically impose on another country — in this case Korea — and I understand their argument. I disagree with it, obviously, but they’ve got a point. Others aren’t in a position to make the choices I can. But my reluctance to return was never strictly practical; one of the reasons I left New York in 2018 was my friends were starting to get hassled by ICE and I didn’t want to live in a country where that was happening to them but not to me, to be part of a system that let that happen. And maybe all I’ve done by leaving is trade one set of privileges for another set.

All this is to say that there’s a moral cost to travel, one that I’m acutely aware of. Every hotel I choose is to some degree driving up market rates for renters, every transatlantic flight dumps another half-ton of CO₂ into the atmosphere. I can feel the weight of my decisions rippling outwards, whether I choose to pay attention or not. Most of my choices are constrained by forces much larger than I am. I’m reminded of Allen Ginsberg’s restatement of the laws of thermodynamics: you can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t opt out of the game.

A lot of people criticize travel as a luxury. And I suppose for most people it is, if what you mean by luxury is an unnecessary indulgence. I doubt anybody’s died because they couldn’t go to Ibiza on holiday. But by that same definition, a comfortable bed is a luxury. A fresh-baked cinnamon roll or slice of apple pie is a luxury. Movies and television shows are luxuries. Anything that brings you joy, whether that’s visiting friends or eating ice cream or putting on headphones and listening to your favorite album when you’re depressed can be considered a luxury. Missing it won’t kill you. But going without any of them for too long could very well make you wish you were dead.

The world might be a better place if we all chose to spend our lives meditating on pillars in the desert. But for most of us, that life would be impossibly barren. We need luxuries, if only small ones, to survive. For some of us that’s a cup of strong coffee in the morning or a glass of single malt before bed. For some of us it’s walks on the beach or through the forest. For some of us it’s ballet, or mountain climbing, or golf, or comic conventions.

During the lockdowns I discovered one of those, for me, was travel. I can do without, if I need to. But it impoverishes my soul to get locked down somewhere. I wasn’t always like this. I suppose it’s entirely possible I’ll reach some milestone and suddenly be content settling down somewhere for years rather than days. For now, though, there’s a part of me that needs to keep moving. So I’m mindful of my privilege, of the larger implications of my choices. I try to minimize the negative effects. I accept that every decision I make is open to criticism. I’m doing my best.

I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning while I was in lockdown. Frankl was a psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor who founded a type of therapy he called logotherapy. For him, life wasn’t about seeking pleasure and denying death as Freud would have it, but about finding purpose in what you were doing. Maybe your purpose is charity. Maybe it’s academics or public service. Maybe it’s love. But it needs to be yours, and you need to believe in it. You have to live for something.

Frankl was an existentialist but not an absurdist. He didn’t believe life was inherently meaningless. But he did think its meaning was highly contingent. Individualized, even. Much like a book, different people can have vastly different ideas about what life means without any of them being wrong. And that meaning can change day to day, even moment to moment. Your life unfolds as a story that never stops being told until you die. Just as your understanding of a story changes as you read it, your understanding of your life changes as you live it.

For him, this means you need to approach life with an attitude he called “Tragic Optimism.” Anyone who survived the death camps of Nazi Germany understood the worst that humanity could do to one another. But Frankl also recognized that even then, we still get to choose how to react to it. We may be sick or dying, we may be imprisoned or abused or suffering, we may be forced to forego shelter or food or heat. That doesn’t rob us of our inherent dignity, our sovereign power to decide for ourselves how to make sense of each and every moment.

Frankl has written that tragic optimism is about “saying yes to life in spite of everything.” It’s about recognizing the limits of our ability to control things, of acknowledging and accepting the horrors of the world, and still remaining open to the wonder and the beauty of life. We can — and should — strive for the best in ourselves without falling into despair when we come up short.

It’s easy to lose track of this when you get busy or overwhelmed with work or errands or depression — having a space to be mindful can itself be a kind of luxury — but I’m trying to integrate the principles into my day-to-day life and make them second nature. There are many different things we can find meaningful in our lives, whether that’s creating something or trying something new, experiencing something or spending time with someone, or even just meditating and learning from the inevitable suffering we all go through.

I decided a while ago I was going to live every day as if it might be my last. Not to live every day as if it were my last; I’d be burned out on coal-fired pizza, lavish cocktail parties, and impossibly perfect sunsets within a week. But I want to live each day so that at the end of it, if I were to discover that was my last day, I’d be okay with it. Maybe it’s a rainy day in bed finally binge-watching a show I’ve been saving. Maybe it’s wandering through a street festival in a city I’ve never been before. Maybe it’s an afternoon reading in a public park and eating two eclairs in place of dinner.

What it’s not is the default settings, killing time waiting for something to happen. I want to be constantly in motion, if not physically then mentally and spiritually. Every day is an opportunity to be a little bit better, to learn a little bit more, to be more generous and more open-hearted and to grow ever closer to my ideals. I’m not all that great at it. But every day is another chance to improve at that, as well.

My mother died shortly before Halloween, in the late ’90s. I think it was 1997 or 1998. I can’t remember clearly; I could trivially look it up but somehow I’m comforted in not being sure, like the uncertainty might mean there’s a possibility she’s still here. I don’t recommend losing anyone you love right before a holiday celebrated with skulls and tombstones and coffins, as you’ll be forced to revisit it year after year after year.

She had been sick for a while. She was diagnosed with cancer while I was in college, and it had been treated and gone into remission for a few years only to return having metastasized at some point. Breast cancer has pretty good survival rates. Bone cancer does not. By then it was mostly about accepting the inevitable, not that I understood that at the time. My mother insisted on keeping the worst of it from us. So from my point of view she was vaguely ill for a long time then suddenly at death’s door; there was a health scare midsummer and three months later I was in Cleveland for the memorial service.

I didn’t know how to deal with any of this, so I largely didn’t. I went immediately back to work. I was self-reflective enough to notice aftereffects — I spent a lot of first dates talking about my dead mother, which is probably why I didn’t go on a lot of second dates around that time — but I mostly ignored it. To this day it feels like a broken arm that never set quite right. I’m fine with it. It’s fine. But the oddest things can still trigger a brief spasm of grief, like a glimpse of her handwriting or hearing someone who sounds similar to her. It’s the same way seeing a kitchen knife you cut yourself on can cause your hand to spasm, the sympathetic magic of the universe working to bind all things together.

It was the first clear understanding I had from the cosmos that at a fundamental level everything was not going to turn out all right. The world will not be bound by any rules of justice or logic or fairness; the only way to avoid eventually losing everyone you care about is through the simple expedient of leaving first. I’ve been wary since then. I’ve always been a little guarded, and my social anxiety makes me less outgoing than I’d care to be most of the time. But even then, even if we’ve gone from strangers to acquaintances and from acquaintances to friends, I’m reluctant to put too much weight on the relationship. I truly cherish all the friendships I have. But I never expect them to last.

I don’t mean to seem morbid or depressing. Victor Frankl would argue we can view death as a kind of gift, investing each moment of our lives with meaning and depth by virtue of its transience. And living in fear of that loss is ultimately a way to rob the moments we can share of their enchantment. We are granted a single life to do with what we would; I’ve chosen for the time being to fling myself near and far across the globe, to see things I’ve never seen and try to grasp the vastness of the world and the fragility of our connections across it.

I guess the only thing that really terrifies me anymore is time. I’ve often wished I could talk with my mother one more time, to get her perspective on how I was living and what I’ve been able to do. She shows up occasionally in my dreams, less and less often as time goes on, but I never seem to have a chance to speak. The scene shifts and dissolves just as I’m about to ask a question. Time moves on whether we’re ready or not; I could live for another century and still feel there were things I wanted to do and opportunities I squandered thoughtlessly.

But I guess I’m ready to let go of that, as well. The world can be a terrifying place, but it won’t last. We know at least that much. Things will change and we will change along with them, losing some acquaintances and gaining new ones, avoiding some tragedies and running headlong into others, muddling through as best we can. My expectations are smaller than they used to be, my ambitions a little less grand and a little more manageable: more time with friends, less time alone, a snug hotel room with decent water pressure, a warm comforter, and an outlet near the headboard.

Life’s simply too short to live in fear. I may be more cynical and pessimistic than I used to be. But I’m keeping my hopes as high as they’ve ever been. That may be a foolish decision, but at least it’s a knowing one. And besides, what choice do we have?

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