How do you live a good life?

This seems like the appropriate time to take stock in how I’m doing, overall, since I started traveling. And, I mean, I’m doing fine. I suppose people want to me to say I’m doing amazingly well, that traveling the world is breathtaking and exciting and endlessly invigorating, that I’m greeting each sunrise in a new location and living life to the fullest.

Let’s be honest, that was never going to be me. I’m moody, if not downright melancholic. Traveling doesn’t change that. I think the natural tendency on vacation is to push yourself if you’re feeling out-of-it, to take advantage of the places you’re visiting while you can, and to crash and recover when you arrive home. That’s always nagging at me. But without a home, if I keep pushing myself, I’ll never get a chance to recover.

Since I flew to London in August, I’ve traveled 45,063 km, changed cities 30 times, been to 13 countries, attended 5 larps, and stayed with friends 6 times. If you include the travel I did the first half of the year, that distance jumps to 85,684 km. It’s been a lot.

The strange thing is it hasn’t felt all that hectic. Partially because I’m getting pretty good at planning my itinerary and booking flights and hotels. But I think the bigger part is a psychological trick your mind plays on you. People are pretty bad at tracking time, as the the perennial popularity of the “It’s been over 20 years since the first Harry Potter book was published! You’re old now!” style of meme suggests. When we think back, one of the ways we figure out how much time has passed is how much we remember happening in between.

It’s a bit of a paradox. When you’re bored, time seems to pass slowly. But if you think back later, it feels like it passed in a heartbeat — being bored just isn’t memorable. The life I’m living now is far more indelible than when I was mostly just going to work and coming home in New York, and so when I think about it, it feels like I’ve been doing this for years.

So that’s one interesting effect. I presume I still get the same amount of life as before. But it certainly feels like I’m going to be living longer, just because there’s going to be so much more to remember.

I suppose the cliché is to say I’m traveling to find myself. I don’t like that idea. You’re already there, for one thing, and if you don’t know how to look for yourself I’m not sure being in Paris is going to help. I’m also trying to stay as far away from American politics as I can get, which feels less like discovery than escape.

But there is an interesting psychological underpinning to the idea that you discover things about yourself in strange settings. Consider the Capilano Suspension Bridge study. The Capilano Suspension bridge is long, and would hang about shoulder-height on the Statue of Liberty if she were standing in the Capilano river in Vancouver. Being a suspension bridge, it has a tendency to move and sway as people walk across it. It can be terrifying.

In 1974, two psychologists named Art Aron and Donald Dutton hired a female researcher to stand in the center of the bridge (or, alternatively, on a similar bridge firmly planted only a few feet off the ground). She would approach men and ask them to fill out a questionnaire, and after they did she scribbled her phone number down on a piece of paper and told them to call her if they were interested in the results of the study. Half of the men approached on the Capilano bridge called, compared to about ⅛ of the men approached on the fixed bridge. Aron and Dutton explained this difference by saying that the men who were approached on the suspension bridge were already agitated — they were breathing heavily and had their heart rate pumping — and thought it was because they were romantically interested in the researcher rather than the effect of the bridge.

This effect is broadly known as the “Two-Factor Theory of Emotion,” and it’s been demonstrated in a number of contexts. We tend to think we experience emotion in a straightforward way: you see something, you experience an emotion, and you have an emotional reaction. There’s lots of evidence it doesn’t work that way, at least not all the time. More often you see something, it provokes an emotional reaction in you, and then you have to figure out what emotion you’re experiencing. Sometimes you decide you’re terrified, sometimes you decide you’re in love. It’s usually all of the above.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the purpose of life, about what it means to live “a good life.” I’m not just talking about living a moral life, or a pleasant one, but something more akin to a meaningful one, a life worth living. Not surprisingly, a lot of philosophers have a lot to say about that question, and so I’ve been reading a moderate amount of philosophy.

One of the things I keep thinking about is Susan Wolf’s formulation in her book Meaning in Life and Why It Matters that “meaning arises when subjective attraction means objective attractiveness.” In other words, in order to live a meaningful life you need to both be doing something worthwhile (objective attractiveness) and you need to find it personally rewarding (subjective attraction). That feels intuitively right to me.

So am I living a good life? I’m not sure. Honestly, I’m not even sure you’re supposed to be able to answer the question. If I ever thought the answer was clearly yes, I’d have to wonder if there wasn’t something I was overlooking, some way to do more with the time I’ve been granted. And if the answer was clearly no, well, what would I be waiting for?

Is all this travel rewarding? Yes, if not unambiguously. There’s a lot of planning, of researching visas, of booking travel, of worrying about my passport and paying usurious prices on replacement USB cables at the airport. But just within the last month I’ve been able to watch the sun rise over Turkey and set over England, I’ve gotten reasonably drunk in pubs in Dublin and reasonably drunk at Christmas Markets in Berlin, toured the ruins of 3,000-year-old cities and been to the top of the London Eye. That’s pretty amazing.

Is this life worthwhile, though? That’s a harder question. Truthfully, I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll ever know. But I suppose that’s what we get, at best. An opportunity to try and find out.

So that’s my plan for 2019. Keep travelling. Visit more places. Make new friends. See old ones. Try and understand more about the world, and more about myself. Try to be a slightly better person, every day I wake up, just taking it all one step at a time.

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