There are actually many reasons why people choose to travel, to leave their home in search of new places and experiences. People have been traveling for centuries and centuries in turn, and while their reasons for traveling might have changed over time, the most important of them have remained unchanged. Many of us feel the need to travel but do not have an underlying reason behind this urge to leave. Most of the times, there is a combination of reasons behind the need to travel, wanting to discover new places, to meet new people and know new things, to discover themselves along the way, maybe to relax a little or evade daily life.
TO DISCOVER
The initial motivation behind travel, the reason why the first people left to travel at the beginning of this human activity is to discover. Discovering new places is essential for the majority of people when they think to travel. The destination of the journey is one of the central points behind modern tourism, with every attraction, village, city, area or country, no matter how small or big, trying to create a unique touristic image, with the only purpose of attracting more people to discover it. The attraction seems higher for more distant and different places. Of course, other factors like time, budget or accessibility can come into play, but most of us are attracted to new and unusual places.
TO KNOW
Although this was one of the primordial reasons behind people traveling, in today’s world, less and fewer people choose to travel in order to know new things and new people. The need for knowledge once represented one of those essential directions in the life of every human, but along the centuries, this has lost its value and meaning for many. Many people travel today without knowing that they are being driven to travel by their thirst for knowledge. Visiting museums or cultural destinations, meeting new people and fascinating cultures, we increase our level knowledge, even without knowing it, and this thing makes us want to know more, realizing how little we know and how much we could learn by traveling.
TO KNOW THEM
Some people do not only travel in order to know other people and discover new things, they travel in order to better know themselves, to find a purpose in their life. While not many have the opportunity to do this, there are those that really seek to better their life through traveling and adding new experiences. By doing new things, meeting new people and cultures, discovering new places, meditating and relaxing, some people gain a new understanding of life, reaching a higher level of self-awareness.
TO RELAX
The modern civilization does not leave much time for relaxation and recovery to people, training them to live in a rhythm that sometimes is suffocating, people yearning for some moments of calm and silence. How many of us often feel the need to leave everything aside and detach from all problems and daily routine in order to be able to continue. One of the best methods to relax and regenerate our mental or physical health is to travel and this has been for a long time, but in the world, we live today, a world of speed and the constant struggle to reach higher ideals that always seem farther away.
TO EVADE
Evading from daily life and routine is one of the most common underlying reasons behind people traveling, even if few of us can admit to it. How many of us have felt the need to leave everything behind and evade to some unknown place after a tough day at work? Many people feel the urgent need to leave the crowded city, full of noise, lights, and pollution, evading for a day of complete evasion far away. Believe it or not, many people feel this way and this makes them travel a lot more often than other reasons.
TO BE IN TREND
Unfortunately, more and more people travel because this has become a trademark of their level of life. When seeing their neighbors traveling to a certain destination and their colleagues to another, more and more people choose to travel to an even more expensive destination in order to simply make a statement and not to discover or know more. The tourist destinations grow and decline in the tourist preferences at the speed of the currency rate.
This film is exploring the question ‘Why do people travel’? As a traveler myself I had trouble answering this question, so I got the idea to ask travelers this question and others that would get to the heart of this motivation. I interviewed 21 travelers from different countries.
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