Traveling, Thinking, and Thinking About Traveling

Turns out, I'm not actually nomadic by temperament

Yesterday, on the flight home to Seattle from Edge Esmeralda, I had my first proper brainstorm in nearly six months, as in a natural flood of usefully coherent unstructured thoughts that I was able to capture on paper. As is often the case with proper brainstorms, I was in a slightly tired but relaxed mood. The reason for the tiredness was obvious, since I’d just been facilitating a week-long workshop, which is something like a 9-5 task and a month’s worth of social energy. The sort of normie duty cycle I’ve never been able to sustain for long. But the relaxed part was interesting. I realized I hadn’t been in a properly relaxed mental state for nearly 8 months.

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The Contraptions Book club June pick is Monkey King/Journey to the West (pick either the Lovell or Jenner edition). We will discuss this week of the 23rd.

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The culprit is travel. I’ve been on 8 work trips in the last year, including three longer international trips (one of which was a month-long round-the-world trip). The longest I’ve been home continuously was last summer, July-October. I don’t think I’ve ever logged this many miles in a single year. I think 2009 and 2004 perhaps had as many trips, but I wasn’t logging so many miles or so much time away.

Though I’ve been a very frequent mover (23 apartments in 10 cities in 28 years), and have had a few intense corporate-style globetrotting travel years, I’ve never been a proper digital nomad, working as a seasonal transient out of temporary accommodations. The closest I’ve come has been one long road trip of about 6-7 weeks in 2011, when I moved from DC to Seattle and made a book tour of it. But I wouldn’t call that a proper nomad phase, since I was basically funemployed, having just quit Xerox, and not yet found gainful gig work. I think the best description of my lifestyle history is slow drifter with bursts of jet-setting every few years.

Looking back on my mental state in the last year, I think I need to be in homebody state to do meaningfully creative work, in my native INTP mode. Too-frequent or too-intense travel seems to switch me into a more stressed-out and non-native ENTJ mode, where I’m much less effective. And when I think of people I know who seem to thrive on intense travel, and do some of their best thinking while in constant motion, I’d say they’re all native INTJ/ENTJ/ESTJ types, and usually at a level where it is all business-class/five-star with a support staff. Or if you don’t like Myers-Briggs shorthand, my native mode is low executive function idle dreamer mode, and travel forces me into high executive function operator mode. A mode in which I’m both less effective, and less energy-efficient. I find intense travel mostly draining. And there are second-order effects, like my diet and exercise routines (which are fragile even at their most stable), falling apart.

Unlike the high executive function operators, who seem to thrive on all this action even into their 70s and 80s, and enjoy building robustly optimized mobile lifestyles (they seem to eat and exercise better on the road than I can manage even at home), travel of significant duration/intensity turns me into a rolling trainwreck by the end of week 1.

So I suspect my state of brainstorm-friendly relaxation on the flight home had to do with the fact that I have no travel planned for the next 4-5 months at least 🤞. I think my brain went into “native mode” in anticipation.

I think my ideal lifestyle is actually staying put in one pleasant city, taking occasional road trips to nearby coastal or mountain vacation spots (2-4 hours drive away), especially in the off-season/shoulder-season, with perhaps one proper long-distance vacation to a stimulating new place every year or two. And though I enjoy meeting visitors, I don’t even like driving out locally to meet people, so where possible I get them to meet me somewhere I can walk to.

When I’ve managed to approximate that condition for a few years, I’ve been at my most creative and productive. While I can be productive on the road, if I’ve planned well, I can’t say I’m ever very creative on the road. In fact, I don’t think I’ve written a single exceptional blog post or essay on the road.

Not that I’m complaining, but for much of the last couple of decades, my actual movement pattern has been far from what I now understand to be the ideal one for my temperament. My wife and I have moved states/cities/apartments a lot not because we particularly like boxing and unboxing our lives, but because school/jobs took us to various places, and until we landed in Seattle in 2012, we never quite found a fit in a place we both liked enough to want to stay put (my wife likes LA, where we spent 2019-23, more, but I like it sufficiently less that Seattle is a better compromise). We’ve been now trying to buy a house for the first time here for nearly two years, and doing very badly in our search, thanks to developing an itch to settle down in the worst housing market in decades. So I don’t know if we’re actually done moving so much, but we’re certainly trying to be done. I don’t relish the prospect of getting into a 30-year mortgage at age 50, but oh well.

I didn’t think I’d end up in this curious situation. Nearly 10 years ago, my wife and I made an informal deal that when our aging cat died, we’d go nomadic and try to live pet-free around the world for a while, but by the time that actually happened, we’d both lost our imagined appetite for that lifestyle (thanks in part to the potent combination of Trump, Covid, and middle age), and found ourselves wanting to double down on the cat-owning settled lifestyle in a familiar city we both liked.

Looking back, my wanderlust through my 20s and 30s had more to do with cultural and geographic curiosity (the travel being a necessary means) than any actual nomadic tendencies. Having recently done a deep dive into the history of nomadic cultures, I realize I’m decidedly not a nomad, temperamentally. The nomadic lifestyle selects strongly for high-executive function operator mode and practicality. With or without barbarian conquerer warrior-poet sensibilities (poetry/music, I suspect, are the most natural nomadic art forms, neither of which I have much taste or talent for). I’ve flirted occasionally with the minimalist lifestyle, especially when it comes to books (we rarely buy paper books anymore, and our collection is now down to perhaps 10-15 boxes, down from a peak of about 25). But I now realize this has less to do with minimalist tastes — in fact I’d like a mansion with a large library and workshop — and more to do with the logistical annoyances and financial constraints of the actual life I ended up with. If I ever manage to buy a house mansion, I suspect I’ll start collecting more paper books again. Project Mansion though, appears to be dead in the water at the moment.

Mobility and cognition have a very subtle relationship, and one that changes quite a bit with age. I think if I ever crunch the data, I will find that my best writing probably corresponds to my longer stay-at-home stretches. I think I need to have a sense of at least 3-4 months of travel-free equilibrium ahead of me to get into my best native thinking mode. Currently, that’s not easy, since between my two main gigs (running Summer of Protocols, and consulting for TensTorrent), I end up having to do at least half a dozen domestic and international trips a year. Plus, aging parents call for more frequent India trips (3 in the last 12 months). It is worth noting that 80% of my travel is to relatively predictable places — Bay Area, Austin, Toronto, Coimbatore, Singapore. Which means it’s generally not particularly new or stimulating. Which adds to the general stress level.

There is a curious aging-related effect here. Stimulating new places can at least temporarily trigger my native relaxed INTP mode, since there’s lots of new stuff to take in and theorize. But as you log a lot of travel over a lifetime, the proportion of new places in your itineraries drops. In the last couple of years, I found the relaxing new-place headspace only once, in Istanbul in 2023, the only destination I hadn’t already been to. The previous time I found that headspace was Newcastle/Northumberland in 2018.

It’s surprising how long the been-there effect lasts for me. I went to Chiang Mai and Bangkok last year, and I was last in those cities in 2008. But apparently that’s still recent enough that I didn’t get the jolt of new-place energy.

It’s a bit sad. There are many more places I’d like to go that I think I’d find stimulating, but the state of the world, and the constraints of my personal life, don’t favor that. Two of my bucket-list regions, Russia and Iran-Iraq, are probably off limits for the next few decades. China, I still hope to visit. I also have all of Africa and Australia (but to be honest, neither is high on my list, since they’re off the main course of world history). I’ll likely go to Argentina in November. That’s never been on my list either, but perhaps I’ll be surprised by it.

It’s good to finally understand my native mobility-cognition tension and travel temperament at age 50, so I can begin to design the latter decades of my life around it.

My current idea for the future is to try and cluster my travel into two daisy-chained continuous bursts in spring and fall, and try to make one or both friendly to India detours. And hit at least one stimulating new place every year or two. That way, I can expect to have two 4-5 month at-home stretches every year, manage the practical work-travel and eldercare needs, and perhaps finally make Project Mansion happen.