I met a solo traveler waiting for the airport bus in Thailand, and the next week we did a road trip across the country and back together. I met a solo traveler in Hungary on the train that needed accommodation, so they stayed in my living room and we spent a few days traveling. I met a solo traveler in Italy, and the following week we decided to hitchhike to various coastal cities. Their "selfish pursuit" brought me all sorts of value.
It just isn’t an enlightened pursuit. If you want to escape life as a corporate drone or whatever running away isn’t the answer.
'Escape' and 'running away' are roughly synonymous.
What other escapes do you prefer?
You can leave an unfulfilling job for another form of responsibility in life that is more fulfilling.
Endless travel is really just life without responsibility. Having zero responsibility actually does not make most people happy in the long term. It’s an unnatural human state, particularly for grown men, and most will wake up eventually (perhaps once it’s too late) and realize there’s nothing enlightening about a life lived that way.
A lot of us think it’s time to design new values and beliefs.
But many (most?) self-fund their ongoing travel, whether through odd jobs while traveling, savings from a previous stable employment, or "digital nomad" work on the road[1]. In that sense, they're just shifting a portion of their contributions from time period B to time period A, in the same way that spending during retirement works. I don't see how this can be described as "feel[ing] no shared responsibility to contribute to society" any more than someone who spreads their contributions more evenly over time: it's just describing the use of money as a store of value.
I definitely would be happier if i had more free time. But my feeling is that i would also be a more productive member of society. At the very least i know i would engage more in the community. I am currently on day 5 of 12 days annual leave, and i am only just getting to the point where i feel i have the energy to venture out of my apartment. Surely this isn't the most efficient way to "contribute to society"?
One of the things i like best about traveling is that i have the time and mental energy to engage with the people around me. I eat at restaurants, i go to bars, i listen and share stories, i'll contribute to the local economy and perhaps put a smile on someone's face.
When i am working i suppose you could say i am contributing to society, in the sense that i am helping to build some software that performs a function our customers appreciate. But most of our customers don't live in my community. And even if they did, i'm not really employed to serve those customers, i'm employed to increase growth so that the company will make more money for its investors. Trickle-down theory says that's still a net contribution to society, but it feels very abstract to me.
Meanwhile, when i work i am too exhausted to spend any of the money i earn doing those things that i would when i travel - i don't spend money at local businesses, i don't talk to other people in the community, i just go home and sleep and go back to work again. It's the life most of us are forced into to survive, but i wouldn't really call it contributing to society, or at least not in as direct a way that people do when traveling.