Alter-Nomad: Why We Travel

Encountering travelers is part of traveling. Travel is full of repetition. People travel to the same places. Few innovate. Whenever I meet someone similar on the road, I never fail to ask the same question: Why do you travel? And I’m always surprised to find that most individuals do not travel for a reason. Backpackers looking for meaning, tourists passing time… they are legion. The more I travel, the more I find that travelers follow the same pattern, some sort of hero journey.

The monomyth, also known as the Hero’s journey, is a fascinating concept in narratology popularized by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949): “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” This pattern can be found in most tales depicting the adventures of a hero. In most religions too: all prophets went through a similar journey.

Carl Jung observes that symbols from the collective imaginary take a big part in the development of our subconsciousness. Heroism is no different. It is deeply ingrained in our psyche: “He is no hero who never met the dragon, or who, if he once saw it, declared afterwards that he saw nothing. Equally, only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard”. The Hero’s journey is still widely used in popular narratives — advertisement exulting the inner hero of the consumer, or the origin stories of famous entrepreneurs. We all aspire to be heroes, and I believe modern travel to be a path toward this aspiration, or sometimes, a substitute.

When people say they travel to find themselves, it means they want to change their own identity. Or maybe, find back their own identity. It is Oedipus’s travel: to seek the source of his evils to free himself from them. To find a local who knows us better than we do ourselves. To remember one’s own origins is to revert back to a fetal state without any need nor boredom, a pure state of bliss… However, most travelers I meet are more running away from things rather than finding them. They try to escape from responsibilities, or from themselves. Modern travel is deeply oedipal. Oedipus, destined to murder his father and marry his mother, escaped Corinth in an attempt to avoid his fate by traveling to Thebes, only fulfill the dreadful prophecy. There is a bit of tragedy in modern travels. A tendency for escapism which prevents sustainability. Oedipus used travel to run away from an immutable reality, his destiny. It was his curse, it shouldn’t be ours.

It’s always important to understand the reasons why we do things and if their pursuit is worth the time invested. Traveling should not be an excuse to avoid our issues, a substitute to deep internal introspection. Successful people who went through a hero journey are the ones who attained the treasure. The prize can take any shape, but it is up to us to find it. To do so, we have to go through every stage of this ultimate pursuit of self-discovery. Few are brave enough to set out on a quest for self-realization. You have to look out for the right opportunities, and dive in them. Go through every trial and tribulation with faith in oneself and others. Die. Resurrect. Reinvent yourself. Return. Share your treasure. Only by obtaining this new-found freedom can you face death with serenity. Some heroes face their fate willingly, while others are forced to embrace it. Achilles is a symbol of the former, while Ulysses represents the latter.

Epic journeys occupy a central place in Ancient Greece. The Iliad and the Odyssey are among the oldest texts of Western literature. As we established before, travel is cultural and its meaning varies over time and space, but the way Greeks perceive travel quite resonate with modern times.

Achilles is a fundamental aspect of the Greek notion of travel. When he left Phthia, the hero knew he was destined to die on the battlefield: “my nostos has perished, but my kleos will be unwilting”. Achilles renounced the comforts of his home and the instant gratification a life of material pleasures would have offered him. Instead, he traveled to Troyes to meet his fate: death, but glory (kleos). He never gets to come back home. The philosopher Diotima explains in Plato’s Symposium that people are driven by a search to reach some form of immortality. Sex, art, and most of our creative endeavors are an attempt at defying the bindings of time. Achilles’ desire for glory is so strong that it ends up costing his life. Achilles represents this idea of living a short existence filled with hardships to achieve glory, in contrast with a long and average happy life. Kleos means “what others hear about you”, your reputation. A Greek hero earns kleos through accomplishing great deeds, traveling being the mean. The most important aspect of Achilles’s character is not his search for glory. It is his ability to stay true to himself. I see Achilles knowing his fate as a metaphor for self-knowledge. He clearly understands what it is he needs to do to accomplish his authentic self. More than love or glory, Achilles seeks the truth, and for that, he has to go on a journey.

Odysseus, the main protagonist of the Odyssey, is a great example of the Nostos theme, a theme used in Greek literature depicting an epic hero returning home by the sea. The journey isn’t just a homecoming. It’s about how it changed the hero’s identity. The term Nostos would later bring out the expression Nostalgia, meaning the condition of longing for the past: Odysseus travels only to come back a better man, transitioning from a war machine to a family man after longing for his son and wife for years. Traveling as an apprenticeship, a rebirth to integrate more successfully into daily life. Unlike Achilles, Odysseus never sought glory. He didn’t want to leave Ithaca and has to suffer his fate instead of reaching out to it. But again, despite him unwilling to travel, he is compelled to it and ends up transformed. Consequently, we could formulate that the main characteristic of a fruitful traveling experience is that it is not sought out, but the byproduct of a higher motive. Travel becomes a tool to grow, to meet one’s destiny. This “Jungian” travel is a way to become a better individual, who benefits humanity as a whole. Changemakers go through a similar hero journey.