This Is Why I Love To Do This

by Mathieu Beth Tan

Man, I love to travel.

I really do.

But when I say I love to travel, I don’t mean it in the sense that you may be thinking about—like getting your bags checked in at the airport, staying in fancy hotels, or devouring your favourite cuisines, although those are all nice.

No, when I say I love to travel, what I mean is that I love planting myself in unfamiliar places because they come with the realisation that there are just so many things I have no knowledge about!

Did you know that in the Philippines there are groups of Indigenous people called the Aeta? That these communities trace their roots back as far as 30,000 years and are considered by many anthropologists to be among the earliest inhabitants of the archipelago? That they continue to face social marginalisation and constant threats from large corporations seeking to occupy their mineral-rich lands? Did you know that in Balinese tradition, whenever a piece of land is developed for residential or commercial use, a shrine must be built on it? That it is mandated by the belief that the land must be harmonised between the spiritual and mortal realms? That this isn't just a religious custom, but one that is also recognised by law?

And did you know that Koreans used to have two ways of counting age—traditional Korean age and internationally recognised age? I had my own fair share of confusion at our recent camp in Jeju, South Korea, because apparently, under the traditional system, a newborn was considered one year old at birth rather than zero.

Actually, you know what? Knowing these “facts” doesn’t matter. They don’t make me any smarter. They don’t make me any wealthier. And they certainly don’t make me better—in any sense of the word—than anyone else.

But it does bring to mind the Dunning-Kruger effect, the psychological phenomenon which suggests that people with limited knowledge of a subject often overestimate their understanding because they don’t know enough to recognise what they’re missing.

In other words, the more you know, the more you realise how much you don’t know.

That’s what travelling does to you. It offers a myriad of experiences that shape your perspective. It injects fresh and novel ideas into your mind as you explore the city. It forces you to question your own position in this world by providing you with a yardstick made from a different culture, a different belief system, a different way of life.

“Travel is not really about leaving our homes,” the great travel writer Pico Iyer said, “but leaving our habits,” to experience life outside our comfort zones.

Last month when I was in the Philippines for a humanitarian expedition into the mountains, I came into contact with one of the most destitute and marginalised communities of the country. A part of me was taken aback because it was so easy to assume that everyone has benefitted from modernity, and that the world is in a much better state than before, as global statistics have constantly argued. Yet, there I was, handing out bags of groceries and essentials (worth half a year of wages) to the Aeta, who, according to our local guide, could not afford—let alone have tasted before—a burger from Jollibee!

Which was why I wasn’t surprised when one of my companions asked me if I ever thought that these “poor and dishevelled” human beings were happy. A simple, honest question. But I could not answer truthfully because I could not speak on their behalf.

Part of the reason he asked that question, I suspect, was because he could not imagine himself living in such a condition. To wake up every day with no meaning or purpose other than to survive is something our city minds could not comprehend. In any case, we concluded that it was impossible to know for certain, and instead of searching for a definitive answer, accept the fact that reality is just different for everyone else.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that our way of life is how it’s supposed to be. I’m guilty of this. One example is whenever things are not moving at the speed I’m used to, I catch myself thinking, why can’t they be a little more efficient at this? In my country, this is how it’s done, and it works well. You should do it this way.

Only by travelling can we eradicate this arrogance in us. Only by seeing things from a different vantage point can we eliminate the ethnocentrism that plagues our society. Only when we immerse ourselves in an environment that reflects a different upbringing, a different culture, a different language do we realise there are not one but many ways to live.

Perhaps it was his seven-month pilgrimage to India in 1974 that sparked Steve Jobs’ interest in Eastern spirituality and the search for enlightenment. Once, he stumbled upon a festival known as the Kumbh Mela — a religious gathering for Hindus which involves bathing in the Ganges that signified the sacred act of washing away of sins. At one point, while he was eating, a Hindu man suddenly pointed at Jobs and began laughing maniacally. “You are just like a baby!” the man shouted, before pulling him out of the crowd and shaving his head with a razor. Obviously none of these would likely happen in America, and to Jobs, the people were fuelled by a different kind of "spirit."

It wasn’t so much about the uncanny experiences in India but the realisation that people in this part of the world were completely different from “those in America” that he claimed to have suffered a greater culture shock coming back home than he did when he first set foot in India. Jobs revelled in the fact that while Westerners were intellectually smarter and more rational, the Indian people were simply more intuitive—the "spirit" that set them apart from his own people. “Intuition," he reflected forty years later, "is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect,” which he admitted had a big influence on the way he ran his company.

Experiences that we accumulate on the road will have a profound impact on what we do in the present and future. It expands our vision from end to end, providing the benefit of sight that impacts the various facets of life. It provides us with the creativity and cross-cultural skills that, if contextualised properly, will allow us to ideate for the increasingly complex problems we face today. Whether it’s a business problem, a social problem, a mental-health problem, putting our physical and mental bodies through an unfamiliar filter often makes our lives better.

The place we call home is only a fraction of the world we live in. There are bound to be things hundreds or thousands of miles away that can teach us more than what our cultures have worked so hard to ingrain from birth.

But this particular wisdom doesn’t come naturally. Nor is it merely gained from reading books, or from watching documentaries, or from listening to the stories and philosophies of those who’ve been there and done that. No, it comes from experiencing it first-hand, from living in the customs and practices of local tradition. It comes by conversing, exchanging and confronting the realities of a people that we know so little about, in person.

This is how our kids learn adaptability, and I’ve seen this evidently in my own five-year-old. In 2022, we were lucky to spend a year in Japan just six months into becoming parents. It was precisely in that land that he was exposed to a language and way of life that were not from his parents. He enrolled in a local daycare, which was sort of his first touch into a proper school routine that included Japanese philosophies of manners. Whenever we are at our overseas creative-culture camps, he almost always has no problem socialising with the kids and adults of that land. To him, they are all equal. You might sound and look different, but can you kick a ball with me? Can you play tag with me? Can you jump on the swing with me? If yes, then you are my friend. To him, they are just people whose homes are only accessible by plane. And I am certain that it was the experience of living abroad that shaped and is still shaping him positively today — because every now and then he would claim that he is Japanese lol.

Look, you can’t learn this from textbooks. You can’t learn this by sitting comfortably in the classroom. And you certainly cannot learn this by prompting AI to tell you all you need to know about a subject.

It can only be learned by hitting the road, by actually getting your hands dirty, by being out there, physically, talking to people and struggling with the language barrier. It can only be learned by eating the food, sitting in local traffic and looking out the window to see what’s happening in the community, even if it’s only for a brief moment.

This is why I love to do this. I love to do it so much that now it's crazy to think that it's my job.

But you know what I've learned from this?

I've learned that travel does not always have to be expensive or long for it to be worth it.

Neither will there ever be the “right moment” for it.

And while there is no such thing as the “perfect” getaway, in my experience, when a child thanks you for bringing them on the trip, that itself is perfect.