The thumb moves with a mechanical, rhythmic flick, scrolling past 41 photos of turquoise water and 11 sunset shots that all look suspiciously identical despite being taken on different islands. You’re sitting at your desk, the one with the slight wobble in the left leg that you’ve ignored for 201 days, and the fluorescent light overhead is humming at a frequency that feels like it’s drilling directly into your premotor cortex. The coffee in your mug is lukewarm, sporting a thin film of oil, and the existential dread you thought you’d buried under several layers of SPF 51 and expensive linen shirts is currently sitting on your chest like a very heavy, very bored cat. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. You spent $3001 and 11 months of planning to ensure that when you returned, you would be a New Person-someone who drinks tea without sugar and speaks softly about ‘perspective.’ Instead, you’re just the same person, but now you have a pile of laundry that smells like saltwater and a deep resentment for the guy who just stole your parking spot.

I watched it happen this morning. Some guy in a silver SUV just swerved into the spot I’d been waiting for, and for a split second, I felt my entire ‘vacation Zen’ evaporate into a cloud of pure, unadulterated petty rage. I’m Aisha P., by the way. My day job involves editing podcast transcripts-thousands of hours of people talking about their ‘journeys’ and ‘transformations’ while I sit in a dim room trying to make sure they don’t say ‘um’ 101 times a minute. I’m currently working on a series about a woman who went to the desert to ‘find her roar.’ It’s exhausting. The more I listen to people talk about how travel ‘healed’ them, the more I realize we’ve been sold a massive, glossy-coated lie. We treat travel like a personality transplant. We expect a two-week itinerary to do the heavy lifting that years of therapy or 11 minutes of honest self-reflection couldn’t manage. We’ve turned the act of going somewhere else into a consumerist hack for inner peace.

The Geographical Conundrum

There’s this thing in psychology called the ‘arrival fallacy,’ which is the belief that once you reach a certain destination-whether that’s a promotion, a marriage, or a beach in the South Pacific-you will finally be happy. Travel is the ultimate arrival fallacy. We convince ourselves that our problems are geographical. We think our anxiety is a byproduct of the grey sky in our hometown or the way the neighbor’s dog barks at 7:01 AM. So, we pack our bags, but we forget that the most annoying passenger on any flight is our own brain. It comes with us. It sits in the seat next to us, whispering about our insecurities while we’re trying to enjoy a sunset. You can move your body 5001 miles across the globe, but you’re still using the same neural pathways to process the scenery. If you’re a person who worries about the future at home, you’ll just be a person who worries about the future while eating a croissant in a Parisian café.

The ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ industrial complex has convinced us that if we don’t return from a trip with a life-altering epiphany, we’ve somehow failed at being a tourist. We’ve turned wonder into a KPI. If you didn’t have a spiritual breakthrough by day 11 of your trek, did you even go?

Stopping the Demand for Miracles

This pressure ruins the actual experience of being somewhere new. Instead of noticing the specific, jagged texture of a mountain range or the way the air smells like roasted spices and damp earth, we’re busy checking our internal ‘transformation meter.’ Is my soul changing yet? Do I feel more ‘at one’ with the universe? No? Maybe I need to buy another rug. I saw it when I was looking into Excursions in Marrakech for a client project last year-people often arrive with this desperate, frantic need to be moved. They want the Atlas Mountains to speak to them, but the mountains are just rocks. Big, beautiful, ancient rocks that don’t care about your mid-life crisis.

It’s the memory of the specific shade of orange in a Moroccan market, or the 1 particular way a street performer in Rome held his accordion. These aren’t life-changing events. They are just details. They are bits of data that remind you the world is larger than your cubicle. They don’t solve your problems, but they make your problems feel a little less like the center of the universe. It’s a shift in scale, not a shift in substance.

The Relief of Being Unimportant

We’ve become obsessed with the ‘rebranding’ of ourselves. Social media demands a narrative arc. Act 1: The Burnout. Act 2: The Exotic Escape. Act 3: The Enlightened Return. But life is mostly just Act 1, over and over again, with different snacks. The woman in the transcript I’m editing right now-the one who found her ‘roar’-she’s probably back in her kitchen right now, arguing with her spouse about who forgot to buy milk. Her ‘roar’ is likely muffled by the sound of a vacuum cleaner. We need to be more honest about the fact that travel is a temporary reprieve, not a permanent solution. It’s a comma in the middle of a very long, sometimes boring sentence. If you go into a trip expecting a miracle, you’ll return with a sense of debt-you’ll feel like you owe the world a better version of yourself that you haven’t actually earned.

I’ve edited 31 podcasts this month alone that use the word ‘authentic’ at least 11 times per episode. It’s a word that has lost all meaning. The sun has been hitting those desert dunes for millions of years, and it will keep doing it long after your ‘trip of a lifetime’ is a blurry memory in a cloud storage folder.

The Quiet Hoard of Wonders

Maybe the reason your trip didn’t change your life is that your life doesn’t actually need changing as much as you think it does. Maybe it just needs more windows. We don’t need to be ‘new’ people. We just need to be people who have seen more things. I think about the 51 hours I spent in transit last year. Was it worth it? Yes. Not because I’m a better person, but because I know what a specific type of street food in a specific corner of the world tastes like, and that bit of knowledge is 1 more thing I have that the parking spot thief doesn’t. It’s a small, quiet hoard of wonders. And that has to be enough. Because if we keep waiting for the trip that finally fixes everything, we’re going to spend our whole lives sitting in the airport, waiting for a flight that never actually lands.

So, you’re back at your desk. The hum of the light is still there. The 41 unread emails are still there. But maybe, just maybe, if you close your eyes for 1 second, you can still feel the heat of the sun on your neck from that one afternoon when you weren’t trying to be anyone at all. You were just there. And being there is the only thing that ever really matters anyway.