Why Would Someone Travel the World for a Year on Sabbatical?
When Alyssa and I started telling people we were going to live abroad and travel for a year, we typically were met with at least one of three questions:
1. How the hell will you afford that!? (we point them to our budget)
2. Where are you planning to go? (we point them to our map)
3. Why are you going to travel for a year?
And of course, the fourth question was always, “If I squeeze in to your suitcase, can I go with you?”
While the intent of our other blog posts will be to cover both the “how” – financial tips and tricks, planning and travel logistics, etc. – as well as the “where” – documenting our travels with pictures via blog posts – the third question of why is what I will start to cover here.
What it all comes down to for us is that it has always been our dream and passion to travel; so instead of waiting until the end of our careers in retirement to see the world – assuming we’re still around and healthy – we figured, why not take a year off along the way?
As Mark Twain once said, “Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.”
However, as we’ll be capturing over the course of our travels and in future blog posts, there are many more unexpected benefits of a sabbatical and taking a year off to travel. These benefits touch on the areas of financial well-being, professional skills, creativity, physical and mental health, social skills, and many other things that we hadn’t even thought of.
The Origins of My Passion for Travel
My 2004 high school trip to Europe. Can you find me? Hint: as my family will tell you, my eyes are closed in 95% of all pictures taken of me. This one is no exception.
My junior year of high school in 2004, I was fortunate enough to do a little over a week abroad as part of a high school trip and visited France and Italy with a small group of about 30 others. Being immersed in a different culture for that short amount of time opened my eyes to the fact that the world is a truly diverse and interesting place; it is one thing to be told that, but I found out it’s an entirely different thing to experience it. From that point on, I was hooked on the experiences and lessons of traveling.
After graduating from college, all was well and good. With several amazing trips each year to discover new cultures and new locations, I eventually found my way to the online forums and blogs around traveling, and they posed an interesting possibility: why not travel for an extended period of time?
Questions started circling my mind. Isn’t extended travel (i.e. more than a month) only something for the extremely wealthy or those that are already retired? Wouldn’t my professional skills and career fall behind during that time, being negatively impacted by the time off?
And there was one of the most important questions: what would Alyssa – my girlfriend of about 2.5 years at the time – think of this crazy idea? Spoiler alert: she wanted to start our year of travel even sooner than I did!
Life With No Regrets: Our Decision to Take a Year Off Now
Up to my 30th birthday, I subscribed to what I saw as the typical attitude towards life, which was to go to school, get good grades, get a good job, and then work until I retire, maybe getting lucky and retiring “early” in my 50s. Along the way, this path to retirement would be sprinkled with small one to two week vacations each year for the rest of my life. After retirement, I would be met with the golden sand beaches, beautiful trails for hiking in foreign lands, and all the time in the world to explore new places.
Alyssa and I driving around Germany in April 2016 while picking up her Audi TT Roadster.
Sounds great, right? But then I started wondering: how do I know that in the 35 (or likely more) years I still have before retirement that I’ll still be healthy enough and even able to travel? And then there is the somewhat morbid but often illuminating question of: will I even still be alive to enjoy this dream of mine?
Continuing to question my assumptions and think more counter-intuitively, I then started to wonder if there could actually be personal and professional benefits to taking a year off now, such that I could actually improve my financial situation, professional skills, and personal life by doing so.
Thus, I started truly asking myself: why would I wait until retirement to start “living” my dream, when it is fully possible to take a year off right now, while I’m still healthy, energized to learn new things, and able to travel?
After I started doing some research, I quickly discovered I was not the first person that has mused over these types of questions. For an excellent TED Talk on the subject of “mini-retirements” during our working years and the benefits that they can bring, check out The Power of Time Off and How Mandatory Sabbaticals Will Transform Your Company and Your Life.
Furthermore, two of the points mentioned in the first TED Talk come from Bonnie Ware’s observations of the Top Five Regrets of the dying – something I try and reflect on monthly – really resonated with me and seemed to align with this idea of a year of travel. Who better to help put your life and all your decisions into perspective than those at the end of their lives who have already seen it all and have reached the end? Those top five regrets are:
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Life-Changing Question #1: People work their entire lives, often 40 to 50 years – and statistically speaking, the years of their best health – to then start “living” in retirement. Why couldn’t we live our dream of traveling the world starting today, and might it be beneficial for our health, well-being, happiness, and even our finances, creativity and professional skills to do so?
Challenging Beliefs: Is Traditional “Retirement” Still Going to be the Norm in the Future?
The word retirement typically brings an image of Adirondack chairs on a tropical beach, Pina Coladas in hand, while palm trees flutter gently in a salty breeze, feet up with a good book to read, and the sound of crashing waves and seagulls in the background.
I want to make this clear: my year of travel will absolutely NOT be that!
So that raises an interesting question – would I even want that? Assuming that I have found my true calling and passion in life, and that I’m contributing to making the world a better place, why would I ever want to give that up?
The world is changing at an ever-increasing rate as technology connects more and more people across the globe, and I think it’s safe to say no one can accurately predict what the next year will bring, let alone what 30 years from now will look like.
With many companies doing away with traditional pension plans and relying more on the employees and entrepreneurs to set themselves up for future success, I think it would be wise of anyone to question whether the future of “retirement” will have a similar look and feel to what retirement is today.
Reflecting on retirement and what that might look like for me in the future led me to visualize more of a hybrid retirement for myself. One where I still do meaningful, creative work, potentially even at the same company, but where I have added flexibility in terms of where I perform that work, when the work occurs, and how the overlap between my personal and professional lives all contributes to my happiness and meaning in life.
Yes, that may mean still “working” and producing well into my 60s, 70s, and beyond, but the type of challenging, fulfilling, and rewarding work won’t be the traditional office job. And in terms of health and longevity, there are countless studies out there showing the benefits of being a lifelong learner and keeping your mind engaged.
Life-Changing Question #2: Given that so many examples in history demonstrate that something we “knew” to be fact ends up being completely false (e.g. the Earth being flat, the Earth being the center of the universe, that humans can’t run a sub four-minute mile, and many more), what other beliefs that we have today may not be true in 10, 20, or 50 years from now? Is our standard belief and image of traditional retirement perhaps one of those?
New Opportunities for Personal and Professional Growth
Once I started to think about what a year off would actually look like, I started realizing the extremely unique opportunities that this would present me in terms of areas for both personal and professional development.
One of my mind’s biggest counter-points for taking a year off was that I would fall out of practice in terms of my professional skills, and I would have a gap in my resume, which would hurt all my future earning potential and cause me to fall behind my peers.
However, when I started reflecting on this thought, I came to discover two major flaws in my rationale:
- First, life and professional careers are not some “race” to be won, and there is definitely not one designated path to get there. While there may be people that treat life as such, getting caught up in such a pursuit will no doubt lead to longer hours, more stress, and less happiness in the end. Life can’t just be about reaching that destination that is in your mind, way off in the future; life is about living and experiencing every up and down along the way, and is more about the journey than the destination.
- Second, why can’t I use this year to work on certain areas of personal and professional development that most people working a 9 to 5 job actually wouldn’t be able to experience, and thus gain useful skills that will make my resume even stronger when I return in a year?
When presented with any challenge that seems to have two options (e.g. either be successful or be happy), I generally try to re-frame it from a false dichotomy of “Option A or Option B” to why can’t I have both Option A and Option B? When you pose this question to your mind, you will be surprised how often there is a solution that doesn’t have to select between the two options, but where you can devise a solution that actually permits having both outcomes.
Life-Changing Question #3: Instead of a “mini-retirement” or poorly named “gap year” of simply traveling and kicking our feet up, what if the year off could be structured more along the lines of a year of growth and development, and actually help us get ahead of where we would be if we had continued working our traditional jobs for a year?
In the end, wouldn’t it be better to experiment and prove out (or disprove) certain assumptions in terms of finances, generating income, travel, and life in general, sooner rather than later? It’s much more difficult to get that time back if I realize I made a mistake with my priorities when I’m 65, compared to realizing those mistakes when I’m 31.
Summary – Why Travel for a Year?
Going back to the original question of “why”, I would summarize all my above points in to the following:
- No Regrets: live our dreams and enjoy our present lives, here and now, while we still have our health and the good fortune to do so.
- New Perspectives: uproot and challenge our current assumptions in life by living in foreign cultures for a year and being open to new people and new experiences.
- Unique Opportunities: work on several areas of personal and professional development that would not otherwise be possible while balancing the demands of a typical office job.
We fully understand many people are not in the situation right now where they are either financially or socially able to do a trip like this, or that they would ever want to, and that is perfectly fine. The intent of this blog is not to convince everyone that traveling for a year is the right thing to do for everyone, or even that it’s a possibility for most people; however, for those that want to get a different perspective about what’s possible, for those that this idea does sound interesting to, or for those that just want to follow along on our adventure, this blog is for you.
