A while ago, I saw a headline for an article in the New York Times called “Why We Travel”. Well, at least I thought it was an article. It really turned out to be a slideshow of pictures, none of which really explained to me why exactly people travel. I guess the answer to that question is really too varied, too complicated to be answered in a slideshow or a magazine article (if there was such a thing); perhaps even too complex to be answered comprehensively in a book. After all, people travel for many reasons: leisure, work, escape, and exploration just to name a few. Maybe a question like “Why do we travel?” could only be answered by psychologists, or maybe its sociologists, cognitive scientists, philosophers or even archeologists.

A question like this reminds me of lower-division Cognitive Science class, where we learned about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Wikipedia says, “Maslow’s theory contends that as humans meet ‘basic needs’, they seek to satisfy successively ‘higher needs’ that occupy a set hierarchy. This Hierarchy goes as follows: 1. Physiological (ie. the need for food) 2. Security (ie. safety from violence) 3. Love/Belonging (ie. the need for human relationships) 4. Esteem (ie. the need to be respected) 5. Actualization (ie. the need to make the most out of each individuals unique abilities). So, as you grow older, most people move up along the hierarchy of fulfilling needs.

I think that traveling (at least from my experience) really helps people fulfill the last three of Maslow’s levels: Love/Belonging, Esteem, and Actualization. Traveling to foreign places gives the traveler a sense of belonging; a sense that they are one person in a grander scheme of things. There are other cultures, other places, and always more things to learn along the way. A traveler belongs to the world. As a traveler learns how to make dealings with other cultures they gain self-esteem: they are testing their limits in unfamiliar environments. And, as they test these limits, they are self-actualizing, realizing how they can make the most of their unique abilities.

The other night, I watched a movie I got from Netflix entitled “Around the Bend“. The plot centers around four generations of broken family taking a journey together as the dying funeral wishes of the eldest (the dying wish of the great-grand-father was that he wanted his ashes spread across America by his son, his son’s son, and his son’s son’s son). So as they are traveling, they get to know each other and develop a camaraderie amongst what they call “their tribe” (the true wish of the great-grand-father). In this case, the trip (the protracted funeral) was the activity that brought them together. Good movie.

On a side note, I recently saw this posted on Signal vs. Noise: Netflix Mailers Over the Years, a photo gallery of all the different iterations of mailers that Netflix has used to send DVDs to its customers since 1999. There are probably many assertions that can be derived from this gallery (the design changes and their implications, the changing brand of the company and what it means), but I believe that the true zen of the gallery is the journey involved. Another sort of travel if you will. And the lesson in all of this? You tell me.