Why Do Most Travelers Fall into Confusion and Anxiety After Returning?

📍 Changsha · 👁 2 reads · ❤️ 110 likes

After finishing my first long-term trip in 2016, I fell into a very depressed state. I wrote in my diary:

At that time, I watched my graduating classmates all starting to get on track, while I was still wandering in place. This made me doubt my decisions and feel lost. This feeling repeated itself after every long-term trip abroad, until I understood the reasons behind it and began to solve the problem instead of continuing to worry.

Later, I found that I wasn’t alone—this seemed to be a common phenomenon among “people on the road.” Just a few days ago, a friend who was still traveling told me she had decided to go back to work. We started discussing: why do most travelers fall into anxiety, confusion, or even depression after returning to normal life?

If you plan to start a trip in the future, I hope this article can help you mentally prepare in advance.

Travel is a wonderful thing. I’ve always believed we need to give ourselves time to rest and embark on inward or outward journeys. Deciding to set out is the decision I’ve regretted the least in the past 27 years. The process of exploring unknown destinations has accelerated my self-understanding and the formation of my worldview.

It made me start living a life of self-examination.

But everything has a positive side and a negative side. Anyone who has had a long-term travel experience has probably experienced the disappointment of “stopping.” This sense of falling behind traps people in a vicious cycle of anxiety.

Why does this happen? I’ve summarized the following reasons.

But it gives you the illusion of being “different.”

I’ve said many times that I don’t think visiting many places is something to show off, because I know that travel is a low-barrier activity. What’s truly worth cherishing is the courage to step out of your comfort zone.

But precisely because most people lack the courage to take the first step, those who actually set out are a tiny minority. This group forms a niche “travelers’ circle,” and more than half of them set out to escape real life—though of course, curiosity about the world is also involved.

Travel makes you disconnected from regular life. You no longer have to follow society’s established rules. Everything you encounter and will experience is unknown. People stop talking about worldly things like cars, houses, and social insurance, so you start to think those things don’t matter anymore.

When everyone lives a life of “thinking about tomorrow only after today passes,” your mind gets assimilated, and you rationalize your current situation. Of course, that’s not necessarily bad, but the key is that you don’t truly agree with it from your heart, nor can you genuinely give up worldly fame and status. It’s just assimilation due to environmental influence.

Travel brings you into a simple, niche circle—a utopia in the real world. It blinds you with superficial “coolness” and rationalizes your state of being detached from the outside world.

And such a groundless belief will also disappear when you return.

Yes, a conclusion that might disappoint you: travel cannot become a job.

First, we need to be clear that “people need to work”—not necessarily for fame or money, but simply to have something to do. If you go out and play for a week or a month, pure fun is fine. But what about half a year or a year? Even the most beautiful scenery will get boring. We need to find something to hold onto in life, to find our place and sense of social responsibility in this world.

That something could be writing, painting, or even collecting trash.

When people have too much free time, they start overthinking. This is the anxiety travelers face at the beginning, especially when you accidentally return to the city and find everyone else working hard to move forward. This anxiety will immediately intensify.

You might think of “making money through travel.” But think again: are those people really “making money through travel”?

The common ways travelers make money are as follows:

1. Travel shopping—buying goods from around the world. The essence of travel shopping is retail, sales.

2. Travel bloggers—creating valuable content through text, images, videos, or podcasts, gaining traffic, and then monetizing it. The essence of travel bloggers is content creators, and the threshold for content creation is much higher than simple travel. (For example, my account goes by the same name on all platforms: 丸子里里.)

3. Travel customization—designing unique travel routes for clients and charging service fees. The essence of travel customization is product service providers.

As for the digital nomads I mentioned a few days ago who “earn money while traveling and living,” they don’t make money through travel either. They are all outstanding professionals with specialized skills in their respective fields.

Although travel is not as expensive as people think, it does cost money. And being a traveler is not really a status; it can only be called a lifestyle or a way to pass time.

As Xiong Peiyun wrote in “Freedom Is in the High Place”: Merely striving for freedom and independence is not enough. We strive for freedom to better achieve ourselves, thereby gaining lasting creativity and guaranteed happiness.

Who are you really during travel? This is something that needs careful thought.

The moment you decide to break away from institutionalized life, the people around you see you as “different.”

Either you discover that you truly love life on the road and find a suitable freelance business model, deciding to be a lifelong nomad, or you eventually return to your original life, bringing back the nourishment travel has given your soul. Most people return with some regret.

The hardest part of returning to life is often that after you have accepted your own uniqueness, you need to accept your ordinariness again. Returning to daily life with a normal mindset is not easy.

Going from the slow pace of travel back to the fast pace of work, from simple interpersonal relationships back to complex social interactions, from minimalist material needs back to an environment full of material desires—

this is a new test.

When you have seen a corner of the world but find that your abilities cannot satisfy your desires, when you suddenly look back and realize you have been left behind by your peers, you will eventually face your own heart.

Whether you have a strong heart, whether you know yourself well enough, and whether you clearly understand what you want determines the state you return to.

Last year, the question I was asked most was: “Do you plan to keep living this nomadic life?”

When I saw friends who set out at the same time all returning to stable lives, I also doubted my own choice. But tossing and turning, I truly felt the nomadic genes flowing through me. The distance always attracts me. What’s behind the mountains? What’s beyond the sea? How do people living thousands of miles away live? After five years on the road, my curiosity about the world has not diminished.

In fact, whether you get married or not, whether you have children or not, whether you go to work or not, what you wear, where you live—people always try to approach a more ideal and happier state. You should follow your heart, not be controlled by rules.

So what does it matter whether you continue the nomadic life or not?

As I have always firmly believed: “There is no standard answer in life.” Since everyone lives only once, and no one has experience, just live your own life well.

This might be what I want to say about long-term travel. Finally, I’d like to share this sentence from Zhou Guoping’s “On Boredom”:

“Nothing is more exciting than a long journey, and nothing is more boring than a long journey.”

And life itself is a long journey.

【101 Ways to Encounter the World】

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2.1 Travel is a low-barrier activity

3.2 Travel cannot become a job

4.3 Compared to leaving on a whim, returning is harder

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