On Adventure

Why I can't stop making horrible decisions.

As someone young, just starting to build a life, I feel immense pressure to find and chase a niche. There simply is no time to explore. If you don’t specialize young, you won’t be an expert by the time you’re 30; if you’re not an expert by the time you’re 30, you won’t be a leader in the field by the time you're 40. If you’re not a leader by age 40, you won’t have enough time to drive the field further into the unknown by the time you retire.

But also don’t forget to try lots of new things before you’re career takes off. Don’t forget to travel. Also you should probably spend a year abroad in Europe, working as a barista and immersing yourself in a new culture. And don’t forget to go skydiving, hike the PCT, ski in Japan, try pufferfish, ride camels in Morocco, kiteboard in Sicily, and meditate in the temples of Tibet.

Also, make sure you do it all on a $20 budget and above all, don’t forget to vlog, Instagram, snapchat, bReal, VSCO, LinkedIn, Facebook Marketplace, and Bumble BFF the mother f**ing shit out of your adventures, lest it all be for nothing.

Social media is, after all, where the ideas for these adventures originated, no?

Recently, it feels like adventure is becoming less and less a thing that we experience and more and more a thing that we’re packaged and sold.

Do I even go on adventures, or do I just consume them? Recently, travel, piercings, falling in love, trying new foods, and the myriad of other heart-palpitating, breath-catching things I’m supposed to be enjoying in my 20s have started to feel more like checkmarks on a 3x3 social bingo card than an adventure.

The adventures of our 20’s allow us to discover new things. They’re supposed push our social, geographic, spiritual, and moral envelope. Before we all plugged in, this was a lot easier to do because everything felt a lot more novel. Now that we’re all sharing a singular 24/7 digital experience where novelty can be livestreamed from your bed, it becomes abundantly clear how little risk is actually involved with the so-called “adventures of your 20s.”

So, is this it? Is this the end of adventure? Maybe there’s an alternative. In the age of the packaged experience, adventure has become deeply tied to consumables, specifically the consumption of people, places, and things. The adventure industry is one of experiencing new cultures, visiting new places, and trying new things. But the experience of adventure remains an entirely cognitive one.

Adventure isn’t a thing you do; it’s an emotion you feel, and like all emotions, it ebbs and flows. While the physical world has been largely documented into a convenient consumable, maybe that just leaves us more space to explore the mental aspect of adventure. Perhaps adventure is the experience of learning something new, having a core view challenged, or leaving your comfort zone (all of which can still happen from the comfort of your bed).

That is the purpose of Adventure, after all: to establish a baseline of experience from which to confidently and securely enter a lifelong niche. It’s to explore, to find what you like, establish what you believe in, and gain confidence in who you are. None of this learning is inherently tied to a single event, location, or person but rather to a general life experience achieved through exploration of the previously unknown.

If the adventures of the generation before involved traveling to new cultures, maybe our shared adventure is the exploration of a culture so different from ours that it challenges every moral we hold.

Instead of going to Portugal, maybe I’ll try falling in love with someone I deeply hate. Maybe I’ll go to a different church every Sunday for the next year and see what I learn. Maybe I’ll move to Utah and deeply commit myself to the Mormon religion and see how it changes my view of the world. I wonder what would happen if I locked myself in my room for a full month and only left for food. I’ve never been married; that’s probably a crazy experience. I walk past houseless people every day, and I’ve never really talked to any of them… I wonder what they have to say. I’ve never settled down and truly ingrained myself in a culture. I wonder if that will bring contentment or boredom. I’ve never known I would regret something and done it anyway just in an attempt to better understand the emotion of regret. I’ve slept outside in the forest but never in an urban environment. I wonder what I’d learn from that. I’ve never fasted for 3 days to experience true hunger, I’m sure that would probably teach me something about consciousness… food for thought I guess.