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Blog featuring travel tips, packing guides, videos and photography from around the world.
Traveling is good for you, so pack your bags and go!
Traveling, whether for fun or for business, helps people trust each other and understand each other better.
During the COVID pandemic, one of the things I missed the most was travelling. So many kinds of travel have been put on hold, and some of them still are: visiting family and friends, taking vacations, exploring new places, and even going to work-related conferences. With the pandemic, everything stopped. During the worst of the pandemic, there were so many things to worry about that travel seemed small, almost like an “extra” in life.
When you travel, you get to try new things.
I didn’t realise until recently that the pandemic stopped one of the most important parts of travel. When we stopped travelling, we missed out on things like being with people we love and care about in person. This was a cost that was clear. We also lost the chance to feel like we were getting away from everything. And we probably spent less time going to new places.
Many of us felt like we lost something when our ability to travel changed. But what was less obvious was that we missed out on getting to know and trusting people and groups that were different from us.
Travel makes you trust people more.
Researchers have found a strong link between a wide range of foreign travel experiences and a higher level of trust in others, or a belief in the good in people. 1 Having a higher level of trust in people is good for us in the long run. When we trust each other more in general, we are more willing to learn from each other. And when we learn to appreciate those who are different from us, we become more tolerant of those who are different from us. The researchers also found that even short trips can help us trust people more if we talk to locals and other travellers.
When we trust people more, we can see things from their point of view.
One of the most important parts of social empathy is being willing to learn from other people, especially strangers whose lives are different from our own. The best way to improve our ability to understand other people is to go through things that help us see the world through their eyes. We benefit when we can see things from the point of view of people who are different from us, whether that’s in terms of ethnicity, race, class, culture, or other ways people define themselves. Taking a different point of view can be done in different ways. One way is to travel, which can be fun and exciting as well as help us get better at taking different points of view.
Mark Twain was a great American author who wrote a lot about his travels. His insight shows how empathy is at the heart of travel. In his book Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” He said this because he learned from his travels that we can be in the world of people who are different from us, and that this teaches us about other ways of living, learning, thinking, and just being.
Travel to learn how other people feel.
Traveling isn’t the only way to learn about other cultures, but it’s a great way to do so. During the pandemic, losing that chance meant losing an important way to help people understand each other. Now that the world is opening up again and we are travelling, I’m excited to bring back a tried-and-true way to help us understand other people. Bon voyage!
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