I started this post in 2022 and after writing only 2 paragraphs, I realised I needed more time to think it through and gather more evidence. It’s now 2026 and I can finally revisit it with new insights.

Since 2020, I have been observing people a lot. Like most people, prior to 2020, I used to work in an office every day and spent hours in traffic doing the daily commute. Just the driving alone used to make me tired, and with the mental work I had to do for my job on top of that, I was exhausted most of the time.

Working from home allowed me to get the right number of hours of sleep in and took away the stress and fatigue that came with sitting in traffic. While I enjoyed seeing my colleagues in person, I was in between jobs and had let go of them anyway. I’ve been working from home for 99% of the time ever since, and disconnecting from the everyday personal interaction with coworkers has taken away a lot of background noise, thus allowing me to think about other things (which can sometimes be a bad thing, but I won’t get into that) and more importantly, get better at observing from a distance.

When things changed

I’ve watched the world go into a downward spiral since 2020. I was one of those people that started to question what the government was doing, and I lost friends because of it. This is when my thinking really started to shift.

I could not understand why people I had known for the majority of my life trusted the government more than me, simply because I was not a medical professional. It opened my eyes to just how different our perspectives and beliefs can be, and that those “friends” did not have the same level of trust or opinion of me and my intentions that I thought they had. Cognitive dissonance was a real thing. None of it made sense – we had had similar upbringings, gone to the same school, knew the same people, did some of the same sports, even liked the same boybands. So why were all of them so different to me?

It was around the time that I started writing this post that I realised that there was one major differentiating factor between me and them: none of them had traveled as much as I have. In fact, the one I had the biggest falling out with had never left the country (and probably never will). Her young adult life was all about her studies, marrying the rich guy (“Financial security, then love”, she used to say in high school), having kids, and then studying more. Her life revolved around the university and textbooks – her entire life perspective came out of that, not from real experience with other countries, people, food, or cultures. I’m not condemning her choices by any means – it is simply an observation.

I, on the other hand, changed degrees, started working, then started travelling. I’m still single, have no kids, but I’ve been to around 30 countries. The experiences that came with that were priceless, and I’m glad I managed to document a lot of it in this blog, but there’s still so much missing since the last post.

It’s taken me years to piece this post together. Using my personal experience with losing my friends, here’s why I think travelling does indeed teach you how to think, and why you will likely start to lose certain friends once you take that trip.

Travelling forces you out of Autopilot

At home, most of the thinking you do is reactive or routine. You don’t really need to “think” to do certain things because everything is familiar. Travel strips away that familiarity – things like language, signs, and social norms. Suddenly you can’t rely on habit; you have to notice small details like street layouts, payment systems, and even body language; you have to question assumptions, like “Why does everyone eat dinner at 10 PM here?”. You have to be conscious of every decision you make – this is deliberate observation which is the first habit of independent thought.

Cognitive Dissonance is a regular experience

You encounter systems that work differently, and well, like a city with no traffic lights but orderly flow, or a culture where silence in conversation means respect, not awkwardness. It could even be in a hostel where strangers share food freely. To make sense of this, you can’t just reject or romanticize it, you have to hold two conflicting ideas at once – the fact that your way works but theirs also does. You’re forced to revise your general principles based on new evidence. You’re basically learning dialectical thinking – holding tension between opposites without rushing to judgment.

It trains Meta-Cognition

When you get lost, scammed, or confused, you have to backtrack: Why did I assume that street was safe? Why did I trust that map? Why did I get irritated at the waiter?

Travel constantly produces small failures of expectation. Each one is an invitation to

• Identify your own biases e.g.: “I assumed everyone values punctuality”.
• Separate fact from interpretation e.g.: “He didn’t show up” vs. “He’s disrespectful”.
• Update your internal decision-making rules for next time.

In short, travel makes cognitive flexibility unavoidable – you learn to debug your own thinking in real time.

You realise there’s no single Right Answer

School often rewards finding the one correct solution. Travel shows that most real problems have multiple valid answers:

• Three different routes to the same village, each with different trade-offs.
• Ten ways to bargain, none universally “right.”
• A missed train leading to a better experience than the original plan.

You start thinking in terms of trade-offs, probabilities, and context rather than fixed truths.

Travel teaches pragmatic, situational thinking — what works here, now, with these people. If you’ve never left the comfort of your own home, your manner of thinking will never truly change. You will continue to believe that the “peer-reviewed studies” by others who live exactly the same life as you are the only correct answer.

You can take Intellectual Risks more easily

At home, being wrong can feel costly (e.g. your job or reputation). On the road, you’re often anonymous and transient. That psychological safety lets you do things like test hypotheses – “If I smile first, will they help me?”.

It also gives you the freedom to try flawed logic and correct it quickly – “I assumed the bus left at 3 PM — I was off by an hour zone”.

And my personal favourite: the fact that you can admit ignorance without shame. You can say that you have no idea how something works and can either watch someone do it or ask them, because not doing so could mean you’re stuck.

Over time, this builds humility – the willingness to say “I don’t know” and the skill to find out.

Travel therefore turns thinking into a trial-and-error process rather than a performance.

It forces Prioritization when you’re Uncertain

This one really hits hard, as I’ve been in this situation countless times whenever I went to a new country, sometimes even when visiting a new city, because you can’t process everything in a new environment. You end up learning to ask questions like:

• What information matters right now? E.g.: the platform number and train vs. the history of the station.
• What can be ignored? E.g.: Most shop signs and even most stranger’s opinions.
• What’s the simplest next step that reduces confusion? E.g.: Let me cross this street first so I can get my bearings.

This is the essence of critical thinking: filtering noise, identifying leverage points, and acting before full certainty.

Travel teaches you practical reasoning, where thinking is aimed at action, not just analysis.

It Rewires how you handle Emotion while you’re Thinking

Stress, fatigue, and surprise are constant on the road. Travel teaches you to notice when frustration is hijacking your judgment. For example, “I’m not lost; I’m just hungry and annoyed”, and to separate mood from analysis. You learn to pause before reacting and instead ask questions like “What would I think about this problem if I weren’t tired/scared/angry?”.

The interesting thing is that once you get used to it, answering that question is almost instinctive. You use emotion as data e.g.: “My anxiety about this neighborhood might be real – or it’s actually just unfamiliarity”.

Travel builds emotional regulation into the thinking process – this is a mark of mature cognition.

Travel doesn’t automatically make you smarter. But done attentively, it repeatedly breaks your mental habits, confronts you with contradictions, and forces you to rebuild your reasoning from the ground up. That’s not learning what to think — it’s learning how to think. And unlike a textbook, travel gives you immediate consequences for bad thinking and immediate rewards for good one. In that sense, the road might be the most honest classroom there is.

At home, weeks blur into a single hazy memory. But years from now, you’ll still hold that stone from Loch Ness and recall not just the place, but the exact shape of a problem you solved, an assumption you shattered, a way of thinking you’ll never unlearn. Routine gives you repetition. Travel gives you a memory that thinks back with you.