The shortest path to oneself leads around the world

In Richard Linklater’s 1995 film Before Sunrise, two strangers meet on a train and spend one night together in Vienna discussing love and the vagaries of human nature.  In one striking scene, Jesse, a young woman says:

… it's myself that I wish I could get away from. Seriously, think about this. I have never been anywhere that I haven't been. I've never had a kiss when I wasn't one of the kissers. Y'know, I've never gone to the movies, when I wasn't there in the audience. I've never been out bowling, if I wasn't there, making some stupid joke. I think that's why so many people hate themselves. Seriously, it's just they are sick to death of being around themselves.

This is modern equivalent of the Zen koan everywhere you go, there you are.  Either version has the lovely feature of being so obvious but still rather intriguing (to me, anyway).  It is true, I think, that our own internal monologues and feelings are the central inescapable features of our lives; no matter what we do, no matter where we go, we can never get away from our selves.  And if we are not happy with our selves, then Jesse’s lament is a serious one, echoed in Alain Ehrenberg's Weariness of Self, a psycho-analytic exploration of depression.  Drawing on this, blogger Tim Urban puts it starkly: You are the problem you cannot run away from.

But does that mean that there’s no point in seeking out new experiences?  As a keen traveller, I have always been taken by St Augustine’s notion that the world is a book and those who do not travel know only one page.  But Jesse’s point holds; it’s still me travelling the world, reading each page.  It's still all through my lens, with(in my case) my rather tedious inner chatter and judgement that I cannot quell, no matter how hard I try.  So is Urban’s bleak point correct?

As soon as I put it like that, it seems to me that Urban’s characterisation has missed the point; which is that self is not a fixed thing.  Even though we cannot get away from ourselves, we still all change over time –  children obviously, but adults too, just more slowly.  And so we can certainly take steps to try to shape the ways and directions in which we change, and I think that’s where travel comes in.  So it’s not about escaping the self  - it’s about developing the self, and travel is one way to do it.  In fact, anything that jolts us out of the usual self-absorbed routines of daily life is likely helpful.

Many readers here will know that there are few things more jolting than relocating to a new culture, and so a recent study by Adam et al is perhaps unsurprising.  The study found that those who relocate to a new country tend to develop a better sense of self than those who don't, and in particular that living aboard triggers self-discerning reflections in which people grapple with the different cultural values and norms of their home and host cultures.  In other words, meeting and joining other cultures can shape the lenses through which we understand our own cultures, and hence ourselves.

So there’s no tension between Linklater’s film and broader views of travel and of experience.  This is nicely captured in the title of Adam et al’s paper, quoting philosopher Hermann von Keyserling, who wrote that the shortest path to oneself leads around the world.

References

• Adam, H. et al (2018) The Shortest Path to Oneself Leads Around the World Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Vol 145: 16-29 
• Ehrenberg, A (2009) Weariness of the Self
• von Keyserling, H. (1919) The Travel Diary of a Philosopher