I remember being told once that if the history and pre-history of the Earth was quickly time lapsed in order to fit in a 24-hour period, the human race would come in about a minute before midnight. If you have never heard that before, then that is your new fact for the day. I think it is always great to learn something new, or experience something new, or feel something new every day. When we as a community are being innovative by doing new things we are timeless. It is the same for us as individuals: If we experience something new every day we are ageless.

I think one of the most exciting ways to do this is to travel, whether it is just a different part of town you have never been to before, or taking planes, trains, and automobiles over a whole day to get to the heart of somewhere exotic like Patagonia—to just go somewhere for the sake of being somewhere else, to be restless and eager and overall “mad” really because that is what keeps us feeling young.

“The only people for me are the mad ones,” that is the start of the famous quote from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, “the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” The cross-country American saga of Sal Paradise, based on Kerouac himself, along with his friend Dean Moriarty, based on Neal Cassady, going places like San Francisco, Denver, Los Angeles, Texas, and Mexico, is regarded as the testament of the Beat Generation, the counterculture American literary movement of the 1950s built on bohemian ideals and spontaneity in a post-World War II era. In 1952 a New York Times Magazine article attempted to define what it meant to be part of the Beat Generation, to be a ‘beatnik’ as they called it, saying that “how to live seems to them much more crucial than why.” No longer preoccupied with questions of what it meant to live, they just went out on the road and really lived.

Nowadays there seems to be a revival of this sort of bohemian ideals for the modern traveler. It is not about checking certain countries and cities off a bucket list in order to say you have been to “X” amount of places, it is an investment in new experiences that is important in order to make the most out of our time here on Earth. Nowadays people do not just want to go to somewhere new, they want to do something they have never done before. In the past there was something so romantic reading about the running of the bulls in The Sun Also Rises, or a great American road trip in On the Road, or a beautiful Italian romance in A Room with a View, and that is how I assume people were inspired to go out and travel. The rise of social media, however, means that now most people can be easily inspired by a single photo, which is supposedly worth a thousand words but is definitely worth a thousand likes on Instagram. 

Taking those two things together, the desire for experiences and the fact that almost everything is posted online, the modern traveler looks for the unique in hopes to be the first to post and share it and be the one to say, “I was there before everybody else was.” In a way it is kind of like an age of explorers rather than travelers and, although there are no new lands to claim on this Earth with a flag in the ground (or at least I do not think so), we instead look for new experiences to claim with a photo and a caption to post like “the most authentic pad thai in Bangkok.” 

On that note, if you do find yourself in Bangkok, try Thipsamai, I went after seeing it in Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and it surpassed my expectations with some really excellent pad thai. So that’s how the cycle goes. You might get inspired by my explorations and those of other people, so you try to be an explorer yourself in search of the next new experience, and once you find it and post, you get to inspire others, too, and so on and so forth. This is the age of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, but most of all crowd-inspiring. 

Taking a break from quoting and referring to modern classics of literature, I am reminded of the immortal words of Hans Gruber from the movie Die Hard: “When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.” That is because on the flip side of that, when I look at a map of the world and see how many new places there are for me to go to, with hope, or I look at an Instagram feed of photos of new experiences to try, I can only smile and feel like my life is just beginning and there is so much more for me to conquer.

A person who looks back will only feel the years and their age. To remain young, one has to keep looking ahead at the new and the exciting, thinking about the next adventure, most likely inspired by something one saw online, whether it is a beautiful sunset in Cappadocia or the vibrant cityscape of New York. Ushering in a new age of explorers and beatniks, moving around and finding new experiences, and even if we return to places we have been before, as most of us do, we still look for something new and different to do. In a final quote from Jack Kerouac, “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”