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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

> I think that’s how I operated as a kid in the summers, riding bikes and walking around town with friends until we needed to eat. I feel like those moments are underrated and very visceral, instinctual parts of the human experience.

This is exactly how I spent my youth, and I try to use how I felt those moments as a comparison for how engaged I with the real world at any point. If I find myself too decoupled from real life and too deep into work, I will extract myself by leaving the house without any devices or any place to be. I love those moments. I no longer carry a smartphone with me, just a standalone smartwatch for incoming calls, so that's actually made those moments to be any moment I'm not at my desk.

It's why travel, even local travel, is so important to me. I can live moment to moment, experiencing life in simple visceral terms. How do I feel right now, and what does that make me want to do? Well, let's do that then.

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Backpacking is the essence of travelling you describe. Just buy a return ticket, some guidebook (not necessary but usually more help than harm), maybe a local phrasebook. Ideally avoid most touristic places or zoom through them quickly.

Living in the moment, many unplanned unique experiences every single day, 2 week vacation feels like a month or two passed by.

I did that in India&Nepal twice, each time 3 months, and I literally forgot about reality back home, it felt like 5 lives before, memory of a distant dream. Submersion was absolute, same for my partner back then. It helped it was 2008 & 2010, we didn't have phones with us.

These days, I can afford to travel in much more luxury but I will always revert to backpacking. It is simply better, more rewarding and intense experience. But sometimes I need to rest after such a vacation :)

I never felt at ease backpacking. In places like India and Nepal you spend most of your time playing tourist alongside other people's poverty while enjoying advantageous exchange rates that exist for all sorts of horrid reasons both past and present.

Hmm, I guess we do it differently then. I am not saying I didn't also experience of what you describe, poverty is literally inescapable in India unless you bury yourself in some 5-star hotel. And Nepal is still one of the poorest countries of the world.

But these things were never core of the experience. Frankly, quite opposite. Generousness of the poor is not something to shy away from, I am happy to be helped, share a dinner with them, listen to their life stories, and help them out if I can.

I don't feel any ancestor's guilt like folks from some parts western Europe could, I come from country which never enslaved another one. Maybe its just about optics on same things - my beer is definitely half full when travelling. My budget spent in the poor remote area will trickle a bit into local economy.

Maybe its a bit about expectations - I don't travel to have it easy or only positive. Intensity is what matters more.

The Nepalese are extremely friendly, and I don't regret going, I just walked away with different feelings. For me it's not about guilt, it's about the shock of being part of a global economy that is at its core exploitative. That I live comfortably while these people don't have basic medical care, and my little splurges are equal to a days wage for them. Basically it was a window into the incredible, and unnecessary, inequality that exists. Something that didn't really hit me fully until I experienced it first hand.

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