Solo travel is an inherently selfish pursuit. You are just consuming, and not creating anything of value for society.
I met a solo traveler waiting for the airport bus in Thailand, and the next week we did a road trip across the country and back together. I met a solo traveler in Hungary on the train that needed accommodation, so they stayed in my living room and we spent a few days traveling. I met a solo traveler in Italy, and the following week we decided to hitchhike to various coastal cities. Their "selfish pursuit" brought me all sorts of value.
It just isn’t an enlightened pursuit. If you want to escape life as a corporate drone or whatever running away isn’t the answer.
'Escape' and 'running away' are roughly synonymous.
What other escapes do you prefer?
You can leave an unfulfilling job for another form of responsibility in life that is more fulfilling.
Endless travel is really just life without responsibility. Having zero responsibility actually does not make most people happy in the long term. It’s an unnatural human state, particularly for grown men, and most will wake up eventually (perhaps once it’s too late) and realize there’s nothing enlightening about a life lived that way.
A lot of us think it’s time to design new values and beliefs.
But many (most?) self-fund their ongoing travel, whether through odd jobs while traveling, savings from a previous stable employment, or "digital nomad" work on the road[1]. In that sense, they're just shifting a portion of their contributions from time period B to time period A, in the same way that spending during retirement works. I don't see how this can be described as "feel[ing] no shared responsibility to contribute to society" any more than someone who spreads their contributions more evenly over time: it's just describing the use of money as a store of value.