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Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

Volunteering and traveling both put you in a position you are not normally in. They will give you new ways to look at things, from how you might be acting as a customer (volunteering) to how much work goes on behind the scenes (volunteering) and how different people live, work, and play (travel). It's mind-expansion. It's fun. It's rewarding. You make new friends. You find new things to love. Your perceptions change. You become a different person.

Of course, you can also volunteer and travel and get absolutely nothing out of it. Depends.

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Speaking as a sometimes-introvert, it's very, very easy to go travelling and not meet anyone.

Yep, if you can't mingle in your home town, you won't mingle in a foreign town.

I think traveling brings a sense of anonymity that, for some, can lift a lot of social pressures.

To throw my anecdote out there, I find that I have no trouble at all talking to people on the road and making friends but I can't do that at all when I'm at home. I have very few friends at home but when I'm out traveling I find myself opening up conversations with perfect strangers. I've made some terrific friends doing that.

Just wish I could make myself do it at home, too.

In contrast, I have learned that I am just as shy in the middle of nowhere as I am at home.

The difference is that you have to talk to people at some point when you're traveling, only if to ask for directions.

GPS.

My record is three weeks on the road with no conversation deeper than ordering a meal or checking in to a hotel. And I'm not really all that introverted.

I did then use gumtree to find some folks to travel with, but still, just saying 'travel' is not really a cure-all for introversion.

Try travelling on a budget. A really really low budget. You'll have to bum lifts, work casual labour, sleep in less than luxurious places... If you aren't making meaningful human contact after a month on a starting budget of $100, then you probably never will.

Begging for rides and sleeping in stys seem worse than total isolation to me.

I also can't imagine someone who is an extreme introvert would be able to pick up odd cash jobs really easily, and also don't seem like great ways to have extended contact with other people.

I'm an introvert and had a great time when I was younger travelling with no money. It's not just meeting other people, I would say one of the most satisfying things about travelling is the risk. Risk is scary, it wakes you up, makes you feel alive. Being comfortable is wonderful, but if you are always comfortable I feel like a part of you goes to sleep. I was biking home on my normal comfortable route the other day and starting improvising another way home and got fairly seriously lost. I was late and it rained on me, but I felt happier.

"felt happier" when you got home, right?

It's an interesting point that risk makes you feel alive, I've experienced it myself and you feel brilliant afterwards.

Once I got trapped in a wave machine as a child and was being spun around underwater, but kept down the panic and managed to work out how to get out again. I was probably underwater for a total of 90-120 seconds. People were going crazy when I came back up but once I'd got my breath back I felt incredible.

I wonder if it's possible to apply this sort of risk-reward feeling to earning money? Is this what people feel like when they put everything into a startup? Money just sort of seems so mundane when compared to physical activity.

I felt happier when I was out in it too. One of my happiest memories is sitting under a tree in a thunderstorm eating muesli. I was in a country where I didn't speak the language and I had little money and no place to stay. I sat under that tree crunching away and being incredibly happy that I was having an adventure. My new resolution is to stop being so comfortable and get out in the world some more, even if it hurts.

> Volunteering and traveling both put you in a position you are not normally in.

Volunteering is work. Sometimes hard work, back breaking even. I don't do it for fun, and certainly not the pay. I did it a few times to try to see what it is people get from it, and while it was nice to help people in need, I don't see it as you listed. I'll probably do it again soon because someone has to do the work.

> It's mind-expansion. It's fun. It's rewarding. You make new friends. You find new things to love. Your perceptions change. You become a different person.

I don't see it as, "Man, you blew my mind" type expansion (what ever that means). In fact, a lot of what you just said could be applied to just plain work.

Again, either people are getting something from it that I don't 'get' without having someone enunciate exactly what it is or people who give this advice don't really volunteer, or something that needs explaining to me.

Firstly, since I don't want to spam replies, a comment on an earlier post:

> "Yelling at people doesn't help. It kind of feels like people are telling a person to just cheer up if they're clinically depressed."

Except it's completely different. "Go interact with human beings" is actionable advice, he even listed a whole bunch of ways by which this interaction can be achieved. This is very different than a general, un-actionable "just get better, duh".

To do what he suggests you literally just follow his post. His advice is IMO relevant - just like when I'm feeling frustrated at work my coworker tells me to go take a walk. It's directly actionable, and it works.

> "I did it a few times to try to see what it is people get from it"

I think this is at least part of the problem.

This is sort of like saying "I picked up a basketball a few times, I just don't get it", or "I sat in front of a piano and hit some keys, but I still don't get it". Volunteering is not some kind of religious experience where you go and 30 minutes later you've received the Divine Revelation of Why This Matters. There is no magical threshold where you will suddenly be dumbstruck with All The Volunteering Secrets.

If you want to grok volunteering, you need to have more than a glancing blow with it. You will not collect the rewards on the first day, or the second, or the third.

I don't think there is anything more to it. I think it is a matter of personality or perhaps something along the lines of "neural wiring."

I feel pretty much the same as you do - for stuff like this the juice just isn't worth the squeeze. I think that for some people the juice just tastes better - maybe they have "taste buds" that I lack or maybe I have a much better imagination such that the difference between the actual "juice" and just thinking about the juice is much smaller. FWIW, I also get no pleasure out of physical activity, no runner's high and after working with a physical trainer 4 days a week for two years getting into shape and dropping 75lbs to a normal weight I felt no better than I did when I was fat - the only difference that was perceptible to me was that my old clothes were too loose. Maybe that's all related, maybe not.

fwiw I never got any pleasure out of physical training either - lifting weights, running, etc is just pure tedium for me.

I do, however, get a surprising emotional boost from physical work. Axe, shovel, sledgehammer, wheelbarrow. I don't so it all that regularly, and the effects would no doubt wear off pretty damn fast if it was my day job, but when I do it invariably puts a smile on my face

Have you ever learned another language, or lived in another country for an extended period of time?

Often when people say 'travel' they mean immerse yourself in another culture. One of the deepest learning experiences you can have that forever changes your view of the world and your own culture.

You may have already had that. But if you haven't, understand that travel is as varied a thing as reading. There is a vast difference between War and Peace and a blog post.

> Have you ever learned another language, or lived in another country for an extended period of time.

Yes and yes.

> Often when people say 'travel' they mean immerse yourself in another culture. One of the deepest learning experiences you can have that forever changes your view of the world and your own culture.

I think the loose definition might be part of the problem. Some people might say that going to the west coast for a week and telling everyone how they touched a whale was like being born again vs living in another country for a month is confusing, and doesn't seem like the same problem. Still, having lived in another country where I could vaguely speak the language didn't seem so magical.

The definition is loose because everyone does it differently, and finds something different.

You should look into Buddhism, or Yoga (which is many many things, only one of which is doing poses on the floor). What most people never understand is that there is a lot of introspection, thinking, reflecting, noticing, altering, and understanding that you should be doing.

One example: by concentrating on your breathing (and I mean really noticing everything about every aspect of the action of taking a breath and what happens before, during, after, etc etc) you will learn things. You will learn how your body works. You will learn what it sounds like when you breathe. You will learn how deep a breath you can take. You will learn how long you can hold it. You will learn how your posture can affect it. You will learn how your breath affects your immediate surrounding. How it can affect your mood. How it can alter sensation. How it can be changed. How it can be tuned. And a million more things, just from spending time thinking about and tinkering with your breathing.

You can take this one concept of constantly noticing, evaluating, and learning about all the possible aspects of one single thing, and begin to do the same thing as you travel, or as you volunteer, or as you do any thing at all.

This is why the concepts of travel, volunteer, etc are so broad. There is an infinite number of possible things to influence your brain, which will alter every possible thing about you (the way you think, talk, speak, act, etc). But you can't just stand in a room and wait for enlightenment. It's an active process. You must seek out change by taking everything in and thinking about it. It doesn't happen overnight.

Reading your description of all the things you can learn about your own breathing reminds me of a line in a Seinfeld episode when Tia the model turns to Jerry and says: "I've never met a man who knew so much about nothing"

Reading your comments I have to ask - what IS magical to you?

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