maybe don't quit your job to become a travel influencer

ok this letter was a little emo but I’m sharing anyway because infinite full-time travel is sooooo deeply unnatural, as is “influencing” — and that is a reality that is important to discuss!! rest assured we are not quitting, just evolving :)

Hello from the suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut! It’s the Tuesday after the 4th of July, and I’m writing this from guest room of my oldest friend’s house where she lives with her husband and three pets. I’ve been crashing here since last week when I took the Amtrak from New York City for a moms and daughters weekend — flanked between two (!) of my college friends’ baby showers in the city. An overdose of family fun after 4 months on the island of travel with Nick.

I have tried and failed to articulate my feelings towards travel, social media and the prospect of settling down after 15 months of hopping but I can never get the tone right. It’s always more somber than it should be — I think because I’m afraid to own the thing that I’ll go ahead and say anyway: I feel relieved to have accomplished my goal of traveling for one year through Asia — South America felt like a bonus. I feel smug because I have been blasé in my pursuit of a social media audience and grew one anyway. And having gotten everything I wanted and more - I have no fucking clue what to do next.

ON ACCIDENTALLY AND SORT OF ON PURPOSE MONETIZING OUR LIFE DREAM

For the last three years, everything we did was in service of our goal to spend time traveling the world. The goal was always the travel itself — everything else (the youtube videos, the city guides, the instagram reels, the spending through our life savings) we did to increase our chances of continuing to travel, not so that we could become travel creators. The distinction is important because we are now (for the time being) tired of traveling full time, thus goal-less, and at the precipice of becoming full fledged bills paid, brand trip, content creators which is so cool but also….. not exactly what I wanted?

I LOVE youtube. There’s something so special about building an audience of people who heard you out and chose to stick around. I know the comfort of seeing a 30 minute upload from my favorite creator after a stressful week — it’s mind boggling to think that we are that for some people. I can also honestly say that documenting our trip online was an additive experience — it connected us with locals from around the world who shared perspective, advice, and a pride in their cities that made us feel even luckier to be there.

But after 15 months, to continue to travel full time feels like having a third glass of wine at dinner — still fun, but less so than the first two, and at a point (the 4th glass, the 5th?) more depleting than it is enriching… which is awkward considering this is what we built our platform on.

There’s also an existentialism that I can’t shake about sharing the way we do on Instagram — I cannot have my personality reduced to Where I Think You Should Eat in Tokyo if You Want to Be Cooler Than Your Friends. I don’t care if it pays my bills. I want to HANG OUT with my friends, not one up them in niche restaurant references to a chorus of 70k on instagram.

At the same time, there’s no denying the ego stroke that comes from living like this!!! In June alone we went from Santiago to Lima to Mexico City to New York. We’re weighing Paris versus Berlin for the fall, preplanning a third trip to Seoul for our routine doctors appointments. We got recognized twice on the way to dinner in Brooklyn this week. If I reread that paragraph I’m like damn girl you won at life wtf are you on about! But after years of observing people all over the world live their lives, I am craving one of my own.

I have talked many times about bending life to your will — and I know first hand how easy it is to live without any parameters when you believe there are no rules. But freedom isn’t having every possibility at your fingertips, it’s living a life that you choose even if, by making those choices, you eliminate other ones.

We risked everything for a chance to travel the world for a year and have been floating in the ether ever since. It’s the greatest thing we ever did, but it’s not a sustainable lifestyle. Not if we want to actually live for ourselves and not for the way our life looks on the internet. I know this to my core, yet I struggle to think of something I want that’s worth giving up the possibility of anything for. Decisions come with compromises, visas, money and job constraints that I know we’ll need to work through soon. but for now it is a privilege to exist comfortably in the in-between.

:)

ps nick is very much here hahaha he’ll share his thoughts (which differ from mine) in future videos <3