Gaining a Little Perspective

When I started planning this trip, my reason was simply that I wanted to travel around the world. There's never a good time to take time off from "life" (which is not really life of course, but the rat race) and I felt that it was as good a time as it would ever be for me personally to do this trip now. I wasn't trying to find the meaning of life, I wasn't hoping to fall in love with some other backpacker (although if not for El Hombre, maybe I would have hoped to fall in love with a Spaniard so I could stay in Spain, or become the 5th wife of a sheikh so I could have an unlimited allowance), I wasn't on any type of mission and I wasn't trying to learn any life lessons. But unintentionally I ended up learning more about life than I expected. I think seeing how people live in other parts of the world gives you just a little bit more...perspective. How different people are, act and think in other parts of the world...yet how similar we are when it comes down to what really counts: to provide for and protect those we love, to have our basic needs met and upward mobility in order to strive for things we want, to have dignity as a human being. Basically we are all the same in that we all want/need family (which I use to include those people we love and care about, including friends), food and dignity. It's everything else that makes us different.

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I think the most meaningful conclusion I have reached as my travels draw to a close is this: happiness and freedom are most attainable to the middle and middle-upper class. And in the global context, I think happiness and freedom are most attainable to the middle and middle-upper class citizens of secular, democratic states with constitutionally protected rights. Which brings me to the conclusion: I am so thankful and happy to have the life I have. It's not that the poor or uber-rich people cannot be happy or free...I just think there are more obstacles in their way. The truly poor have to worry about daily sustenance - they get stuck at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - simply tending to their physiological needs is a real and daily struggle. It's hard to be happy when your stomach is empty (even if I go hungry for a few hours my bloodsugar levels take a nosedive and I get very cranky). I think freedom, in the broadest sense of the word, also requires a degree of financial mobility (for example, most U.S. citizens have the freedom to travel to almost anywhere in the world, but in real terms, without the money to do so, they are not actually free to travel). But money can also end up being its own prison. People who become consumed by money (when it becomes the end in itself, and not simply the means to afford the things you need to live a happy life) and ensnared in the world of social status-ladder-climbing and/or the acceptable mores of high society are trapped in almost as bad a prison as the truly poor.

Ergo, happiness and freedom are most attainable to the middle and middle-upper class. Not exactly a fool-proof theorem or argument. Good thing I didn't become a litigator.