van van “He who wants to travel happily, must travel light,” said Antoine de Saint-Exupery in a ‘Little Prince’ that marked a before and after in the history of literature. And he was right.
Today’s life haunts us. We live in a spiral of mediocrities run by technology, working life, money, anxiety, and conformity. We believe we have the key to happiness in our wallet, but we are amazed with the curiosity of never satiating ourselves with the purchases we make with it. There is something that goes beyond our dissatisfaction with what we have, and it is the desire to never feel a healthy material saturation.
What might this be due to?
We could stop to think that our life is full of insignificant objects that illuminate us with the idea of happiness. We have houses, cars, state-of-the-art mobiles, televisions that entertain us when we don’t want to think, jobs that collapse us in exchange for money, surgery that beautifies us when we don’t like our image. Capitalist life has proclaimed itself “exclusively happy when owned.”
And what about experiences?
What is traveling? Several psychological studies claim that when we reflect on our last moment of greatest joy, our minds often take us on a journey in good company. And this cannot be a coincidence.
Life is a continuous roller coaster of experiences in which, as human beings, we enlarge ourselves with the things that move us away from our circle of comfort. There, far from what we can and know how to control, is where the magic happens; and our hair stands on end as we re-create ourselves in those memories that filled us so much inside.
That is why Antoine de Saint-Exupery was so right. If traveling brings that happiness of which you speak so much living new experiences, better to put aside everything that, to advance in them, is a hindrance. That is why I decide to collect moments before products.
