I can't believe it has come to this that *I* am giving career advice. But given the number of emails I receive on "how to be a travel writer" or "how to fund my travels", even from students as young as in high school, I'm inclined to issue a warning and perhaps some helpful advice. Because what worries me is that they want to jump right into it as a career option without bothering about the nature of work that could sustain this lifestyle.

(Full disclosure: I have quit my corporate job to travel more and I fully recommend it. But my warning is to consider the issues I discuss below before quitting.)

Brace yourself, long post ahead! If you're contemplating quitting your job to travel the world, this is for you. If you're not but looking to travel, head straight to this section - What you could do instead of dreaming of quitting your job to travel.

Lifelong travel is a means to no end. Seriously!

All those who seem to travel forever, do some kind of work. (Ridiculous that some people think they don’t work, they work very hard!) These people, they’ve hustled and found ways to sustain themselves while on the road. But hustling for a year or two or five, is absolutely great. Anything beyond frankly is tiring and pointless in my opinion. 90% of those Internet people who pontificated quitting their jobs to travel the world have gone back to steady jobs and the few who didn't they have hit the jackpot only by creating businesses and innovative sources of income out of their addiction. So you see, people cannot travel the world forever; you'd be mighty bored and will run out of money before you get there! Heck, even Nomadic Matt has thought of settling down and started a hostel for crying out loud! Maybe you'd go around the world in 8 years or in 80 days but only wanderlust isn't going to sustain forever.

While it is an enticing idea to go on an endless vacation, the reality is much more boring and the idea equally asinine. If travel is the cure for ennui, endless travel without an agenda will bring back the same ennui you tried to escape in first place. If you’re wondering this is not true, look back at your own travels. What amazed you on your first trip most certainly wouldn’t amaze you the same way now after 20 trips.

It isn't always practically possible, to live a life of constant travel

I can't peddle a life of travel because some of us might be privileged enough to have no responsibilities but that's not the case with everyone. The way people speak about this makes me very uncomfortable. What is going to happen tomorrow if everyone starts quitting his or her jobs and travel? The few of us who have these glamorous jobs writing about travel is only possible because others are doing their so called "boring" jobs and paying for our indulgences. They are busy running the world!

Encouraging people to follow their dreams is noble. Asking to do so by brushing off the circumstances in one wide stroke of laziness or reluctance is downright cruel. I see this happening time and again over social media and in all those gushing blog posts proselytizing quitting jobs to travel, and this gets on my nerves to no end. By all means, encourage people to follow their dreams. But before doing that, acknowledge your own privilege. A person from the slums and a middle class person do not start from the same rung of the ladder; let's not even act as if it is anything else. Our troubles are the worst, but only to us, let's not make a mountain out a molehill. That's one reason I do not share much about my life or struggles after quitting my job. I need time to make sense of what's happening, of my future and also to understand how to project it in a realistic way.

Before heading straight to the "quit your job to travel" section, I would highly suggest keeping a tab on reality too. Perhaps you need to spend time with family or take care of a loved one or work on a dream project that requires your time, being on the road constantly is highly overrated not the only way to see the world. Do what we do best, adapt and make best use of what's available to us instead of dreaming of hitting the road indefinitely. Hustling to travel constantly sounds fancy, but what it is in reality is the same old drudgery packaged with different rewards and issues minus a cubicle, office politics and perhaps ennui.

Sense of accomplishment is crucial to our happiness, choose wisely!

We spend a better part of our life doing work, whatever it is that we choose to do. If it's not enjoyable, if it's not motivating, if we're not proud of what we're creating, we'll be hopelessly lost in the long run. Looking back at the last few years of my life, I do not want to look at a string of influencer marketing deals that made me richer but left nothing but a trail of product recommendations in my wake. Neither do I want to see a binder full of clips in high-end magazines telling people where the hottest luxury hotel has just opened or gush about a well-worn tourist trail. Either way, I could've made a lot of money if I so wished and would've travelled a lot too. But there would've been the same void that I failed to fill in my corporate life - a bottomless pit of discontent at not creating something that I considered useful.

Money is important to our general well being. But the most important thing that gets swept under the rug for some strange reason is work satisfaction. When you come to me asking for advice on how to quit your job to travel, it shows that you have given no thought to the work that you want to put behind it. What's the worst you are willing to do to travel? Do you have a threshold and how long can you put up with meaningless jobs? Do you have a particular liking to one aspect or kind of travel? You need to consider finding work that aligns with your interest and liking. For instance, even though I'd get to travel, I'd be downright miserable writing luxury hotel reviews for even a reputed publication because it is just not what I want and it's just not the right fit for me.

So while a life of travel might sound enticing, at the end of the day, you need to feel proud of the work you are putting out. You'll achieve lasting satisfaction when you find a worthy reason to wake up every morning, when you find a meaning to your passion.

What you should look for instead?
Some sort of purpose that intersects with your passion.

It might look like I'm veering into boring philosophical territory here, but stay with me because if you're contemplating quitting your job to travel, this is pertinent. I remember having many conversations with friends and strangers fraught with anxiety and disenchantment of the "normal" lifestyle. These people were so depressed, they were happy to join any company and do anything that would allow them to travel. But you cannot lead a lifetime with a purpose as shallow as "traveling for fun".

So many of my friends started something dreamy, quickly realized working in the travel industry too comes with the same old constraints of routine grunt work, along with the insane rollercoaster ride of emotions and conflicts thrown in as an entrepreneur, and have now settled comfortably in their lives. But they’ve done so with the added contentment that they at least tried. Few have gone on to make a living out of travel. Those who succeeded had a passion that went beyond travel, an underlying motivation that pushed them through the infinite hurdles.

If money or time was no consequence, what is it that you'd want to do every single day of your life? After lounging on the beach or a hilltop for months, you'll want to do something of consequence. So even though it may seem like money or travel or luxury makes you happy at the moment, once these things are achieved you'll be looking for something more.

Ever since I realized this, I’ve changed how I travel. I now exclusively pursue novelty and stories instead. Why? It makes me feel alive and it gives me something to tell. Here, this is a passion that could translate into a tangible result instead of something as fleeting and generic as seeing beautiful places or traveling for fun. Novelty is the fuel to my passion and sharing that story to the world gives purpose to my passion. Life has been so much simpler ever since I realized this. (The reason I enjoy writing for reputed publications more than my blog is this, I enjoy reaching as many people as possible.)

Find what fuels your passion and what gives meaning to it.

Here's what being a travel writer entails.

Travel writing is a lot like unrequited love. You go through a lot for a very little in return but you do it anyway because you love it. Not because you get to travel, but because you get a high from publishing. I'm going to expound this more in another post in future but take this on face value for now - getting into travel writing hoping you'll get to travel is going to be the sure-fire way to kill your interest in both travelling and writing.

Here's what being a travel blogger entails.

You could put in the same kind of work, writing wise, into your blog and succeed as a travel blogger without the insecurities of publishing industry. But again, you'll succeed only if you're driven to create quality content consistently for absolutely no return while bootstrapping, interacting and engaging with your followers, creating an illusion and feeding their curiosity persistently, and marketing your lifestyle or life story obsessively. As you see, if you don't have a passion for blogging, social media and a certain affinity to self-promote to begin with, you won't succeed here either.

In the same vein, to be successful as a travel photographer, you need to be really passionate about photography first and also be good at it! And be prepared to be a one-man army in running your business.

It's not all hunky dory. It is work. Do you have passion for this kind of work? If not, how different is this - doing any job for travel that is - from choosing a meaningless job for the reward of a salary or travel? You'll be back to resenting your life in no time! The only difference is now you're both miserable and penniless. In your corporate job, at least you were not penniless.

I couldn't put it any more eloquently than Mark Manson who elaborately explains you need to be in love with both the result and the struggle required to get to the result, to succeed in an unconventional pursuit. Travel is the reward and the drudgery you're willing to put up with, is what you have to figure out. "Our struggles define our successes, so choose your struggles wisely my friend", he says. Couldn't agree more, go read his superb piece linked below and come back to see what you could do about travel.

The most important question of your life - How do you choose to suffer?

(While you're at it, see if whatever you have in mind is going to pass the litmus test of positively getting through these questions? 7 Strange Questions That Help You Find Your Life Purpose)

***

Here's what you could do instead of dreaming of quitting your job to travel:

1. Find a suitable job that allows you to travel and pays you well

Look no further than fellow traveller Anshul Chaurasia who I profiled on my blog earlier. With a well paying corporate job and meticulous planning, he’s on his way to seeing as much of the world as possible. If you even remotely enjoy the work you do, this is the best approach to fund your travels. Read: You don't have to quit your job to travel. Here's why!

2. Find a passion that also allows you to travel

Passion's the operative word here. That passion could be storytelling, videography, photography, research, conservation, science, activism, documentary filmmaking or even teaching! Then it wouldn’t be like you are travelling to feed your passion, your passion itself would take you places. This is the kind of work that sustains over a long period, very long period.

3. Work towards a location independent lifestyle

I cannot recommend this enough. It's a miracle that we're now in a place that allows us to work remotely. In my opinion, this is one the best things to come out of Internet proliferation for the common public. Take out all the horrible work things that ties you to a location like long commutes, useless meetings, constraints that require to you to be present physically and your work no longer is the noose around your neck. Instead it is now your ticket to freedom!

4. Sort your priorities. Do a SWOT analysis. Make a plan.

List your goals and work towards them. Travel cannot be an actionable goal. X amount of money and Y days of vacation is. Think hard, figure out what’s important to you and also what’s acceptable to you - and then find some middle ground.

5. Hustle or Save up. Then go for a gap year!

Earn and save up. Travel for a year or two. Get back to your job and life. Repeat. For this, hustle away to glory. From SEO links to influencers ads to barter exchanges to random “flavour of the season” neo-digital media campaigns, everything goes. But be warned, don’t think of this as your long-term strategy because in the long run, this sort of hustling sucks big time. Hustle to find your path, not to stay on it forever.

Travel. (Work) Satisfaction. Money.

If you’re not intent on arriving at this winning trifecta at some point in your journey, I would suggest to not bother with quitting your stable job to travel the world forever, because you might end up in the same old rut you tried to escape and it’s only going to be much worse this time.

In the end, all I want to say is there is no need to mix travel and work. If you do, do it wisely and it can be immensely gratifying. Or keep them separate and have the best of both worlds!

Related reading:

A comprehensive primer for Digital Nomads & location independent entrepreneurs by Legal Nomads

With all the “How I quit my job to Travel” stories (mine included) floating around in the web world, it might be easy to think that quitting job is the only possible way to travel. But that’s a far cry from reality and definitely not a pre-requisite to travel the world!

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list! - Susan Sontag

Quitting your full time job sounds like a fancy proposition but the hard truth is it is not as glamorous as it sounds. There’s the possibility of a lot of travel but there’s a lot of work involved as well. You have the freedom but you don’t have the luxury of a big chunk of disposable income anymore. In the end, it’s all about making a choice.

Both the situations have their pros and cons. I have travelled a lot over the past few years – with a job in hand and without one over the past few months. I have experienced both sides of the coin and certainly have missed few things from my cubicle days. The thing is, when most of us quit our jobs to travel, we find another work. Travel is not an escape from work and it isn’t supposed to be.

So, unless you have found another way to make money and pay your bills, traveling with a job in hand can actually be quite amazing. With some good planning, you can travel a lot! I once met a German guy who worked as a teacher, a profession that gave him enough long vacations (summer, winter, Christmas etc) during which he used to travel to many countries every single year. And every few years, he used to find work in a different country allowing him to explore that part of the world while he was posted there. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Here’s the story of another friend who goes on crazy adventures across the world and he does it all with the help of his corporate job and some kickass planning. As we speak, he’s already making plans to overland across Central Asia and visit one of the least visited places, Socotra Island this year. In the last 2 years, he’s been on the Trans-Siberian journey, wreck-dived in Bali, ice-dived in Russia, went on the highest and longest train journey in the world from China to Tibet and visited about 20 odd countries.

Hear it straight from the horse’s mouth!

Anshul Chaurasia tells you why having a job to travel the world is just as awesome.

Being in a full time job and managing travel is very much possible. The easier way to understand is to take this up job as the source of funds and travel as the main passion. Secondly one needs to be very proactive in planning. Just like managers plan projects months in advance and have a pipeline, one can plan their travel well in advance. I have nothing against impromptu vacations, but things like international travel, cheap airfare deals, and visa issues are handled well if you have proper timeline. Think, three-four week long holidays abroad/in India as big projects that need planning and small weekend holidays as ad-hoc deliverables that need shorter planning. Also saving up money becomes easier when you have a timeline - book tickets in first month, hotels next month, visas as early as the specific consulate allows, and the Forex in the month you would be travelling. Also informing at one's employer 3-4 months before the travel helps since managers can manage dependencies easily then. This becomes a major hurdle for last minute holidays.

For example I planned a trip to Bali more than a year in advance as I got Bangalore - Bali return fares for as low as 8000 INR in an AirAsia sale. Also be a big hound for cheap airfares deals, once that is done rest of the things can be taken care of easily.

It would be wrong if I don't accept that the thought to quit my current job and do something more conducive to travel industry - like a writer, scuba trainer etc has not come in my mind. But then a stable well paying job gives one the luxury to plan costly destinations, borrow money from people since you can return them next month, use credit cards without much thought, and above all a stable revenue stream is hard to give up.

I did try a short 2.5 months trip this year, which spanned 26,000 Kms of overland travel across Russia, Mongolia, China, Tibet and Nepal and was able to get Leave of Absence from office (unpaid, naturally). But the peace of mind one gets because there is a job waiting back cannot be compared to if I had to quit and search another job after coming back. Best part is that I told them the real reason and after much convincing they were in support of it.

I think this if fine as travel does a lot of broadening of one's perspectives and if their parents can fund their travel I would say they should definitely try it for few months at least. In west, many people do it taking student loans after college end. But then getting a job makes one value every single rupee earned and then one becomes a conscious traveler as they are spending their own hard-earned money.

The mantra is don’t think your job will be the driving force in your life, you would have to find that force yourself. If travel is that force, then use whatever fuel you can get to keep it running.

Have you thought of quitting your job to travel?

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” - Henry David Thoreau

Surprisingly, it wasn’t all about travel. 

Although travel had a lot to do with this decision, it was also not entirely about it. It was something so much more than travel. Something that travel had introduced me to, freedom! The freedom to do things we want and things we must. I love to travel, no doubt, and having a steady job with good income and a great number of vacations per year was actually working out quite well for me. But somewhere along it felt like I was trying hard to play catch up and never really caught up. The last few months have been so crazy I’ve hardly been able to do anything I like. It was an exciting period both professionally and personally but it drained me out completely and left me mentally exhausted.

Despite having never gone to gym, I used to be pretty fit thanks to frequent short yet strenuous treks. But over the last few years I have become so dull, I struggled to climb every single time I have gone trekking in the recent past. Being unfit in the outdoors is so not fun, trust me! No treks, no sunsets, no cool evenings, it seemed all that time was spent in traffic. And the rest of the time, I was busy playing catch up. I got a lot of writing done (Read : Reflecting on a year as a Travel Writer!), got a lot of experience and all that slogging was part of the mandatory early learning curve but it had to go away. It had to end.

I had already given up on material possessions in favor of meaningful experiences, you know how travel does that to you, but I wasn’t counting the mental energy and precious time I was still investing to keep up this lifestyle. One fine day, as I struggled with this new discomfort, I came across Henry David Thoreau’s excellent quote “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” That did it for me, I decided it wasn’t worth it anymore. I didn’t want the extra money at the cost of living with stress and restraint. I wanted freedom - the time to indulge in my passions, to travel, to read, to write, to go visit my family and have the bandwidth to explore and do/create something meaningful.

I did not want to settle for what’s been handed to me. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t escape me for one moment that I’ve been blessed with extremely good fortune where I have a good life, am free to travel, have my health, earn well and have a supportive family that doesn’t require my financial support. Because I had nothing stopping me, it made all the more sense to go after my dreams or make better use of my time than participate in the rat race. If not, all that good fortune seemed just like a crutch to take support from forever instead of making it a pedestal from where I could fly higher. I’ve taken the path of least resistance so far(finished school, took up engineering, took up the first job I got) but now it’s time to tread new waters and push boundaries.

Years from now, I don’t want to be wondering “what if?”. Travel has showed me how beautiful life and this world can be and I intend to experience as much of it as possible. Cliched as it may sound, I want to feel alive and be free.

Of course I will be traveling more but I am not taking off on a six month trip to some place exotic because time is what I need, not more travel. All I want now is the bandwidth to try out different things, enjoy the sunsets, think about how the next years of mine should look like, write and read more. I want time to stand still while I figure this out. But since we do not have that luxury, I want to slow down or just stop in my tracks, turn back and start over. I do not want to escape the hard work, just that I want to invest my time and energy in doing things that matter to me and are close to my heart. And that’s the freedom I dream of.

I am excited about the future, that which is unwritten, wide open and mine to create.

The one where endless possibilities await!

NOTE : In case you are wondering, I used to work in the IT Industry. ;)