Do you ever feel like you’re in a fishbowl?

Over the past ten years I’ve had the fortune to visit many countries. In 2014 I flew to Patagonia and spent five months travelling by bus to Colombia. This South American adventure was a true travel delight. In fact, some of my closest friends today came from that experience.

This was my first introduction to the travel world. A world full of summer season chasers, hedonistic heathens, and people who maximise their life for total stimulation in the search of that holy grail of…happiness.

In contrast, my world back home is a meaningful grind. We often tie ourselves to one location, cultivate communities, invest in friendships, build families, and go on the odd two-week holiday to reset. This is the real world in all its stable glory.

In recent years, I’ve started to travel again by taking five-week remote working trips. When these trips roll around I’m so ready for them. In fact, right now I’m sat in the back of a taxi in Ho Chi Minh City with five weeks of January sun and kitesurfing ahead of me. The uncertainty about who I’m going to meet and the excitement of what stories I’m going to accumulate is the reason I keep choosing these rich experiences.

I found I became too stale if I stayed in the real world too long. I became bored of repeated city activities. Simply put, I became boring. There are only so many catch ups you can have before you have nothing left to catch up about.

So right now I’m living in cycles, chasing the summer sun during the winter months. Five weeks in the travel world, twelve weeks in the real world. It feels like a good flow at the moment, for me.

However, this is where the fishbowl concept comes in. I woke up in London a few days ago whilst visiting my family for Christmas. The quiet London street and polite English culture felt the polar opposite of my nine-metre wind-powered ocean jumps on the north coast of Brazil. It just wasn’t me anymore.

How did I get here? How was I experiencing such polarities?

The travel world seemed like a distant dream. I lay in bed feeling like I was in a fishbowl. I felt a sudden urge to bust out of it again and search the ocean outside for more stimulation. My memory served me images from my recent travel escapades. This is when the stability of the real world can start to get you down. You feel like life could be richer on the other side of that glass. The usual grass-is-greener thought appears.

It’s not all sunshine and Mars Bars though. Too much time in the travel world and you become detached from reality. You go a little crazy floating around in that big blue sink. Sure, it’s great, you’ve got a lot of freedom. However, people come and go quickly. One minute they’re by your side, the next they’ve hopped on a slipstream to another part of the ocean. They’ve become a tappable circle on an app.

This happens whether you’re solo or coupled up. I’ve watched partners convince each other of the travel dream, only to then start yearning for a base - a fishbowl of their own to return to. One they actually like this time as they decided long ago that their home country is too “expensive” or “cold”. So now they have nowhere to belong.

I’m talking about sustained nomadism here. Not a one-time multi-month travel experience filled with wide-eyed first-time travellers, checking temples off their list. These nomadic travellers have settled into the life floating on the road. That gets tiring though - I’ve seen it first hand. Depression doesn’t care about cheap food prices or how sunny it is.

So what is the perfect subaquatic configuration for us humans?

Do you bust through the glass and swim into the ocean? Or remain in your fanciful fishbowl, seek to forget this duality and get on with life in the real world?

The real world has big benefits. We know that embracing community helps us live longer and be happier. You can make your world smaller by assimilating into a stable local community - humanity’s natural cradle. I’ve built a business on that concept, and it works.

However, even though my current work is about creating local fishbowls for others, I often feel trapped. I sometimes ask myself: how did I apparate into my current fishbowl? How do I smash out of it before the glass thickens?

Then I realise my discomfort isn’t wanderlust at all. It’s the unsettling realisation that I built the bowl myself. I tricked myself once again.

Maybe that’s the point though. Knowing you can break out whenever you want. The glass will always thicken. It’s just whether you recognise there’s a B-Side of your life out there waiting for you or not.

Your rich and expansive ocean.