Year Two of No Flying

Emily here, reporting on my second straight calendar year of no flying (first year post). At first, I couldn’t think of much to say about the absence of an experience, the same way I have nothing to say about not riding a camel and not driving a tractor. I just haven’t done it; it’s not a part of my life and I don’t think about it much.

Instead I’ll reflect on how my second year of no flying has also been the year of my best travel experiences ever.

Here’s some context about me: I’ve done quite a lot of flying and international travel in my life. I spent many years of my early childhood in Shanghai, and my family took vacations to many tourist attractions in the Eastern Hemisphere, in places like Thailand, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and of course, China. I remember almost nothing about these trips, because I was so young then.

After moving back to the U.S., our family vacations continued in the Western Hemisphere: Alaska, Maine, Florida, Washington, California, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Costa Rica, Peru.

In the years since, I’ve become embarrassed to mention all this traveling in my past. It seems offensively lavish. Insensitive of planetary reality. Pointlessly destructive. But it did happen, and I think a silver lining is that my flight-full childhood made it easier, not harder, to go flight-free as an adult.

You see, while I had fun on these trips, none of them were really important to me. When I was 7 years old, that was mainly because I was 7 years old. But even as a teen, when I had the facilities to be more involved, I still tagged along in the metaphorical child’s seat. As I experienced them, these trips were lighthearted affairs. Little was at stake. It didn’t really matter. I went out of a sense of obligation, tried to appreciate the museums because I ought to, tried to enjoy the activities because I ought to.

I did enjoy it, but at what cost? Looking back, it feels like a waste of resources and pollution to have flown me around to these vacations, given how little long-term impact they had on me. Sure, I got short-term enjoyment. But I also enjoyed reading books, going to dance class, playing music, and being with my friends. I wasn’t deficient in enjoyment. I didn’t need to fly to Alaska to enjoy life more. All these meaningless (sorry, Mom and Dad) trips knocked flying flying off any pedestal it might have otherwise been on. I didn’t covet airplane travel as a status symbol or an escape route. So when I made that first decision not to fly for a year, I didn’t feel like I was giving up much.

In contrast, my first years of independence, which are also my first years of (intentionally) not flying, have yielded by far the most fun, rewarding, and life-changing travel experiences of my life. I’ve written about my two major multi-day trips in 2023: going to a 10-day Vipassana meditation course in Western Massachusetts and going to a cob workshop in Tennessee. Both trips were done by train and bike, as is all of my travel these days. Both experiences were amazing and far more impactful than any “vacation” I’d taken before. I learned about myself, tackled the challenges of pushing my limits far beyond where I’d gone before, and built cherished connections with people and communities. These trips weren’t really vacations at all in the traditional sense of “going somewhere to relax and kick back.” They were journeys with a purpose. If I wanted to relax, I’d stay home!

You could say my travel experiences as an adult far surpass those as a child because I’m the one in control now. That’s exactly true. I did what I wanted to do. I wanted to learn about cob. I wanted to try a 10-day meditation course. I wanted to travel by bike. I didn’t want to fly. I did what I wanted to do, even if that meant going alone, and against my parents concerned wishes. Prioritization.

Many people imagine not flying to be inconvenient, annoying, and frustrating. That’s not how it feels to me. Actually, it doesn’t feel like anything, most of the time. I never think “Gosh darn, if only I could fly there!” I genuinely don’t want to fly, so that would be like thinking “Gosh darn, if only I could eat my shoe!” Every choice to do something is also a choice to not do something else, but when I talk to people about not flying, they tend to focus on what I’m not doing rather than what I am doing. What I’m not doing is flying. What I am doing is striving to be true to myself and positively impact the world, and having a pretty darn good time while I’m at it.

By the way, I also discovered that was easier than I’d expected to travel the country by bike and train, despite the tragic pruning of America’s passenger rail system. When I searched, it was possible to get to basically anywhere I wanted in the continental U.S. via train plus up to a few days of biking. I now know that’s within my ability (with a little training), and an enticing adventure at that! I don’t bemoan trips to Europe I’m not going to do, but I do look forward with excitement to my future bike tours across America. I have lots of ideas dreamed up, places I want to go learn and landscapes I’d love to spend meditative days pedaling across.

Changing the way I travel is only one part of the many ways I’ve changed my life to be more true to who I am and who I want to be. I’ve not only changed how I travel, but why I travel. When I discuss the effects, it can’t really be separated from everything else at play. My life is not a scientific experiment: there is only one of me. But this has been an important part of my journey.

Recently, I read “The Case Against Travel” by Agnes Collard, an essay that ruffled feathers this summer. It’s really “Some Thoughts Against Meaningless Leisure Travel, or Vacationing.” I appreciated that it criticized the thoughtlessness and conformity that can be found in vacationing, and challenged the reader to think about what they really got from their travels. As others have pointed out, it’s far from a watertight “case,” but I think it prodded something that needed more prodding. I really liked Dan Duett’s take on it, as he shares many of my views on travel (the unfairness of the massive emissions emitted by plane travel, the desperate need for more local community) and has on top of that, read Callard’s book on aspiration and can offer insights from there.

It goes without saying that I will indefinitely continue to not fly. But also, going forward, I don’t see myself doing much of that flight-enabled style of vacationing that Callard derides, either. My travel is now more considered than it used to be, not only because I am now doing it on my own dime and vacation hours, but also because it takes so gloriously long, and because I am more in tune with what I want to do in life. I now think of traveling as the enjoyable process of getting to somewhere I truly want to be, whether that be away to valuable learning opportunities or home to loved ones.

There’s so much more to be said about flying and travel, but I’ll wrap it up here for now and leave you with a short montage of clips I recorded during my travels this year. Happy 2024!