The feeling of wanting to leave everything behind...

It’s quite ironic that in a world as vast as  ours, we often find ourselves clinging to just a tiny part of it. Often, we die in the same  place we came into existence, surrounded by roughly the same people. Somehow, we’re expected  to remain close to our roots, our family, and the friends we accumulated in that environment as if  we’re irreplaceable parts of it.

As years passed, we grew attached to our little bubble: it feels  safe and familiar, and it’s hard to imagine life outside of it. Yet, some people decide to escape  the bubble, detach themselves from the known and familiar, and start over elsewhere with a clean  slate. This desire to escape might stem from necessity, but it could also arise from a deep  wish to part from the past, from what we, for years, called our ‘life,’ and start over fresh.

But where does this urge to leave everything behind come from? And is packing our stuff  and starting somewhere afresh actually a smart move? Is there anything profound  and meaningful about changing location, or is it just a means to escape discontent?

This video explores the curious feeling of wanting to leave everything behind  through a philosophical lens. You may be familiar with that urge—this nagging  desire to pack your bags and leave. This desire could arise from apparent reasons, such as  having made a mess of your life or being in a destructive environment.

Sometimes, the  reasons may be unclear, and the wish to leave seems irrational and inexplicable. Maybe this  tendency to move on is an inherent human feature, a remnant of our ancestors’ nomadic mode  of living. Or perhaps it’s an unconscious longing to break with the monotony of daily  affairs, to refresh oneself in new environments.

I remember my first strong desire to leave  everything behind occurred in 2010 during a period of depression and the lengthy,  painful ending of a long-term relationship, which was pretty toxic when I look back on it. During that time, I fantasized about becoming a travel blogger, going from city to city,  or disappearing in the wilderness like the well-known adventurer Chris McCandless. I dreamt  about finding a job abroad and starting a new life there; at some point, it didn’t matter where  it would be: Asia, Spain, Iran, anything would do.

But why was I so desperate to leave? From what I recall, there were several reasons. First, I felt my past hanging around my  neck like a millstone, and every confrontation with my surroundings reminded me of some dreadful  experience.

Second, due to the financial crisis, I couldn’t find a job fitting my education,  so I worked in factories and warehouses to pay my bills, which I generally didn’t like doing. The future felt hopeless to me. And the sum of all past and present circumstances seemed to arouse a  strong and nagging desire: the urge to leave.

Like a butterfly, I wanted to emerge from my chrysalis  that held me prisoner for so long and fly away. Like a snake, I longed to shed off my old skin and  roam freely in the wide world. I wanted adventure, new sceneries, and new people, hoping that  novelty and being on the move would wash off the dirt of the past and turn me into a new person.

Eventually, I found a job I enjoyed, enrolled in a university, expanded my social circle, and  had loads of fun in the years after. Hence, the feeling of wanting to leave everything  behind went dormant. My life didn’t seem so bad anymore; the contentment with the present  overshadowed past grief, and so, what I had, I did not want to leave behind.

The wish to leave  correlated with dissatisfaction with my existence, which I eventually mitigated by  making my life at home more fun. Yet, the urge to leave never entirely went  away. When I saw some friends moving to Germany and establishing themselves in their  new environments, the call to adventure awakened me again.

I asked myself: am I here  to stay? Or am I supposed to leave? Of course, I knew this rearoused desire to leave again  matched a recurring dissatisfaction with my life, a restlessness telling me it was time for change.

So, I identified two main options: to solve this dissatisfaction locally or to follow the urge  and leave for better pastures. The latter was much stronger, which led me to spend a lot  of time abroad since the pandemic ended and entertaining the idea of, at least partly,  establishing myself somewhere far from home. It’s funny when I think of it because  I could have solved my dissatisfaction locally by changing my thinking and altering  my close environment.

To be happy, I don’t need to change scenery. After all, happiness comes  from within, isn’t it? So, in a way, this urge to leave is irrational when we do it out of  pursuit of happiness.

Let’s explore this a bit. The feeling of wanting to leave everything behind  implies discontent with current affairs. We want to escape because we’re unhappy and believe  we will leave that unhappiness behind by going elsewhere.

But does changing scenery actually  work, especially in the long term? After all, isn’t our unhappiness the product of our  thinking rather than our circumstances? And isn’t it so that wherever we go, we  always take ourselves with us, including our tendencies to be unhappy and discontent?

Ah, the chase for happiness in external things. The desire to travel and move abroad surely fits  in that category. We see people changing locations for precisely this reason: the expectation  that doing so will bring them contentment.

Some leave permanently out of pure disgust  for their current environment: “This country is going down the drain,” they say. “These darn  leftist cultural Marxists have ruined the West; I’m leaving,” some exclaim, and off they go. Others travel from place to place, eager to receive these shots of pleasure with every  new sight that temporarily mutes their ongoing discontent with life under the guise of ‘finding  oneself.

’ Yes, research shows that travel does increase happiness. However, like with every form  of pleasure we obtain from the external world, it’s not a permanent cure for unhappiness;  the happiness it generates is fleeting. Some Stoic philosophers argued that traveling  is a waste of time.

And we can also apply their argument to leaving our current environment  behind in pursuit of happiness. Seneca, for example, wrote a letter about this  subject alone, explaining why traveling is not a cure for discontent. He opens  his letter with the following passage: Do you suppose that you alone have had this  experience?

Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many  changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need  a change of soul rather than a change of climate. Though you may cross vast spaces of sea (.

. . ) your  faults will follow you whithersoever you travel.

End quote. The travel bug was a thing already back then. The first sentence of  his letter implies that plenty of people attempted to travel to improve their moods.

But let  the Stoics be concerned with precisely that: ‘one’s mood. ’ Seneca argued that travel doesn’t  solve discontent in the long run. You always take yourself with you.

When the novelty of changing  sceneries subsides, your mind catches up; you will most likely experience the same feelings of  discontent, lack, and restlessness you experienced before you arrived. The Stoics explain that these  things are internal problems and we cannot solve them by changing location. We can leave everything  behind, build a new life on another continent, surround ourselves with a fresh group of people,  and even change our names and identities; we still have to put up with ourselves. 

Ultimately, how we feel doesn’t depend on circumstances but on how we think about them.  From that viewpoint, leaving everything behind to pursue happiness is ridiculous and irrational.  We just moved the problem to another place.

But what if we look beyond this idea of happiness  and equanimity as a pursuit in life? What if we don’t necessarily seek happiness and contentment  by starting over new, but something else? There are different ways of looking at life  besides the scope of happiness and unhappiness, pleasure and pain, or contentment and discontent. 

Not everything we do has to be judged within these dichotomies. Leaving everything behind may not be  a good strategy for increasing long-term happiness without considering our inner faculties.  But what if we look at it differently?

Is there something meaningful, something profound  about packing our bags and setting up camp in a new environment, aside from just ‘happiness’? If we take more of an existentialist viewpoint, the wish to leave it all behind begins to make  more sense. If we consider the existentialist idea that existence precedes essence, starting over  somewhere else is another way to shape our lives as we see fit.

Moreover, according to philosophers  Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, we’re both blessed and cursed with the freedom of coming  into existence without intrinsic meaning. Our responsibility is not to adhere to some ultimate,  overarching purpose or belief system but to exercise the freedom we have. We can exercise this  freedom in different ways, and that’s the beauty of it: we can shape it into whatever form we like.

The idea of stepping out of our habitat, leaving the familiar, and establishing  oneself in the world is quite the assertion of freedom. It involves us stepping out of a  preordained environment. It could entail leaving behind familiar values and ideas about existence  and the world around us.

It allows us to redefine ourselves and our place in the world. We take  a deliberate step towards self-determination, taking control of our own narratives, unshackled  by the expectations of others. We make a choice that reflects our personal values and desires,  which are not dictated by societal norms – if anything, we walk away from these norms. 

We assume responsibility for our future, actively shaping our lives rather than  remaining within a bubble, passively defined by our circumstances. It’s a gesture of liberation  from the constraints of predetermined existence. The movie Interstellar takes a curious  philosophical position when a character named Professor Brand discusses the  protagonist, Joseph Cooper’s mission, saying: “We’re not meant to save the world.

We’re  meant to leave it. ” When watching this movie, I remember this quote really struck a chord.  It made me reflect on the exploratory nature of human beings, and how we’ve always traveled  the world and established ourselves in unfamiliar places.

The idea of our species eventually  leaving this planet and spreading across the galaxy mirrors how we’ve operated in the past. The quote also implies a sense of purpose. Quite differently from the existential position, the  idea that we’re meant to leave the Earth suggests a more prominent, perhaps cosmic, significance,  as if humanity’s journey is, somehow, predestined.

Ultimately, I believe the urge to leave everything  behind is more than an escape from the familiar or a quest for happiness elsewhere. It’s a  deep-seated part of who we are. I remember how my brothers and I could play with Legos all  day, building spaceships and fantasizing about how we’d discover new planets.

We’d  take our Lego characters everywhere, whether it was a family visit, a vacation, or a  walk in the forest; every trip we’d turn into an adventure. Our play always had this tendency  of exploration, which, as far as I recall, felt exhilarating to emulate. It was like we  were playfully getting ready for our adult lives, hoping we could have space adventures in real life  someday, which, unfortunately, never happened.

Still, the way we played back then tells  me something. I think it’s evidence of the adventurous spirit and curious nature ingrained  in us as human beings. So, the feeling of wanting to leave everything behind is perhaps not an  anomaly but a reflection of our truest selves.

Thank you for watching.