People who travel with a checklist mindset get burnt out.
They collect countries like stamps, like dogs chase bones or sunsets, and fill their camera rolls with things they’ll barely remember a year from now. That’s all good, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not why I travel.
I travel because people fascinate me. It sounds crazy because I’m mainly introverted. After visiting 40 countries, not as a tourist passing through but as someone who moves slowly, lives locally, and watches carefully, I’ve noticed something: take away the language, the food, the religion, the politics, and humans are running the same few programs everywhere.
There is a popular saying in the traveling community, “Escape the United States and escape the matrix”
This is based on the movie “The Matrix,” in which everyone lives a mindless life, plugged into a simulation.
The thing is, the matrix exists everywhere.
As an INFJ, I don’t just recognize patterns; it’s how I’m wired. I can’t turn it off. In a café in Lisbon, on a bus in Bangkok, at a market in Manila, or walking the streets of Salvador, where I live part of the year, I’m always watching, always processing.
These are the seven things I keep seeing. Everywhere in everyone.
1. Loneliness is universal
Loneliness is inevitable and eventually comes for us all.
It doesn’t matter if you’re in a country where family is sacred, and everyone lives within a mile of their relatives, or in a Western city where independence is the highest cultural value and loneliness is everywhere. It just wears different clothes.
It doesn’t matter if you are married or even surrounded by people.
In Japan, I saw it in the precision of social rituals, the careful formality that keeps people at a comfortable, heartbreaking distance. Even as an introvert, I found a balance to social isolation.
In the United States, I see it in how aggressively people express happiness on social media. In Brazil, I see it in how loudly and desperately people need to be surrounded by noise.
I have met introverted Brazilians who felt mentally drained and lonely because they were performing socially to meet cultural demands.
The people laughing the loudest at the table are often the ones who go home and sit in the most silence.
I notice this isn’t depression, but it changes how I move through the world. When someone seems cold, guarded, or dismissive, I stopped taking it personally a long time ago. Most of the time, it has nothing to do with me. They’re just carrying something.
“Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every human.” — Success Magazine
2. Everyone thinks their country is the worst
Ask almost any person about their home country, and within five minutes, you’ll hear some version of: “You have to understand, our history is very complex,” or some sort of sob story about how their country is worse than everyone else’s.
Brazilians, Canadians, Colombians, the French, and Americans all say it. And they’re all right, by the way. I understand that one wants to be taken seriously.
At times, this used to feel like people were committed to playing a victim role.
I’ve started listening to this differently. When someone wants me to understand the complexity of where they’re from, they’re usually also saying: Don’t believe all of the stereotypes you hear or see on TV, Don’t think that my country is Disneyland because of what travel influencers say, “Don’t assume, Don’t think you already know who I am.
That’s something I feel deeply as a Black American man. I know exactly what it’s like to have your entire identity based on someone’s assumptions. So this one gave me empathy I didn’t expect.
The “Grass is Greener” Effect: People are intimately familiar with their home country’s daily struggles, politics, and systemic flaws. Because they rarely experience the day-to-day realities of foreign nations, they tend to idealize them.
3. Social hierarchies are everywhere
In the US, it’s wealth and perceived success. In some European countries, it’s education, taste, and cultural capital. In parts of Latin America, it’s a family name and skin complexions. In certain Asian cultures, it’s age and institutional seniority.
The game doesn’t change for anybody.
What I find interesting is how invisible each culture’s hierarchy is to the people inside it. Americans will tell you class doesn’t exist here while navigating class signals in every single interaction. Some South American countries will tell you that racism doesn’t exist, but treat people of darker complexion as if they are invisible.
Once you see the game being played in a room, you understand the room. This is one of the places where being an INFJ in foreign environments is genuinely useful; you read the currency quickly. I don’t always play the game, but I know what game is being played.
In some contexts, human hierarchies are made particularly explicit (e.g. formal and institutionalised orders of precedence or seniority), while in others, they may be somewhat tacit, instead inferred from the actions and orientations of others. Humans, then, regularly form and navigate both formal and informal hierarchies – National Institute of Health
4. Kindness and hospitality are universal, but the expression of them is not.
This is important, and I want to be precise about it.
I have been treated with generosity in countries known for being cold, and with indifference in countries known for warmth. The difference is almost never about the people. It’s about the cultural grammar of how care is expressed.
In Paris, France, a stranger insisted I come to his home for tea after I’d been walking for three hours. In Lisbon, Portugal, my Airbnb host’s daughter, whom I barely knew, quietly made sure I had everything I needed for a week-long trip without making a single thing of it. Different expressions, same impulse.
The mistake travelers make is confusing unfamiliar expressions of care with the absence of care. When someone doesn’t make eye contact on a train in Germany, it isn’t rudeness; it’s respect for your space. When someone in Southeast Asia doesn’t say no directly, it isn’t deception; it’s a different relationship with conflict and face.
Travel humbled me on this. I came in with American assumptions about what warmth looks like. I had to unlearn almost all of them.
5. People everywhere want to be seen as individuals, not representatives
Every time someone finds out I’m American, especially a Black American who speaks candidly and asks real questions, there’s a visible exhale. Like they’ve been waiting for permission to stop being an ambassador for their entire country.
Nobody wants to spend the whole conversation explaining, defending, or representing. People want to talk about their real lives like their weird drunk uncle, the neighborhood they grew up in, or the music they love that their friends think is embarrassing. What they actually think, not what they’re supposed to.
This happens everywhere. The Brazilian who doesn’t want to talk about the favelas. The Chinese person who doesn’t want to talk about politics. The American abroad who’s exhausted by having to apologize for things they didn’t do.
When you give someone the space to simply be a person and not a cultural representative, not a stereotype, not a lesson, something opens in a conversation that almost nothing else can. This is the best thing travel has done for me. I learned to see people before I see their passports.
6. Masculinity shows up differently in each country
I’m a masculine man and introverted. I lead with presence, not volume. And one thing I’ve noticed traveling through 40 countries is that men everywhere are navigating some version of the same silent system.
What does it mean to be a man now? Each country has a script handed down by people who don’t seem to understand what men actually experience. In every country I’ve visited, I’ve sat with men over drinks, over meals, in conversations, and found the same quiet program beneath whatever cultural armor they wear.
The Japanese salaryman grinding himself to dust because his identity is built entirely around work. The Latin American man performing bravado that exhausts him. The Western man who’s been told he is only important as the size of his bank account.
I write about this specifically because I lived it. And because the conversations worth having about masculinity aren’t happening loudly enough in the places men actually gather.
7. Almost everyone is trying to figure out the same three things
After all the countries, all the conversations, all the quiet observations in airports, social events, restaurants, living rooms, and markets, it keeps coming back to this.
People everywhere are trying to figure out:
Who am I, really? Not who my culture, my family, my history says I should be. Who am I when I’m honest with myself, when nobody is watching, while I am in solitude?
Do I matter? Not in a desperate way, necessarily. But what am I contributing to society, the world, to friends, or to family?
Am I free? Not always politically, but personally. Am I living a life that belongs to me, or one I inherited without questioning?
These aren’t Western questions, Eastern questions, rich questions, or poor questions. They are human questions. I’ve heard versions of them spoken in broken English in a night market in Bangkok, and in perfect articulation from a professor in Athens, and in long silence from a fisherman in coastal Portugal who didn’t need to say anything at all.
That’s the thing about people. Once you slow down enough to actually see them, you realize how much they are just like you.
The real lesson from 40 countries
People will surprise you, mostly in the direction of being more recognizable than you expected.
The differences are real, such as the language, culture, history, and worldview, and they matter. I’m not one of those “we’re all the same” people who gloss over everything that’s genuinely distinct and important. The difference is interesting and is worth understanding.
But underneath it: same fears, same hungers, same hope that they’re not alone in what they’re feeling.
That’s the thing travel gave me that I didn’t know I needed. Not a map of the world or a map of people. And since people are mostly the same wherever you go, it turned out to be a map of myself.
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