The Self Abroad: How Solo Travel Shapes Our Sense of Identity

I’ve previously written about the Stoic perspective on travel (see here and here), which includes the idea that our strong impulse to travel often comes from a desire to escape the self (which is doomed to fail). Our discontent about who we are can be refashioned, unconsciously, as discontent about where we are. We avoid…

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Driven by the Unfamiliar: Novelty as a Basic Psychological Need

In previous blog posts, I have introduced and explored the concept of the will to novelty: the idea that we are motivated to experience newness, difference, and variety (see my posts here, here, and here). Reading more about the psychology of novelty seeking, I came across some literature on the self-determination theory of human motivation.…

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